Vision

Fresh water is an increasingly scarce commodity throughout the world and in Spain in particular.

Background

Since the beginning of this century, desalination has become the main source of unconventional resources for water generation. Many countries have been decisively betting on this means to meet growing demands in a context of decreasing availability of conventional resources. The technology for producing desalinated water from seawater that has been gaining ground since the end of the 20th century in desalination using reverse osmosis.

This is due to the greater energy efficiency of this system compared to water distillation technologies that require thermal processes with lower energy performance. This is true even in the countries of the Persian Gulf that have energy sources in large quantities and at low prices. Desalination through reverse osmosis is being the technology widely implemented in many countries, among which Spain itself, Australia, Chile, and Mexico stand out. Israel, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, United States, Arab Emirates, etc. In many of them, desalination has been implemented to guarantee the availability of resources on a permanent basis through plans that have involved the construction of large desalination facilities.

Two of the largest desalination plants in the world are located in Israel, a country where water resources are scarce and limited and are in continuous decline. It is also a country plagued by a lack of rain, a problem in which climate change has a lot to do with it. Furthermore, like most countries in the world, Israel demands more and more water due to population growth. Although initially the use of desalinated water has been aimed at supplying water to the population, in recent years desalination plans have also been directed at the use of produced water in other uses such as industrial or irrigation in the agriculture. The size of desalination plants has been growing as the advantages of this technology and its economy of scale have become evident. Thus today we can find the largest desalination plants in the world in Dubai (Jebel Ali of 1,020,000 m3/day), Saudi Arabia (Ras Al-Khair of 1,004,000 m3/day) or Israel (Hadera of 625,000 m3/day).