Desalination’s high energy use, the associated running costs and greenhouse emissions are a major hurdle for the spread of the technique.
Plans to build a large desalination plant for London to treat the relatively low-salinity water of the Thames estuary met with much criticism over the greenhouse emissions the project would bring. Phil Burston of the RSPB outlines the proposed plant’s environmental costs, and points to less polluting alternatives.
But desalination could still be made green, as emerging technologies show – one new method developed in Australia, the world’s driest continent, taps into wave energy to power the process while producing electricity at the same time.
Meanwhile over in the United States, also increasingly plagued by drought, solar-powered desalination could be the ‘green’ solution, its developers argue.