Water Scarcity: Global Shortages Drive Innovation Even As Crisis Continues
Over 2.7 billion people, or 40 percent of the world’s population, don’t have enough of it, and there are dire predictions that looming shortages and dwindling supply will lead to another war at the global scale.
According to estimates by the World Wildlife Fund, given the current consumption rate of fresh water, about two-thirds of the global population could face water shortages by 2025.
You will increase your global carbon footprint when you go to seawater [desalination].” However, technology has come some way since.
And on June 19, researchers from Rice University in Houston, Texas, and Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, announced they had created a membrane that uses solar energy and a nanoparticle-membrane to turn salt water into fresh water.
In conventional membrane distillation (top), hot saltwater is flowed across one side of a porous membrane and cold freshwater is flowed across the other.
This off-grid technology is capable of providing sufficient clean water for family use in a compact footprint, and it can be scaled up to provide water for larger communities,” Rice scientist and water treatment expert Qilin Li, a corresponding author on the study, said in a statement.
IDE Americas, a Carlsbad, California, company that manufactures and operates desalination and industrial water treatment plants, is behind the world’s largest desalination plant in Sorek, Israel.
Miriam Faigon, vice president and chief technology officer of assets at the company, explained in a statement to International Business Times how IDE Americas keeps the costs down when operating a plant based on thermal desalination.
When there is waste heat or sufficient electricity available, as is often the case with refineries and power plants, thermal desalination is an efficient and viable solution,” she said.
Lake Baikal in Russia is the single largest surface fresh water body in the world, accounting for 22 percent of the total.