Doha: Solar energy as a source of power for desalination plants, particularly in the Gulf Corporation Council (GCC), would be a more sustainable option, an expert said.
GCC countries currently depend on desalination as a primary source of drinking water, representing 80% of total drinking water. Desalination is simply the process of removing salts or other minerals and contaminants from seawater, brackish water, and wastewater. This is an increasingly common solution for obtaining freshwater for human consumption and domestic/industrial utilisation.
The first seawater desalination plant in Qatar was established in 1953. According to statista.com, in 2020, Qatar produced about 691 million cubic metres of desalinated water, compared to 557 million cubic metres in 2016.
Qatar has three main desalination plants, namely Ras Abu Fontas B-1, Ras Laffan-A and Ras Laffan-B and is gradaully shifting from thermal based desalination which consumes more energy to membrane based reverse osmosis desalination technology, which relies less on gas.
In an interview with The Peninsula, Hafsa Mohammed Ashraf, a researcher at Qatar University, stressed the scarcity of potable water sources such as rivers and wells and the dry, low precipitation rates in GCC countries make them depend on desalination to fulfil consumer water requirements.
She, however, stated that these desalination plants need a sustainable source of energy to power their operations, citing solar as a sustainable source of energy for these plants, especially as it is “abundant and has the lowest geographical limitation” in the region.
“Desalination is one of the energy-intensive and time-consuming processes. More than 20,000 desalination plants are running worldwide,” Hafsa said. “The most used types of desalination process are thermal and membrane desalination. Thermal desalination is widely used in GCC countries, fuelled by natural gas. On the other hand, these countries have sufficient sunlight and solar radiation; therefore, depending on solar power in the daytime for running the desalination plants would be a sustainable solution.”
Most forms of desalination are energy-intensive. In a region whose economy largely depends on fossil fuels, desalination can increase dependence, increase greenhouse gas emissions, and exacerbate climate change if renewable energy sources are not used for freshwater production. Besides the dependence on fossil fuels and the cost, desalination poses a significant threat to marine life because the brine (saltwater) is dumped back into the ocean in its raw form. This changes the salinity of the “ocean water and other physical properties such as the temperature, alkalinity and pH.”
“Despite the great importance of desalination in providing potable water, it has many drawbacks on marine life. These all impact the habitat of all marine animals impacting the development of species, reproduction traits and the survival of larva,” Hafsa stressed.
The QU researcher is currently focused on research to find sustainable ways to ensure desalination works appropriately and provides sufficient water.
“My research is focused on optimising this process and making it more sustainable considering current and future needs and taking care of the environment and having a green desalination process powered by solar power plants.” A UN-sponsored study from 2018 published on ScienceDirect estimates that the world produces about 25 billion gallons of desalinated water every day.
Water scarcity affects roughly 40 per cent of the world’s population. According to predictions by the United Nations (UN) and the World Bank, drought could displace up to 700 million people by 2030. Many studies say hundreds of millions of people across the globe are without access to safe drinking water (only 3 per cent of earth’s water is freshwater). Experts have long sounded warnings about a looming crisis, some even raising the prospect of ‘water wars’.
