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Desalination comes with economic and environmental costs

Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on September 30, 2007 at 3:46 am

From Health News Digest:

With human population expected to balloon another 50 percent by 2050, resource managers are increasingly looking to alternative scenarios for quenching the world’s growing thirst. Desalination—a process whereby highly pressurized ocean water is pushed through tiny membrane filters and distilled into drinking water—is being held forth by some as one of the most promising solutions to the problem. But critics point out it doesn’t come without its economic and environmental costs.

According to the non-profit Food & Water Watch, desalinated ocean water is the most expensive form of fresh water out there, given the infrastructure costs of collecting, distilling and distributing it. The group reports that, in the U.S., desalinated water costs at least five times as much to harvest as other sources of fresh water. Similar high costs are a big hurdle to desalination efforts in poor countries as well, where limited funds are already stretched too thin.

On the environmental front, widespread desalination could take a heavy toll on ocean biodiversity. “Ocean water is filled with living creatures, and most of them are lost in the process of desalination,” says Sylvia Earle, one of the world’s foremost marine biologists and a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence. “Most are microbial, but intake pipes to desalination plants also take up the larvae of a cross section of life in the sea, as well as some fairly large organisms…part of the hidden cost of doing business,” she says.