The desalination process involves taking seawater and forcing it through reverse osmosis membranes to clean it (Figure 1 and 3). This process can negatively impact community land use, increase erosion, cause visual and acoustic disturbances, and spread emissions into the water and atmosphere.

So What’s The Problem With Desalination It’s obvious that the massive amounts of energy used in desalination contribute to climate change-causing greenhouse gas emissions, possibly exacerbating the local drought conditions that require use of desalination in the first place.

Desalination brine, which can be laden with residual chemicals from the treatment process as well as excess heat, is damaging to the marine environment. Most coastal desalination facilities discharge their waste back into the ocean. They are instead concentrated in a hyper-saline brine.

The process uses fuel that is expensive. The process makes water that is unsafe to drink. The process is too difficult to carry out in big cities.

The vast majority of water on the Earth’s surface, over 96 percent, is saline water in the oceans. The freshwater resources, such as water falling from the skies and moving into streams, rivers, lakes, and groundwater, provide people with the water they need every day to live.

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3% of the earth’s water is fresh. 2.5% of the earth’s fresh water is unavailable: locked up in glaciers, polar ice caps, atmosphere, and soil; highly polluted; or lies too far under the earth’s surface to be extracted at an affordable cost. 0.5% of the earth’s water is available fresh water.

Unless water use is drastically reduced, severe water shortage will affect the entire planet by 2040. “There will be no water by 2040 if we keep doing what we’re doing today”.

While our planet as a whole may never run out of water, it’s important to remember that clean freshwater is not always available where and when humans need it. In fact, half of the world’s freshwater can be found in only six countries. Also, every drop of water that we use continues through the water cycle.

Oceans, which are the largest source of surface water, comprise approximately 97 percent of the Earth’s surface water.

Humans cannot drink saline water, but, saline water can be made into freshwater, for which there are many uses. The process is called “desalination”, and it is being used more and more around the world to provide people with needed freshwater.

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