Abengoa signs contract for Morocco desalination plant

This paper abstracts and expands Clifford Geertz' theory of involution as a strategy of adaptation to resource scarcity and applies it to the understanding of contemporary water development in the Colorado River Basin. Involution is here defined as a set of social and technological substrategies, including allocation of shares, diversification of resource use, increasing the efficiency of resource use, regulation of resource use, and specialization segments with exchange. The concept is used to interpret the regional implications of proposed geothermal developments, desalinization plants, irrigation projects, and actions taken by water management agencies. The strategy of involution presents an alternative to the strategy of competitive expansion which has characterized water development in the Colorado Basin. The encouragement of urban agriculture is proposed as a practical application of the strategy of involution. In a recent paper, Anderson and Keith (1977:167) demonstrated that energy development on the Colorado River may have significant impacts on local and regional water allocations and quality. They concluded that the distribution of impacts on the regional population would depend on institutional and economic constraints and incentives which are imposed, either as a result of historical development or future policy directions. This paper interprets the relevant histori

Use of evaporation ponds for brine disposal in desalination plants

Growing populations, increasing food demand, and technological advances may soon lead to intensifying land use in semiarid and arid countries through the spread of irrigated agriculture. Improved water harvesting and desalinization technology, coupled with higher efficiency of regenerative energies, might allow to widely extend irrigated areas. While this is a positive development in the light of growing demands for water and food, it presents challenges for land-use planners. Negative examples like Lake Aral make clear that a careful analysis is required before embarking on large-scale irrigation projects.

The Great Man-Made River (GMR) is the world largest irrigation project, consisting of a network of pipes that supplies water from Libyan desert in the south to the coastal areas in the north. This paper studies the possibility of taking advantage of GMR to generate energy and produce food through agriculture. Hydro-kinetic power generation would be carried out by generating energy from water movements across Great Man-Made River pipelines using appropriate sizes of turbines. It's known that the length of the GMR pipeline is about 4000 km with a diameter of 4 m. Pipeline of such magnitude with great water flow rate would make a turbine to produce hundreds of Kilowatts of clean energy. The most significant reasons that force us to take advantage of GMR to generate energy are: a) The needs to sustainable environmental energy source; b) Power System uses energy of flowing water to provide a consistent, controllable, non-weather-dependent source of electricity, such as other types of renewable energy, which are depend on the weather. The conversion of GMR, from supplying freshwater to coastal cities, to huge agricultural project after the establishment of many seawater desalination plants (solar powered) would cover the needs of cities for fresh water. Thus it would become possible to convert thousands of desert hectares around the pipelines to huge agricultural project irrigated from GMR.