Climate Change Mitigation Strategy through Membranes Replacement and Determination Methodology of Carbon Footprint in Reverse Osmosis RO Desalination Plants for Islands and Isolated Territories

Federico Leon,Alejandro Ramos,Saulo Brito,Carlos Mendieta,Jenifer Vaswani

doi:10.3390/w13030293

Federico Leon, Alejandro Ramos + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/w13030293

Copy DOI

Journal: Water	Publication Date: Jan 25, 2021
Citations: 15	License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria

Abstract

This article shows a climate change mitigation strategy by means of membranes replacement and determination methodology of carbon footprint in reverse osmosis (RO) desalination plants, valid for all the islands, and even isolated territories in the continent. This study takes the case of study of Canary Islands, where there are more than 320 desalination plants with different sizes, private, and public. The objective is to propose a new method which integrates this analysis with the replacement of membranes, from 0% to 20% per year in sea water reverse osmosis desalination plants, to reduce the carbon footprint and ecological footprint. If it is considered a replacement of 20% of the elements per year, the carbon footprint could be reduced to between 5% and 6% and even more if it is introduced low energy consumption membranes instead of high rejection elements. The factor mix in Canary Islands, according to the technological structure of the generation park that uses oil products, is around 0.678 kgCO2/kWh, much higher than in the Spanish mainland where it is 0.263 kgCO2/kWh. Therefore, it is estimated in Canary Islands 5,326,963 t CO2/year can be emitted, which represents 2.4 tCO2/person/year, 12 times more the admissible admissions per inhabitant in the Canary Islands, only considering the seawater desalination sector. This document shows the different results of the analysis of energy efficiency and the environmental footprints. This study may serve as a tool for the decision-making processes related to how to improve energy efficiency in desalination plants.

Highlights

A reduction in energy consumption will have a direct impact on environmental improvement and we study this through the carbon footprint produced by these desalination plants and their ecological footprint, the latter as a future line of action [1,2,3,4,5]
To reduce the carbon footprint of the current energy mix, we introduce renewable energies as much as possible and, failing that, maintain the higher performance conventional technologies such as the diesel engine, combined cycles, or the steam turbine, since these consume less fuel to produce the same energy as other conventional technologies, or improve the efficiency of the electricity grid
It is very important to select the adequate membrane in the plant with low energy consumption and the replacement rate

Summary

Introduction

A reduction in energy consumption will have a direct impact on environmental improvement and we study this through the carbon footprint produced by these desalination plants and their ecological footprint, the latter as a future line of action [1,2,3,4,5]. In relation to territorial dependence, electricity networks generally have energy mixes that cause higher greenhouse gas emissions, typically in insular and isolated systems as opposed to large interconnected continental systems [20], as they generally have systems based on lower performance technologies. These electrical energy production technologies can be classified, mainly, in two types: conventional and renewable. There are technologies based on renewable energies, such as solar photovoltaic, wind, waves, etc. [20,21,22,23,24,25]

Methods

Results

Conclusion