Environmental Performance of Small-Scale Seawater Reverse Osmosis Plant for Rural Area Water Supply.

Latifah Abdul Ghani,Ilyanni Syazira Nazaran,Nora'Aini Ali,Marlia M Hanafiah

doi:10.3390/membranes11010040

Latifah Abdul Ghani, Ilyanni Syazira Nazaran + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/membranes11010040

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Abstract

Seawater desalination is an alternative technology to provide safe drinking water and to solve water issues in an area having low water quality and limited drinking water supply. Currently, reverse osmosis (RO) is commonly used in the desalination technology and experiencing significant growth. The aim of this study was to analyze the environmental impacts of the seawater reverse osmosis (SWRO) plant installed in Kampung Pantai Senok, Kelantan, as this plant was the first installed in Malaysia. The software SimaPro 8.5 together with the ReCiPe 2016 database were used as tools to evaluate the life cycle assessment (LCA) of the SWRO plant. The results showed that the impact of global warming (3.90 kg CO2 eq/year) was the highest, followed by terrestrial ecotoxicity (1.62 kg 1,4-DCB/year) and fossil resource scarcity (1.29 kg oil eq/year). The impact of global warming was caused by the natural gas used to generate the electricity, mainly during the RO process. Reducing the environmental impact can be effectively achieved by decreasing the electricity usage for the seawater desalination process. As a suggestion, electricity generation can be overcome by using a high-flux membrane with other suitable renewable energy for the plant such as solar and wind energy.

Highlights

This study evaluated the main sources of environmental impact considering the operational phase of the seawater desalination process
This paper examines whether the difference of load traces inherent in the seawater reverse osmosis (SWRO)
This paper examines whether the difference of load traces inherent in the SWRO syssystem are capable of causing problems and concerns toward the social, economic, and tem are capable of causing problems and concerns toward the social, economic, and costs costs aspects of local environment

Summary

Introduction

Three-quarters of the planet’s surface is covered with water It is one of the most abundant sources in the world, with 97.5% of water consisting of salt water from the oceans, and 2.5% of the clean water existing in the atmosphere, ice mountains, and ground water [1]. Compounded by the increasing global population, industrial development, and agricultural activity, many countries are facing water scarcity and quality problems and are unable to meet the demand of providing clean water [4]. It is estimated that the global water needs by the year 2030 will rise from 4500 billion cubic meters (m3 ) to 6900 billion m3. This amount of the surface water resources is frankly not sufficient for the future generations [5]

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