Abstract
Several regions are confronting a severe scarcity of fresh water due to the gap between supply and demand. They strive to bridge that gap by depleting nonrenewable water aquifers and expanding centralized energy-intensive desalination technologies. Continuing to adopt the same unsustainable approach could deplete the water aquifers and increase the consumption of fossil fuel and the ecological impact on air, water, and land. However, the traditional paradigm of centralized desalination systems could be shifted by increasing the utilization of renewable distributed generation, which can be coupled with emerging desalination technology such as adsorption desorption desalination (ADD), which has autonomous and resilient attributes that can contribute to the sustainability of decentralized fresh water supply in the future. In this work, three commercialized desalination technologies were reviewed and compared with emerging ones to explore the most economically and environmentally efficient systems within the context of decentralized water production. The well-known configurations of ADD were evaluated and compared with sea water reverse osmosis (SWRO), which is recognized as the principal commercialized desalination technology worldwide. The quantitative case study methodology was used by investigating four centralized seawater desalination plants in Saudi Arabia (SA) with their associated pipeline systems from the energy consumption point of view to determine the applicability of implementing ADD technology in SA and similar arid areas. The study reveals that adopting decentralized ADD technology coupled with renewable energy sources could reduce the specific energy consumption from 4 kWh/m3 to less than 1.38 kWh/m3. Combining reduced energy consumption from desalination plants and elimination of supply pipelines could potentially result in a significant reduction in energy consumption and carbon emissions. Finally, the study may be useful for researchers working on enhancing ADD processes, as well as technology users who would like to implement the most efficient ADD configurations. Additionally, it may initiate a direction of utilizing the results of original critical reviews as a methodology to develop the applied technologies.
Highlights
The Middle East (ME) region is profoundly deprived of natural drinking water resources
While water production processes and technologies have experienced rapid advances in recent years, resulting in a dramatic reduction in energy consumption [1], the existing processes of seawater desalination are energy-intensive due to the irreversibility within various system components, such as in the evaporator of multi-stage flashing (MSF) and multi-effect desalination (MED), due to vaporization, and in the pressurized membrane in sea water reverse osmosis (SWRO) [11]. This can be determined from the universal performance ratio (UPR), which is based on the primary energy of all existing commercialized desalination technologies, including SWRO, with UPR = 86, while its thermal index limit is 828, which means that the conventional technology is operating at less than 12% of the thermal index limit [10]
The main aim of the current study was to evaluate the state of the art of adsorption desorption desalination (ADD) system configuration and explore the decentralized/distributed production strategy, which can provide a sustainable solution for the water shortage crisis in Saudi Arabia (SA) and similar arid areas in the world, for urban communities with small and medium size populations
Summary
The Middle East (ME) region is profoundly deprived of natural drinking water resources. Analyzing the sustainability of the aforementioned sources of water supply shows that underground and surface water resources are not sustainable for the water supply in SA due to the increase in water extraction rates, the low recharge rate, and the geological distribution of aquifers across the country It cannot meet all of the country’s demands. Seawater and brackish water desalination technologies could be considered as the most sustainable sources of fresh water supply, provided that the high energy consumption and harmful environmental impacts have been resolved. Several interdependent factors affect the issue of sustainable water supply These include the selection of desalination technology, decentralization of production systems, energy and environmental requirements, availability of solar energy, and aquifer abstraction and recharging rates, which have to be investigated within the context of temporal and spatial dimensions of the water shortage issue. A predetermined aquifer abstraction rate proportional to the recharging rate of each aquifer was used as the main constraint to control the amount of supply from the groundwater
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