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Desalination Process

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Examining the process
When examining the process of desalination there are several advantages and disadvantages of the process that need to be examined, starting with the advantages. One of the major advantages of this process according to Gude (2016) is having the option to use renewable energy for the process instead of using fossil fuels. He states this is better for our environment and there will always be access to the wind, solar, or wave energy being produced compared to our fossil fuels which already are at a risk of running out. Haddad has also stated that renewable energy resources are better for our environment compared to fossil fuels, as they reduce our carbon footprint and the risk of climate change. Another advantage that can …show more content…

Heck, Paytan, Potts, and Haddad (2016b) talked about how this will affect the customers due to the processes being expensive, they must make up for the cost somewhere leading them to increase water rates and overall hurts the coastal region. He states that it hurts our costal region by limiting people's access to the ocean and causes a change in the scenery. Another disadvantage with continuing to build Reverse Osmosis (RO) plants using fossil fuels to operate them will lead to greater climate change and could make their droughts even worse in the future (Slocum, Haji, Trimble, & Ghaemsaidi, …show more content…

According to Gude, Nirmalakhandan, and Deng (2010) there are three different categories such as phase, non-phase, and hybrid processes and among each one of those three groups is a list of the different processes. Gude et al. (2010) explain the phase process as bringing the feed water to a boiling point and collecting the condensation as useable water and this process is used for multi-stage flashing distillation, solar distillation, or thermal vapor compression to list a few. Non- phase process is when salts are removed either from seawater or brackish water through the use of membrane technology and the desalination processes that use this technique is reverse osmosis or electrodialysis (Gude et al., 2010). He refers to the hybrid process as being a combination of the first two phases that can be used when doing membrane distillation or when adding multi- stage flash distillation or multi-effect distillation to the process of reverse osmosis. Another process used in California is called integrated pumped hydro reverse osmosis (IPHRO) process (Slocum, Haji, Trimble, Ferrara, & Ghaemsaidi, 2016). Slocum et al. (2016) talked about how this is the process of taking ocean water to use for both power and reverse osmosis, using the saline water to run the plant, and once filtered the water will go back to the sea or go back

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