Desalination Research Needs Workshop

Water scarcity in many areas has propelled water utilities to explore and adopt unconventional water supply sources, such as desalinated water. Desalination can minimize the impacts of climate change and augment supplies to meet water demands by tapping unlimited, flexible, and rainfall-independent water sources (i.e., oceans and seas). Significant desalination field experience has been gained and technological development has occurred in recent decades. However, there are still some critical site-specific challenges and issues of desalination as compared to conventional water resources, including relatively higher capital and O&M costs, and energy requirements, limited regulatory guidance and consistency, and concentrate disposal and associated potential environmental impacts, that need to be addressed for its wider implementation. Addressing these site-specific challenges and issues will help advance desalination as a drought-proof, reliable and cost-effective water supply option. To better understand these challenges and knowledge gaps and promote wider implementation of desalination through the identification of desalination research needs, this project will develop a list of projects to help advance seawater and brackish water desalination. Published in 2022.

Originally funded as WERF project Reuse-17-11.