The project relates to the growing need for the desalination industry to address environmental issues. As desalination capacity continues to grow rapidly this focuses the attention and concern of society upon the interactions of desalination activities with the natural environment - both local to, and distant from, desalination plants.

The normal way of dealing with this issue is to undertake environmental impact assessments (EIAs); at present standards and procedures for such studies do not exist. A key task for the industry is to develop such standards. This project represents an initial step in this process by focusing on the description and quantification of the physical and chemical effluents from desalination plants. Such data and information represents an essential precursor to the planning and undertaking of properly-optimised EIAs.

The project methodology will involve a survey of sources of information from the literature and from industry. The two main types of desalination plant, thermal and reverse osmosis, will be dealt with separately. The wide range of chemical and physical contaminants that can be present in desalination plant effluents will be considered. The investigation will be undertaken via a series of separate tasks comprising a general literature review of the composition of disposal brines together with specific activities focusing on the individual process operations.

Review of previous work on specific substances in the waste streams from
different desalination processes, especially thermal and RO processes

Mohamed Sirajueen,
Oman National Electric Company
Sultanate of Oman