 |
 |
| |
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| Chemical
impacts from seawater desalination plants —
a case study of the northern Red Sea |
||||||||||
| Thomas
Höpner and Sabine Lattemann Proceedings of the EUROMED Conference on Desalination Strategies in South Mediterranean Countries, Sharm El-Sheikh, 2002. In: Desalination, 152 (2002): 133 - 140. |
Download
full article in pdf-Format (804KB) from http://www.desline.com/articoli/4864.pdf |
|||||||||
|
Abstract |
||||||||||
|
Seawater
desalination facilities range from heavy coastal industry to small local
plants, with the majority being either thermal multi-stage flash (MSF)
or membrane-based reverse osmosis (RO) plants. Irrespective of the process,
pretreatment chemicals are added to the intake water to improve plant
performance. Furthermore, corrosion cannot be entirely prevented and
heavy metals add to the chemical load of the brines, which are discharged
to the marine environment. For impact assessment, information about
chemical loads as well as the sensitivity of the impacted ecosystem
is required. Loads of selected chemicals were estimated for 21 plant
locations in the Red Sea including the Gulf of Aqaba and Gulf of Suez.
Locations were identified from the 2000 IDA Worldwide Desalting Plants
Inventory Report and localized on GIS data maps from the World Conservation
Monitoring Center (WCMC). Their combined capacity exceeds 1.5 million
m3/d, with approximately 1.2 million m3/d from MSF and 0.38 million
m3/d from RO plants. Based on these figures, the daily chemical discharge
amounts to 2,708 kg chlorine, 36 kg copper and 9,478 kg antiscalants,
when effluent concentrations of 0.25 ppm, 0.015 ppm and 2 ppm are assumed,
respectively. The sensitivity of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba to
chemical loads is discussed and comparisons to the Arabian Gulf and
the Mediterranean Sea are drawn.
|
||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||
| Keywords | ||||||||||
| Red Sea; Chlorine; Copper; Antiscalants | ||||||||||
|
||||||||||