Can desalination be a solution for TN’s water problem

While  reading through the March issue of  Technology Review magazine, I came upon this article on desalination and how Spain has been leading the effort on research and development in this area. (Note that I could not find the article on their website. You may have to get the magazine 🙂 When I was wondering if this could be the long term solution for TN and Chennai’s (and possibly even other water scarce areas close to the coast in India) water problem, I was pleasantly surprised to read that one of the Spain companies was already involved in this effort. Upon further digging, I found that an Hyderabad based company –  IVRCL Infrastructure & Projects Ltd along with its Technical partner from Spain, BEFESA Construction Y Tecnologia Ambiental S.A.U,  has bagged a 500 crore project to setup a desalination plant in Chennai. As usual, this has to clear all the legal/bureaucracy hurdles to actually go through. For more on this and central-state government haggling, and reasons as to why desalination may not be the solution, read the following article . One of the issues with a desalination project for a big city is the prohibitive capital and maintenance cost. To digress a bit, the two mostly preferred technologies for desalination are –

* Reverse Osmosis – This has lower capital cost, but higher operation cost
* Thermal Desalination – This has higher capital cost and lower operation cost

Wikipedia has more on this. The Chennai project is to based on reverse osmosis. It has to be noted that besides the actual desalination, there should be a suitable process to preserve the fresh water by redirecting to reservoirs. Very importantly, environmental concerns such as high energy consumption and disposal of brine back to the sea must always be addressed before undertaking such as project. While I was thinking if the project could be done on a smaller scale – to understand how it can effectively work in a country like India, I was pleasantly surprised to see the efforts undertaken by aimforseva. I was glad to read that this was a grassroots effort led and partially funded by the villages themselves. I believe that a combination of harvesting rain and ground water, better utilization of water resources and well thought out desalination projects could be the long-term solution for TN’s and perhaps even India’s water problem. Ganesh

Comments

  1. Anonymous said March 20, 2006, 2:54 am:

    Good one Ganesh. Very timely post on desalination. I think Chennai citizens are blissfully ignoring the water problem due to copious rains in December 2005. Hope we wake up and do something before the next drought.