Dubai’s Costly Water World
www.nytimes.com
The city has spent billions of dollars to provide fresh water to its residents and tourist attractions, but experts say the efforts are straining the Persian Gulf’s natural resources.

If no immediate action is taken to counter the harm, desalination, in combination with climate change, will increase the Gulf’s coastal waters temperature by at least five degrees Fahrenheit across more than 50 percent of the area by 2050, according to a 2021 study published in the Marine Pollution Bulletin on ScienceDirect, a site for peer-reviewed papers.

  • supper_time@lemmy.fmhy.net
    2·
    10 months ago

    I was curious too. The article mentions that Dubai’s old reverse osmosis systems rely on flash distillation which adds a lot of heat to the system and thus the brine being returned to the gulf waters.

    “Unlike reverse osmosis, which removes salt and other contaminants by pushing water through a semipermeable membrane, multistage flash distillation relies on heat. Decades ago, when the U.A.E. began exploring desalination, the technology could better handle the Gulf’s high salinity, though reverse osmosis can now do the same. And although both technologies create brine, the byproduct of multistage flash distillation is far hotter, further disrupting the ecosystem.“