World's options for water resources

  • The world has three options to deal with its crises in water supplies
  • Water can be transferred from areas of surplus to places scarcity, like large cities
  • There can be massive increase in the building of desalination plants which turn seawater into fresh water, although this will benefit only coastal locations
  • The third option is to recycle as much as possible with the aid of innovations in engineeringbiotechnology and, above all, chemistry. This alternative is considered the most sustainable because it consumes less energy, less expensive and would require the allocation of fewer resources

Membrane technology

  • A key requirement in innovation will be the advances in the development of high performance polymers for membrane and filtration equipment
  • Membrane science and technology made huge progress in the last years and membrane operations are already mature technologies in process engineering
  • Seawater and brackish desalination is perhaps the most known example of large scale application of membrane technology
  • Nevertheless, membrane engineering is probably still at its infancy

Membrane Technologies Diagram