Water is essential to life and we d

Water is essential to life and we depend on it, yet many people take water for granted. As the population for the world increases, and with it the demand for water, there is growing concern that our water supplies will not prove adequate. In areas near the coast, an obvious solution to this problem is to find ways of utilizing the abundant supply of water from the sea.

Water covers 70% of the surface of the earth, but 98 % of this is undrinkable salt water. However, for centuries man has experimented with different methods of converting salt water into fresh water in a process called desalination, whereby salt and contaminants are removed from the water. The challenge, nowadays, is to do a much larger scale.
One place which has used desalination for many years is the United Arab Emirates. It installed the first desalination plants in 1972, and nowadays most of the drinking water in the country is supplied by this process. New filtration systems have been developed to replace the traditional methods, which used a heating process. Another example is Saudi Arabia, whose desalination plants produce almost 25% of the world’s desalinated water. One of the largest plant in the world has been constructed there, producing 300 billion litres annually.
China, with its rapid industrial growth, has also experienced an increased demand for water as well as energy. To overcome the shortage of both, China built a combined power and desalination plant in Zhejiang Province in the 1970s. Since then, salt water has been taken from the East China Sea and converted into fresh water. Some of this fresh water is then sold to industry, and the remainder is sold as drinking water.