Singapore's average annual rainfall is more than...... of notoriously soggy Britain,...... the casual observer might be surprised to learn that the place has a shortage of drinking water. With around 7000 people per square kilometer, Singapore is _________ densely populated country in world. Its land mass is ________ its 5 million inhabitants with water.
One answer is to desalinate seawater. That,though, is expensive, so the Singaporean government is keen to find cheaper ways of doing it. And, ___________ a German company, it may have done so, for the company says its demonstration desalination plant on the island can turn seawater into drinking water using less than half the energy required by the most effective previous method.
______ human consumption, its salt content of approximately 3.5% must be cut to 0.5% _________ desalination plants do this in one of two ways. Some employ distillation, _________ needs about 10 kilowatt-hour of energy per cubic meter of seawater processed. Other plants employ reverse osmosis. This process needs about 4k Wh per cubic meter. The new system, by contrast, consumes 1.8k Wh per cubic meter.