Green measures to make desalting plant less damaging
Palm Jumeirah facility uses chemical-free treatment process
Dubai: The desalination process is "greatly misunderstood" in terms of its environmental impact as many measures are taken to minimise ecological damage, said an official of Palm Jumeirah's desalination plant.
Palm Utilities on Palm Jumeirah produces enough fresh water to fill 22 Olympic-size swimming pools every day in one of its two seawater reverse osmosis desalination plants. Both plants produce around the same amount of salty concentrate, or brine, to Dubai's coastal waters said Dr Emad Haffar, managing director of Palm Water, the subsidiary of Palm Utilities.
The daily production capacity of the plant is 32,000 cubic metres, providing tap water to the Atlantis hotel and all buildings on the crescent. "There is a great misunderstanding of desalination because we are trying to improve the environment," said Haffar.
The plant has one of the world's largest reverse osmosis energy recovery systems (ERS) to reduce energy consumption in its water facility, and uses Dolphin chemical-free water treatment system in the chiller plant of Palm District Cooling, a subsidiary of Palm Utilities.
Four-storey plant
During a tour of the plant during the International Desalination Association's World Summit, Haffar said the four-storey plant sits four metres below sea level and rises 21 metres above.
Seawater is taken up from within the crescent for desalination and the brine is discharged outside the crescent for better mixing. Two openings on the crescent allows the water to circulate better around the fronds and trunk said Haffar, who said, however, turbidity can get very high because of reclamation.
Turbidity is a water quality term that refers to the relative clarity of water. Turbidity occurs when fine suspended particles of clay, silt, organic and inorganic matter, plankton, and other microscopic organisms are picked up by water as it passes through a watershed. Measured in nephelometric turbidity units (NTU), turbidity ranges from less than 1 NTU to more than 1,000 NTU. At five NTU water is visibly cloudy; at 25 NTU it is murky. "On the sediment index it can get very high to 25 or 30, in the summer we often cannot even measure it," he said.
