• The use of subsurface intake types for seawater RO facilities was documented. • Feedwater quality improvements by using subsurface intakes were demonstrated. • Reduced environmental impacts using subsurface intakes were discussed. • Capacity limits on various subsurface intake types were assessed. • Life-cycle cost savings using subsurface intakes were preliminarily analyzed. a b s t r a c t ...

In the seawater desalination field, WHO requires the boron concentration in drinking water to be below 0.5 mg/l, and this requirement has affected SWRO process design, because of the difficulty to achieve such low boron concentration. In order to overcome this problem, a new SWRO membrane element, which had higher boron rejecting performance, was developed. This new SWRO membrane element exhibi...

Desalination capacity has rapidly increased in the last decade because of the increase in water demand and a significant reduction in desalination cost as a result of significant technological advances, especially in the reverse osmosis process. The cost of desalinated seawater has fallen below US$0.50/m for a large scale seawater reverse osmosis plant at a specific location and conditions whil...

Nowadays, water and electricity are closely interdependent essential sources in human life that affect socio-economic growth and prosperity. In other words, electricity is a fundamental source to supply a seawater desalination process, while fresh water is used for cooling this power plant. Therefore, mutual vulnerability of water treatment and power generation systems is growing because of inc...

Forward osmosis (FO) is a promising membrane technology to combine seawater desalination and water reuse. More specifically, in a FO-reverse osmosis (RO) hybrid process, high quality water recovered from the wastewater stream is used to dilute seawater before RO treatment. As such, lower desalination energy needs and/or water augmentation can be obtained while delivering safe water for direct p...

The ‘surplus’ of oceanic water generated by climate change offers an unprecedented opportunity to tackle a number of global issues through a very pragmatic process: shifting the excess water from the oceans onto the land. Here we propose that sea-level rise could be mitigated through the desalination of very large amounts of seawater in massive desalination plants. To efficiently mitigate sea-l...

As population and water demand increase, there is a growing need for alternative water supplies from water reuse and desalination systems. These systems are beneficial to water augmentation; however, there are concerns related to their carbon footprint. This study compiles the reported carbon footprint of these systems from existing literature, recognizes general trends of carbon footprint of w...

The Gulf of Aqaba (GoA) is of significant ecological value with unique ecosystems that host one of the most diverse coral communities in the world. However, these marine environments and biodiversity have been threatened by growing human activities. We investigated the levels and distributions of trace metals in surface seawater across the eastern coast of the Saudi GoA. Zn, Cu, Fe, B and Se in...