Saudi Arabia water problem - Term Paper Example

According to Bragg and Bragg (2005), the oceans contain about 97% of the entire water on the earths’ surface; in Saudi Arabia, water has been supplied in three forms, mainly surface water, which accounts for about 10%, the underground aquifers that provide the majority percentage of more than 80%, and the various desalination plants, which provide about 5% of water. The availability of essential water supply continued to deplete and the water resources become limited, prompting the adoption of desalination plants.

Natural resources define all the resources that occur freely within the environment that exist in a natural form, such as natural forests, minerals, water, and natural gases. 1. Background Desalination refers to the several processes of conversion of salt water to fresh water through the removal of salt and other minerals. Several approaches are used to treat seawater including thermal evaporation of seawater and use of modern desalination plants, osmosis in reverse. Nanomembranes are filters made from organic polymers with less thickness that are used to separate the liquids and gases at the molecular levels.

Such technology is also used in desalination of seawater, purification of polluted water, and the removal of carbon dioxide and other pollutants from exhaust gases. The modern technology adopted in Saudi Arabia has enabled the exploitation of underground water by companies such as Saudi Aramco, an oil company, and hence increasing availability of water in the country. 2. Desalination process In Saudi Arabia, there has been water scarcity because of the rising population, which led to the adoption of desalination technology through the development of modern polymer materials producing semi-permeable membranes, which allow selective passage of water and other ions.

The technology is categorized according to content extracted (water or salt from the main stream), separation process, and the energy used in the entire process (Anon, 1997). Evaporative processes have been used for extraction of fresh water from the mainstream. Such evaporative desalination processes consist of various methods. Multi stage flash (MSF) method involves the evaporation of seawater in chambers with low pressure as compared to the vapor pressure. The low-grade steam from the turbines heats the tubes within the distiller, which heat the seawater intake.

The heated seawater then passes into low-pressure vessels, and boils into steam. The steam is condensed on heat exchanger tubes, which are cooled by the incoming water, feed to the heater. The conversion of seawater to steam depends on the pressure maintained within the vessel. In multiple effect distillation (MED), condensing steam heats tube bundles, resulting into evaporation. The vapor produced is used as steam in the next chamber operating at low pressure and temperature (Micale, Cipollina and Rizzuti, 2009). B. Nano membrane technology