You can't drink ocean water because of its high salt content. Drinking seawater will make you dehydrated because it takes more water for your body to process the salt than your body has available. But with so much ocean water in the world, you might be wondering if it is possible to make this salty stuff drinkable.
Need
The answer is "yes." There are ways to turn saline water into the freshwater people need to drink every day in order to survive. The process is called desalination, and it is often used in places in the world where there is a limited supply for drinking water but an abundant supply of ocean water. Although, in general, most people in the United States have access to plenty of suitable drinking water, as the population grows, so will the need for more fresh water.
Thermal Distillation
In fact, in many arid regions there is a critical demand for drinkable water. As a result, many countries are exploring the development of desalination plants that are powered by renewable energy sources. One such option is solar desalination, a similar process to what nature does in order to produce rain, the main source of all the fresh water available on the earth.
Really all the currently available man-made systems of distillation are only smaller scale duplicates of the world's natural solar desalination process. In nature, the sun causes water to evaporate from rivers, lakes and oceans. This water vapor then comes into contact with cooler air, causing it to recondense and form dew or rain. By using alternative sources of heating and cooling, humans have been able to duplicate this process artificially. Basically people use a form of distillation to heat seawater and then condense and capture the steam.
Reverse Osmosis
Along with thermal distillation, one promising method of desalinating seawater is reverse osmosis. This membrane technique treats seawater by using coagulation and filtration to eliminate particles in suspension. Then the water is forced through racks of semi-permeable membranes.
While the process is environmentally friendly, reverse osmosis is expensive. It can cost as much as $1,000 an acre-foot to desalinate water as opposed to the approximately $200 an acre-foot it costs to supply water through current methods. However, as technology improves and the demand increases, the cost is expected to become more reasonable, making this method of turning ocean water into drinking water more affordable.
Statistics
More than12,000 desalination plants are operating in approximately 120 countries worldwide. These plants produce about 14 million gallons per day of freshwater, but that amounts to less than 1 percent of the world's total water needs. Countries in the Middle East use about 70 percent of this desalinated water while North Africa uses about 6 percent and the United States consumes about 6.5 percent. The thermal distillation method is used to produce about two-thirds of the world's desalinated water; the other one-third is produced using reverse osmosis.
Tags: ocean water, about percent, drinking water, desalinated water, desalination plants