Fresh Water from Saline Waters. The Political, Social, Engineering and Economic Aspects of Desalination

44 Pages·1966·2.352 MB·English

by  Philip Sporn (Auth.)

FRESH WATER
FROM
SALINE WATERS
The Political, Social,
Engineering and Economic Aspects of Desalination
BY
PHILIP SPORN
MEMBER, NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES
and NATIONAL ACADEMY OF ENGINEERING
P E R G A M ON P R E SS
OXFORD • LONDON • EDINBURGH • NEW YORK
TORONTO • PARIS • BRAUNSCHWEIG
Pergamon Press Ltd., Headington Hill Hall, Oxford
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Pergamon of Canada Ltd., 6 Adelaide Street East, Toronto, Ontario
Pergamon Press S.A.R.L., 24 rue des Ecoles, Paris 5e
Vieweg & Sohn GmbH, Burgplatz 1, Braunschweig
Copyright © 1966 Philip Sporn
First edition 1966
Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 66-18400
Printed in Great Britain by Billing & Sons Limited, Guildford, Surrey.
This book is sold subject to the condition
that it shall not, by way of trade, be lent,
resold, hired out, or otherwise disposed
of without the publisher's consent,
in any form of binding or cover
other than that in which
it is published.
(2781/66)
Foreword
FRESH water—its availability and the urgency of the need to
find new methods of controlling, utilizing, or augmenting
its natural supply—has become a matter of increasing social,
economic, and political importance, particularly in the
United States, and a topic of wide discussion in both the
technical and general press.
The President of the United States has placed it high on
the list of priorities which require governmental action. As
recently as August 5, 1965, he issued instructions to the
responsible government officials to press ahead with water
desalination research, "as if you knew you were going to
run out of drinking water in the next six months". Within
hours, both houses of the Congress, by voice votes, had
completed action on the measure calling for a five-year,
$185 million sea water conversion program that had been
urged by the President. The President has since then approved
this Bill.
As this introduction is being written, the entire north-east
section of the United States is in the midst of a severe drought
which has required severe water conservation measures.
Indeed, responsible officials are warning that, if the adverse
water conditions continue, the great city of New York
could run out of water by the middle of February 1966.
My own interest in the problems of water and water
V
vi FOREWORD
desalination was intensified in 1958, when I was asked to
assume the chairmanship of the Sea Water Conversion
Commission of the State of Israel, a post I have held since
then.
Having accepted this post and undertaken the responsi-
bility to study saline water conversion and the implications
of combining it with power generation, I began to explore
the matter with the help of a small staff. Brief, but concise,
studies were quickly completed, and, after deliberating on the
results Of these studies at only three plenary sessions, the Sea
Water Conversion Commission issued a report in 1961,
stating conclusively that the only pragmatic and engineering
based program for reliably producing desalinated water at
costs approaching an economic range would be one encom-
passing a system of conventional steam turbine power
generation, integrated with flash evaporator distillation. It
was recognized that this would not yield water that would
be immediately competitive in cost. But water would be
produced by a means offering good promise of substantial
cost reduction through further development both in tech-
nology and in scale.
The need was clearly seen for the earliest first-hand
experience with this process through a modest installation
based on the combination of power generation with the
latest available advances in the art of flash distillation. To get
economic support for this operation while accomplishing its
prototype purpose, a very difficult area from the standpoint
of water supply in the State of Israel was chosen. This was
the community of Eilat, at that time embracing a population
of approximately 7000, which has since grown to almost
double that number and which seemed to offer an ideal
opportunity. The Commission, therefore, made a recom-
mendation to proceed immediately at Eilat with the instal-
FOREWORD vii
lation of a steam-electric power plant consisting initially of
a 6000 kW back-pressure turbine, furnished with steam
from one of two boilers, the second boiler being temporarily
an advanced installation to give earlier firmness to the steam
supply. Steam from the back-pressure turbine would
initially supply a flash evaporator installation of 1 million
gallons per day capacity. It was contemplated that this would
later be duplicated, giving an ultimate combination of 6000
kW of electric generating capacity and 2 million gallons of
distilled water per day. Later, and as needed, it was contem-
plated the plant could be expanded in rating both as to
electric generation and as to distilled water capability.
Even with the initial modest size facility, and the use of
locally delivered crude oil as fuel, it was possible to project
a water cost in the completed project in the neighborhood
of 80/ per 1000 gallons of product water.
The installation of the initial plant was completed and
started operating toward the end of April of this year. By
July it had achieved operation at 98 per cent of design capacity
with a water purity of two parts per million, and with an
economy in steam consumption equalling or bettering the
original design level.
Four years have elapsed since this original report recom-
mending the construction of this plant. In the interval the
tempo and scope of desalination research and developmental
work in other parts of the world, particularly in the United
States, have undergone substantial acceleration and expan-
sion. In the United States this work has been sponsored by
the Office of Saline Water of the Department of the Interior.
From a modest beginning in 1954, with an initial annual
budget of some $175,000, the scope of OSW operations has
been extended to where the fiscal 1966 budget is projected
at over $26 million. Total expenditures since 1954 will, by
viii FOREWORD
the end of fiscal 1966, exceed $80 million. Virtually every
area of basic and applied research has been touched by the
extensive program—from the study of the water molecule
and the composition of brackish sea waters to a relatively
large variety of processes for the production of fresh water
from saline water, and the design of equipment involved in
such processes.
The United States OSW program, just recently extended,
has interlocked with, and has been supplemented by, other
significant governmentally sponsored programs on desalina-
tion; this is particularly true of the work of the United States
Atomic Energy Commission.
The work directly sponsored by OSW, and the joint
efforts of the Department of the Interior and the AEC, have
been officially reported to the President. Results and con-
clusions, however, have eventually focussed into a very
narrow line of recommended action and application: com-
bined power generation and flash evaporator distillation;
use of nuclear power as the heat source to furnish steam in
large applications; extension in size of both the power unit
and the distillation unit. Thus lower cost nuclear heat, made
even lower in cost to the water plant through integration,
plus the even more badly needed benefits of scaling up so as
to produce capital cost reductions in both the power and
water cycles have been set as the course along which to carry
out further development.
This general conclusion, after many years of effort and a
broad and varied program of research, is interesting because
of its logic and almost easy predictability. Its final acceptance
after failure to find any breakthrough, and the concomitant
decision to take advantage of the simple engineering principle
of higher over-all thermodynamic efficiency when operating
in combination with a power cycle as distinguished from the
FOREWORD ix
much lower thermal efficiency when operating in an inde-
pendent distillation operation, and at the same time to exploit
the well-known engineering principle of upscaling, appeared
to be a foregone conclusion years before they were accepted.
Toward the end of 1964,1 had occasion to review a group
of some of the latest technical publications in the field of
water desalination and combined power operation and
desalination. In the course of this review I examined over
2000 pages of published material and data carrying close to
2000 references.
Contemplating the extent of all of this material and faced
with the challenge to extract the essence of the progress and
achievement in saline water conversion, I undertook the
preparation of some notes and slides on this theme. On
March 11, 1965, under the sponsorship of Kuhn, Loeb &
Company, I delivered a talk on the subject before a group of
bankers, investment consultants, fund managers, administra-
tors of governmental electric power and water agencies, and
business and insurance executives. A small printing, repro-
duced with minor editing from a tape recording, was then
distributed to those who attended, as well as some others
who expressed an interest.
The warm response to the talk has prompted the author
and publisher to issue this talk as a book without further
editing. They do so with some diffidence, but in the hope
that what it may lack in volume will at least be partially
compensated for by clarity of presentation and the forthright
discussion of the reasons for the importance of the subject,
the fundamentals of its technology, both thermodynamic
and engineering, the current economics of converted saline
water, and more particularly the reason why, without any
scientific breakthrough, but aided by technologic research
and development, one can be reasonably hopeful of bringing
X FOREWORD
about large-scale economic distillation of sea water—initially
by combined power and water distillation, but eventually
by completely independent thermal distillation operations—
that will contribute to providing an abundance of the simple
compound water, which is indispensable to human life on
the planet earth.
PHILIP SPORN
New York
August 23, 1965
Acknowledgment
I AM glad to acknowledge and express my appreciation for
the help I received from my colleague, John E. Dolan, in
connection with the gathering of some of the statistical data,
in the preparation of the graphs and tables, and in the editing
of some of the material.
Fresh Water from
Saline Waters
INTRODUCTION
I am delighted and honored to be here before this group,
and I want to express my thanks to you for taking time out
in the middle of a busy workday to come and listen to my
talk on this subject. And I take it, the fact that you are here
is in large measure due to the great interest this subject,
rightfully or not, has aroused during these past several years.
Now, fresh water, by which we mean pure water, is cer-
tainly an important—vitally important, I believe—political,
social and particularly engineering problem. It is a problem
that you will find in many parts of the world, where it is also
a very difficult economic problem.
It is a national problem here with us in the United States.
Of late, it has also become a glamour item. For example,
last July, President Johnson asked the Department of the
Interior, under the direction of which the Office of Saline
Water operates, to work in close collaboration with the
Atomic Energy Commission to develop a plan for an
aggressive and imaginative program to advance progress in
large-scale desalting of sea water.
This report was delivered to the President on September 22.
The President touched on the subject in his recent State of the
Union Message, and again in his Economic Report to the
Congress, transmitted last January 28, in which he alluded