Reverse Osmosis and Other Treatment Technologies - Global Drinking Water Management and Conservation - page 51

Chapter 4
Reverse Osmosis and Other Treatment
Technologies

4.1 Introduction

In the previous chapter we classi ed water treatment into six classes. We also stated

that reverse osmosis and other advanced treatment processes produce a higher
quality of treated drinking water. This chapter is a description of Reverse Osmosis
(RO) and other similar treatment processes. In Chap. 5 , we use data from 36 RO
desalination plants as our sample for estimating breakeven prices and

“ Shadow

Ramsey prices, ect marginal social opportunity

costs; these prices can be considered long-run marginal cost prices.
In order to estimate the prices in the next chapter, we need Total Cost and Plant
Size information on water utilities which are currently using RO treatment tech-
nology, which is probably the least-cost, state-of-the-art technology for producing
high-quality drinking water. Accordingly, this chapter focuses on such technologies
available to water utilities today. It so happens that RO can also desalinate seawater
and other brackish water and, therefore, the processes were developed for water
scarce areas that could use seawater to produce drinking water.
This chapter is organized as follows. The following section is a general intro-
duction to desalination treatment technologies and how these have grown over time.
Section 4.3 gives details of desalination processes of which RO is the most
prominent. Section 4.4 covers the relative costs of desalination as a function of
scale. It includes a description of the 36 RO treatment plants worldwide, which
form our sample of plants that are the subject of econometric estimation in Chap. 5 .
The

” which are prices adjusted to re

final section draws the conclusions.