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Digging deeper or pumping water from further upstream in the water table is only a short-term solution that often leads to disputes between countries and water conservation and reuse projects have only limited effectiveness.
A new study from Yale University and the University of Notre Dame argues that seawater desalination should play an important role in helping combat worldwide fresh water shortage, once conservation, reuse and other methods have been exhausted, providing insight into how desalination technology can be made more affordable and energy efficient.
"The globe's oceans are a virtually inexhaustible source of water, but the process of removing its salt is expensive and energy intensive," said Menachem Elimelech, a professor of chemical and environmental engineering at Yale and lead author of the study, which appears in the journal Science.
