Comparison of Membrane-based Solutions for Water Reclamation and Desalination Presented at the Conference on Desalination and the Environment, Santa Margherita, Italy, 22-26 May 2005. European Desalination Society

• Published in: Desalination Vol. 182; no. 1-3; pp. 251 - 257
• Main Authors: Cote, Pierre, Siverns, Steve, Monti, Sandro
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 01-11-2005
• ISSN: 0011-9164
• DOI: 10.1016/j.desal.2005.04.015

The reclamation of effluents for irrigation and indirect potable water uses is rapidly developing as an alternative to seawater desalination. Two membrane- based options available to treat sewage for water reuse, tertiary filtration (TF) of the effluent from a conventional activated sludge (CAS) process and an integrated membrane bioreactor (MBR) are explored; in both cases, the level of treatment can be complemented by reverse osmosis (RO). These options are compared to desalination of seawater with both conventional multi-media membrane filtration. The capital costs for a plant producing water from seawater are about twice the costs of a plant reusing secondary sewage. Both the pretreatment costs and RO cost are higher. Similarly, the O&M costs for producing RO water from seawater are 2 times higher than the cost of reusing secondary sewage. The total life cycle costs for producing RO water from secondary effluent and seawater are 0.28US$/m super(3) and 0.62US$/m super(3), respectively.