SPAIN – Increases in output at the Torrevieja desalination plant is planned after a reported €45 million ($55 million) investment from the Spanish government. A local source reported that the announcement by the minister of agriculture and environment, Isabel Garcia Teherina, was made during a visit to the facility last week.

The Torrevieja plant has a design capacity of 240,000m³/d, but at present only produces around half of that quantity. The first increase in output is scheduled to be complete by the end of summer this year, and would double the plant’s current output to 220,000m³/d. A planned expansion could further increase the plant’s design capacity to 360,000m³/d, although no date was given for this.^[1]

USA – The Department of Water Resources (DWR) has awarded a $10 million grant to the city of Santa Barbara to offset the cost of reactivating the Charles E. Meyer desalination plant.^[2] In May 2017, after a 25-year hiatus and a $72 million refit project awarded to IDE Technologies, the facility came back online to supply 11,356 m³/d of water to the City of Santa Barbara—roughly 30 percent of the total demand.^[3] DWR’s desalination grant program is financed under Proposition 1, part of the Water Quality, Supply and Infrastructure Improvement Act of 2014.

ALGERIA – The government of Algeria has announced that it will irrigate 25% of the country’s arable land by the end of 2019. The construction of 11 desalination plants and wastewater treatment facilities will allow water in the nation’s dams to be re-allocated to the agricultural sector.

This objective is part of a plan to improve and modernize the country’s farming sector to enable the country reach self-sufficiency in durum wheat, which will require an increase in total annual water supplies from current levels of 4-5 billion cubic meters to 15-20 billion. In addition to desalination facilities, the country is expanding its water resources capacity by building dams, reservoirs, and over 150 wastewater treatment plants. Additional desalination and water treatment plants are expected to begin operations later this year.^[4]

  ^{Workers harvest wheat in a field on the outskirts of Berouaguia, south-west of Algiers Credit: Reuters}

SCIENCE – A team of researchers from MIT and the University of California at Berkeley have successfully developed a method that can extract drinkable water out of the driest desert air. The method relies on metal-organic frameworks (MOFs)—a new high-surface-area material—and can extract potable water from air with relative humidity as low as 10 percent. Mass-spectrometry testing has demonstrated that the water produced by the system contained no traces of impurities. 

Existing methods for extracting water from air require much higher levels of humidity (80-90% for most systems, and 50% for the more efficient dew-harvesting refrigeration-based system). Able to operate in places with low humidity and large amounts of sunlight, the MOF based system may potentially be used in the world’s driest areas to fulfill water needs. 

The test device used by the researchers was purely solar-powered and could provide a quarter-liter of water per day per kilogram of MOF.  According to the researchers, the water output can be tripled with more optimal material.  They are now working to boost the system’s efficiency in order to scale it up for use in individual households.^[5]