Hawaii Deep Ocean Drinking Water

Desalinization has been in practice for many years. Submarines and cruise ships have used it for years now, although the extent to which they have needed to utilize desalinization has been relatively limited, and only for their crew. With bottles and even tap water now coming from seawater, desalinization is a hot topic. In many ways, the desalinization process bears a lot of resemblance to traditional purification of fresh drinking water. There are major differences, however, as the salt is one of the few things being removed from the seawater where as most drinking water must go through more things being removed including pollutants, heavy metals, and more.

Desalinization processes are relatively the same all over the world, throughout all the companies who do them, although some do have their own proprietary methods, chemicals and equipment. Nonetheless, the process of how to make desalinated water remains relatively the same. Seawater is brought in through a series of hoses and pipes, and put through several physical filters, which will remove plankton, fish eggs, and other deposits. The water is super heated in large batches, causing it to steam. The steam is directed through chambers that have filters designed only to allow the gases through. At that point, salt and other debris that was not caught by the filters remains behind. The salt is often shipped to a different facility to manufacture table salt. In the meantime, the steam that was released and re-filtered is then cooled. At that point, chemicals are added to further purify the now desalinated water. The waste that was not salvageable such as salt, is then pumped back into the ocean, sea, or other designated area. Some of these desalinization plants have been utilized as dual purpose, to create both fresh drinking water and seawater drinking water. In other cases, they are seawater only and all water is bottled. And, both single use and dual purpose desalinization plants are used to pump water in some areas (particularly Japan) as drinking/tap water.