How does a desalination plant work?
First, water collects in an intake well (1) and then is pumped (2) from the Brownsville ship channel into a pipeline that feeds to one of four pretreatment units. These units remove particles suspended in the water: silt, solids, and contaminants. This pretreatment reduces the work required of the critical reverse osmosis (RO) unit that removes salts, significantly reducing costs. The four pretreatment units differ from one another: • two ultrafiltration membrane units (3 & 4) from different suppliers using different technologies; • a microfiltration unit (5); and • a conventional treatment unit (6) that uses clarification, sedimentation, and filtration to remove contaminants. The pilot is testing the various technologies to determine which works most efficiently under the specific conditions existing at the site. For this reason, it also features two parallel trains of holding tanks (7) and RO units (8): • The water produced from the filtration processes (the “filtrate”) is pumped to
