Life-cycle assessment of desalination technologies integrated with energy production systems

Desalination technologies require high energy consumption. As a consequence, the environmental load associated with the operating stage is much higher (more than 90%) than that associated to plant construction, maintenance and final disposal. This paper analyzes the evolution of environmental impact by means of the Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) technique, caused by the most common commercial desalination technologies used worldwide - multi-stage flash, multi-effect evaporation and reverse osmosis - when integrated with different energy production systems, also taking into account the origin and sources of the energy used. SimaPro 5.0 software, developed by Dutch PRe Consultants, was used as the LCA analysis tool, and three different evaluation methods were applied: CML 2 baseline 2000, Eco-Points 97 and Eco-Indicator 99.