Evaluating the costs of desalination and water transport

Yuan Zhou and Richard Tol

No FNU-41, Working Papers from Research unit Sustainability and Global Change, Hamburg University

Abstract: Many regions of the world are facing formidable freshwater scarcity. Although there is substantial scope for economizing on the consumption of water without affecting its service level, the main response to water scarcity has been to increase the supply. To a large extent, this is done by transporting water from places where it is abundant to places where it is scarce. At a smaller scale, and without a lot of public and political attention, people have started to tap into the sheer limitless resource of desalinated water. This study looks at the development of desalination and its costs over time. The unit costs of desalinated water for five main processes are evaluated, followed by regressions to analyze the main influencing factors to the costs. The unit costs for all processes have fallen considerably over the years. This study suggests that a cost of 1 $/m3 for seawater desalination and 0.6 $/m3 for brackish water would be feasible today. The costs will continue to decline in the future as technology progresses. In addition, a literature review on the costs of water transport is conducted in order to estimate the total cost of desalination and the transport of desalinated water to selected water stress cities. Transport costs range from a few cents per cubic meter to over a dollar. A 100 m vertical lift is about as costly as a 100 km horizontal transport (0.05-0.06$/m3). Transport makes desalinated water prohibitively expensive in highlands and continental interiors, but not elsewhere.

Keywords: water cost; desalination; water transport; MSF; RO; water shortage (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L95 Q25 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 16 pages
Date: 2004-06, Revised 2004-12
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Published, Water Resources Research, 41 (3), W03003

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.fnu.zmaw.de/fileadmin/fnu-files/publica ... ionFNU41_revised.pdf First version, 2004 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Can't connect to www.fnu.zmaw.de:80 (No such host is known. )

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sgc:wpaper:41

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Research unit Sustainability and Global Change, Hamburg University Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Uwe Schneider ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).