TechTalk Water: Desalination

Debates around the global water crisis have gained an unprecedented global momentum over the past years. Issues affecting the accessibility and quality of fresh water, such as climate change, skyrocketing population rates, and pollution, immensely increase the pressure on existing fresh water resources.

It is not without reason that “Water and Sanitation” was adopted as one of the Sustainable Development Goals’ “17 Goals to Transform our World” announced by the UN in September 2015. Main pillars of the targets identified under goal 6 “Water and Sanitation” are providing clean drinking water, increasing resource efficiency, and ensuring sustainable ways of fresh water production.

The process of using saline water resources to produce fresh water, known as desalination, is a global trend, with the numbers of desalination plants growing worldwide. Aside from using Desalination on sea water and saline ground water, desalination can also be applied to produce fresh water from brackish water, a common by-product of energy production, industrial water usage and agricultural wastewater (excessive agriculture and the use of pesticides have led to an increase in salinity in ground water and complicate the processing and re-use of water for irrigation).

With Egypt’s geographical location between two seas and highly saline ground water, desalination is a promising approach to the growing water scarcity both in drinking and irrigation water, as Dr Hosam Shawky, director of the Egyptian Desalination Research Center of Excellence (EDRC) pointed out in his introductory lecture “Desalination: The Future of Fresh Water in Egypt”.

On November 11th, 2016, the German Science Centre (DWZ), in partnership with Misr El-Kheir Foundation, invited leading experts in the field of desalination and fresh water production from Germany and Egypt to discuss the potential and the challenges of desalination in the Egyptian context at the “TechTalk Water: Desalination”.