ABSTRACT

For the ‘pioneering’ countries, the driving factors were often a lack of surface waters and groundwater coupled with sufficient natural or financial resources to engage in energy-intensive and costly desalination projects. For the newly emerging desalination markets, driving factors are more diverse and include economic and demographic growth, urbanization, droughts and climate change, or declining conventional water resources in terms of quality and quantity due to overuse, pollution or salinisation. Moreover, as conventional water production costs have been rising in many parts of the world and the costs of desalination − particularly seawater desalination − have been declining over the years, desalination has also become economically more competitive.