Environmental ranking of desalination plants: the case of the Arabian Gulf

Performance indicators and ranking methods are effective tools for assessing the environmental impact of emerging technologies and comparing the operational efficiencies of different processes. Desalination of seawater, which is vital for solving the water shortage in the Arabian Gulf region, should be assessed due to its adverse environmental impacts on the shallow and closed Gulf basin. The main objective of the current work is to develop and implement an environmental assessment methodology capable of ranking alternative desalination processes and technologies based on their environmental performance. The proposed methodology starts with identification of relevant indicators and uses the relative ranking of desalination plants together with an aggregated environmental index. The assessment approach was tested on selected desalination plants in the Arabian Gulf region. The results showed that the ranking methods are effective in aggregating the influence of individual indicators to produce a numerical value that indicates the rank of studied desalination plants with respect to their environmental impact.