The announcement by the Climate Action Minister, David Mascort, indicating that the Generalitat has decided to install a floating desalination plant in the Port of Barcelona has surprised (and in some cases, irritated) a good part of the rest of the administrations involved in managing the response. to the drought and even several experts in water resources and engineering.
The desalination of seawater by reverse osmosis - technology that would be used in the new facility in Barcelona - is fully developed and there are thousands of plants in operation around the world (two of them in Catalonia). There are also smaller capacity desalination plants in portable format, some of them installed on ships or barges.
A recent example of portable desalination plants in Spain were those installed in La Palma (Canary Islands) to recover the water supply - in this case only for irrigation - in areas affected by the 2021 volcanic eruption.
However, to date, very few large-capacity floating desalination plants or those similar to the one announced by Minister Mascort (40,000 cubic meters of drinking water per day) have been put into operation.
The best-known comparable example is the floating desalination plant (installed on a barge) commissioned in January 2022 next to the port of Al Shuqaiq in Saudi Arabia. This plant is known as Metito 1, in reference to the company (Metito Overseas Ltd, Metito Group) based in Dubai in charge of its construction and operation.
Metito 1 is in fact the first of three floating desalination plants commissioned by Bahri, the national logistics and maritime transport company of Saudi Arabia, in collaboration with Saline Water Conversion Corp., with the aim of improving the supply of drinking water in this country of the Arabian Peninsula. One of the requirements of the project is the mobility of the barges that serve as a base for desalination, so that they can be transferred to the areas of the country with the greatest need for water at all times.
The Metito 1 desalination plant has a production capacity of 50,000 cubic meters of water per day and works "using the most advanced treatment technology, integrated ultrafiltration," highlights the construction company. In a video broadcast on YouTube, Metito Group states that its project in Saudi Arabia is the largest in the world in floating barge desalination.
The total capacity of these three desalination plants in this project will be 150,000 cubic meters per day; At the moment only two of them are in service.
The project was approved in 2019 with an initial budget equivalent to 190 million euros.
The information released so far by Metito and Bahri does not provide details on the dimensions and draft of the barge on which the desalination plant has been installed or on the source of energy and energy consumption of this installation.
