Sustainable Water Supply Model for Southern Australia Based on CETO Ocean Desalination

摘要

Australia currently has some 380 GL/yr of desalinated water projects in planning and execution phases across five states requiring 225 MW of power, with this power increasingly being mandated from new renewable resources. The need to drought-proof Australian cities and to ease the water stress on catchments and ground water is driving this escalation in the roll out of seawater reverse osmosis desalination plants. CETO is an Australian wave energy capture and conversion system that could fit comfortably into the planning scenarios of many of these large projects as CETO can directly produce highly pressurised seawater for direct in-feed to desal plants thereby replacing a large fraction of the plant's energy requirements, or it can use the same pressurised water stream for on shore electricity generation to power stand alone desalination plants. As such the CETO technology presents a highly flexible zero-emission base load energy and clean water option for integration into large-scale desalination projects. In this paper we outline the model, strategy and methodology by which a sustainable and economically viable water supply for southern Australia could be obtained using CETO technology.