• Journal of Korean Society of Environmental Engineers
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• v.38 no.5
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• pp.255-268
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• 2016

Climate change has increased the need to secure a new water resource in addition to the traditional water resources such as surface water and ground water. The seawater desalination market is growing sharply in accordance with this situation in Korea, "seawater engineering & architecture of high efficiency reverse osmosis (SEAHERO)" program was launched in 2007 to keep pace with world market trend. SEAHERO program was completed in 2014, contributed to turn the domestic technology in evaporative desalination technology to RO desalination technology. Currently, it is investigated that the average specific energy consumption of the whole RO plant is around $3.5kWh/m^3$. The Busan Gi-jang plant has shown $3.7{\sim}4.0kWh/m^3$, including operational electricity for plant and maintenance building. Although not world top level, domestic RO technology is considered to be able to compete in desalination market. Separately, many researchers in the world are developing new technologies for energy savings. Various processes, forward osmosis (FO), membrane distillation (MD) process are expected to compete with RO in the future market. In Korea, FO-RO hybrid process, MD and pressure retarded osmosis (PRO) process are under development through the research program in Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport (MOLIT). The desalination technology level is expected to decrease to $2.5kWh/m^3$.