What is desalination?

Desalination is the process of separating salt from seawater to produce fresh drinking water.

There are two main desalination technologies - thermal desalination (heating the seawater and condensing the vapour to produce fresh water) and reverse osmosis (pushing seawater through a membrane to separate salt and impurities from the fresh water).

All recent and planned major seawater desalination projects in Australia, including the Gold Coast Desalination Plant and the Sydney's Desalination Plant, use reverse osmosis as this process consumes less energy, produces the fresh water cheaper and creates a better final product.

Both the Gold Coast and Sydney plants have been designed to be energy efficient.