What is desalination?
It is the process of removing salt (and sometimes other minerals) from saltwater, seawater or polluted water from lakes, streams and wells.

Is desalinated seawater safe to drink?
It depends on the method used to desalinate. All common methods produce good water. Our method produces distilled water, which is free of most contaminants and pollutants.

What is your Developing Nations Product?
When you purchase SEA Panel product, part of the proceeds are reinvested into our Developing Nations product. We aim to bring SEA Panel technology to places that need it most ... Bangladesh, India, Africa and the Pacific Rim, where quality water can save hundreds of thousands of lives that would otherwise be lost to cholera, giardia, hepatitis and diarrhea.

What is drip irrigation?
Conventional irrigation douses the soil near a plant with water, and much of the water dries or filters away before the plant’s root system can absorb it. The problem is that plants can only drink water fairly slowly. A compulsively-patient gardener could conceivably drip water very slowly onto a plant’s roots, which would decrease water loss. But since few people are willing to do that, we use drip-irrigation systems which patiently drip water to each plant. (The amount of water can be adjusted at each drip head.) Much less water filters through the soil and less water evaporates in the air. Drip irrigation has been used successfully in desert climates to grow food with high water efficiency. Now, with the advent of increased demand for freshwater, irrigation efficiency will become more important. Thus drip irrigation will gradually become as well-known as the ubiquitous as the common irrigation sprinkler. It is likely that future agriculture in dry climates may move completely to drip irrigation … it’s remarkably more efficient.

What is Brine Pollution?
When the desalination process separates salt from water, the salt needs to be managed in some way. The typical method is to send the salt-heavy water back into a local bay or inlet. This ‘brine’ has a salt concentration many times higher than seawater. When injected back into a bay or inlet, the marine organisms usually are not able to handle the increased salinity. Like air pollution, the brine will dissipate with time over a large area, but considerable damage can still be done close to the area of emission.

What is SEA’s answer to Brine Pollution?
The SEA panel can be configured to operate in ‘zero-brine mode’ where solid, crystalline salt can be removed from the system, rather than brine. Rather than having to dispose of several tons of brine, for instance, the operator may only have to dispose of less than a ton of sale crystals, which can be sold or used as a coproduct.

Why are there ANTI-Desalination groups?
One of the problems with conventional desalination is that after the salts and minerals are removed from the saltwater, a salt-heavy, concentrated brine remains. Molecular screens cannot treat this brine, so it has to be disposed. If you’re desalinating near an ocean, you can pump the brine back in. On the surface, this seems like a harmless solution, since the ocean is already salty, what’s a little brine? But it turns out that the salt-heavy brine takes a long time to disperse, and it can kill organisms and harm marine environments near the pump-in point. If you’re desalinating inland, there is rarely a good place to get rid of the brine that won’t damage valuable cropland and soils. Unlike molecular screen and osmotic techniques, distillation can leave behind solid salt crystal residue instead of brine. So instead of having to dispose of several tons of toxic brine, you may only have to dispose of a few hundred pounds of salt crystal. And unlike brine, there is a market for salt crystals — like road salting and food preservation — so they can be sold or used as a coproduct. Another problem with nonsolar desalination is the large amount of power necessary to run the system, which can lead to conventional air pollution. Solar desalination systems like SEA Panel avoid these problems, to create a nearly 100% sustainable technology.