The French utility services group Veolia has won a contract worth 702 million euros (945 million dollars) to design and build a water desalination plant in Saudia Arabia....
... With a completion date of 2010, the plant is expected to produce 800,000 cubic meters (28 million cubic feet) of fresh water per day for the city of Jubail and a nearby desert region of northeastern Saudi Arabia.
From TerraDaily
Smaller scale (Hey! I thought everything was bigger.) in Texas:
On a one-acre site alongside a string of shrimp boats docked on the Brownsville ship channel stands a $2.2 million assembly of pipes, sheds, and humming machinery - Texas' entree into global efforts to make sea water suitable to drink.
The plant is a pilot project for the state's $150 million, full-scale sea water desalination plant slated for construction in 2010.
Desalting sea water is expensive, mostly because of the energy required. Current cost estimates run at about $650 per acre foot (326,000 gallons), as opposed to $200 for purifying the same amount of fresh water.
This is a fact packed 900 word article, worth a look.
From PhysOrg
