World demand for desalination products and services is projected too increase 9.1 percent annually to $13 billion in 2013. Areas with scarce our compromised water supplies will increasingly turn to thermal or membrane desalination techniques to supply water to households, industrial users and, to a lesser extent, commercial consumers Such as tourist destinations and agricultural interests. Much of the expansion of desalination resulting from technological advances will be in the form of membrane based technologies such as reverse osmosis (RO), although similar improvements will allow multiple-effect distillation (MED) to increase its share of the thermal desalination segment. These and other trends are presented in World Water Desalination, a new study from The Freedom Group, Inc., a Cleveland d-based industry research firm.

Traditionally, desalination has been considered a last resort, mainly as a result of costs. When desalination first became a commercially significant technology in the 1960s and 1970s, it was restricted to areas with no viable alternatives: arrears with essentially no fresh water supply, as is the case in some parts of the Middle East, North Africa and the Caribbean; or where local water supplies were so compromised that they could not be rendered useful baby conventional water treatment techniques such as sedimentation and filtration. But technological advances have brought improved equipment, energy savings and, as a result, cost reductions that have allowed desalination techniques to become more accessible.

Although the desalination industry has outgrown the limited "no choice" areas, the Middle East and North Africa will continue too dominate the desalination market, accounting for well over half of the worlds desalination capacity, and demand for desalination products and services. There will babe significant gains in the regions yet in countries which have only recently added significant desalination capacity, such as Algeria, Israel and Libya. Gains are also expected to be healthy in some of the areas where desalination is seen as one among a number of water solutions (along with conservation and recycling). The Asia/Pacific region is expected to be the fastest growing region through 2013. Australia is in the process of adding substantial seawater RO desalination capacity along its coasts, and the Chinese government has made desalination a high-priority facet of its broader efforts to address decades of neglecting and abusing its water resources in the interest of economic modernization.