Arid Forecasts for Alternative Energy-Efficient Desalination

Freshwater is an indispensible scarce resource for domestic, industrial, and agricultural use. To produce more freshwater, sea and brackish water must be desalinized. Recently in Desalination, Qin and Deshmukh et al. evaluated the potential for capacitive deionization (CDI) as an alternative desalination technology to conventional systems based on reverse osmosis. Their findings cast doubt on the best-case potential of CDI to reduce the energy consumption of water desalination.