The Affordable Desalination Consortium (ADC), which is wrapping up its program of work this year, is to transfer the resources left after its closure to the American Membrane Technology Association (AMTA).
Tom Seacord of Carollo Engineers, who is chairman of the ADC board, told the opening session of the AMTA/SEDA joint conference in Miami Beach on 19 July 2011 that the ADC board had voted for this option for disposing of its residual assets, which session chairman David Brown of City of Jupiter called “a very substantial sum”.
The money will provide fellowships over a period of five years and also be used by the AMTA publications committee. AMTA executive director Ian Watson told D&WR that the publications money would be used for public outreach activities, that AMTA could normally not afford, educating local governments, agencies and other bodies involved in desalination and water reuse.
The ADC was set up in 2004 basically to provide a benchmark of good practice to assist the promotion of desalination, primarily in the USA. At the US Navy Seawater Desalination Facility in Port Hueneme, California, the ADC successfully desalted seawater at energy levels of 1.6-1.8 kWh/m³.
Recently it has been working on brackish-water desalination with the Texas Water Development Board, and a report on this work would be published soon, Seacord told the conference.