I searched the Internet to identify desalination plants
located around the world. (At The International
Desalination Association website, 18,426 plants are estimated to have been
in existence in 2015 – click here to go to this data.) I identified 20 plants that I was able to
find on Google Maps. I then measured the
areas of each plant (using the Satellite view) and graphed the measured area against
each plant’s reported water output in millions of gallons per day. The following graph shows the results of
plotting the measured areas against the reported outputs (mgd = millions of
gallons per day):
The graph is based on the data in the following table:
mgd/day
|
acres
|
25.7
|
5.4
|
27.0
|
6.9
|
36.0
|
10.4
|
52.0
|
16.2
|
91.9
|
18.8
|
15.9
|
21.3
|
92.5
|
22.0
|
36.1
|
22.2
|
137.4
|
25.5
|
84.5
|
26.4
|
75.7
|
30.4
|
72.1
|
31.9
|
47.0
|
33.1
|
66.1
|
35.3
|
132.1
|
43.5
|
72.3
|
43.7
|
165.1
|
49.2
|
158.5
|
50.2
|
168.0
|
52.4
|
264.2
|
85.3
|
So, what is the value of doing this? One value might be using the results to estimate
a desalination plant size for a given output.
Doing a regression analysis of the correlation between the measured plant
sizes in acres and the reported plant outputs in millions of gallons per day (the
data in the table above) gives an R square value of 0.7603, indicating some
correlation between the two in a series of measurements. The equation for the resulting regression
line is y = 2.9013x – 0.3923 (the graph above provides the R square value, the regression
line, and the line's equation). Using the
equation (and assuming the correlation is sufficient), a plant size for a 100 mgd output would be about
35 acres and a plant size for an output of 150 mgd would be about 52 acres.
It seems to me that using Google Maps to look at chemical sites
(such as desalination plants) by satellite photographs has a lot of potential
uses, such as what is described above. I
was hoping to find a tipping point such that at a certain plant size, the
output suddenly substantially increases, but was not able to get enough data
for larger-size plants.
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