how the plant works
Tampa Bay Seawater Desalination uses a process called reverse osmosis (RO) to produce drinking water from seawater.
The desalination plant is located next to Tampa Electric’s Big Bend Power Station, which already withdraws and discharges up to 1.4 billion gallons a day of seawater from Tampa Bay, using it as cooling water for the power plant. The Tampa Bay Seawater Desalination plant “catches” 44 million gallons a day (mgd) of that warm seawater, separates it into drinking water and concentrated seawater and dilutes the twice-as-salty seawater before returning it to the bay.
