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The requirement for water for horticultural irrigation to be of low-salinity limits the application of water resources that are marginally above the required salinity. This applies to marginal salinity groundwater in the Northern Corridor, as well as to the use of reclaimed water from the Bolivar DAFF recycling scheme (which may be up to 1200 mg/L) to some horticultural crops that are particularly sensitive.
The availability of new desalination technology that has the benefits of low initial establishment costs and low ongoing energy requirements provides opportunities to unlock the marginal salinity water sources in the NAP/Northern Corridor area for a range of horticultural purposes, if the new technology can be demonstrated to be practical, reliable and cost-effective for small to medium sized horticultural enterprises.
This was a low-cost project that aimed to demonstrate the opportunity to use new desalination technology at the scale of individual irrigated horticulture enterprises to reduce the salinity of marginal-quality irrigation. The project selected a suitable demonstration site in the Northern Adelaide Plains and established a small-scale trial of capacitive deionisation desalination technology, which demonstrated the practicality of such a scheme at the scale of a single enterprise, and the improvements that can be achieved in horticultural product yields or quality.
This project was partly funded by external funding from PIRSA. While desalination technology company Idropan Australia previously indicated a willingness to contribute to the project through provision of a CDI desalination unit, this did not prove to be feasible and an existing UniSA unit was used.
The project will demonstrate the practicality of small-scale installations of capacitive deionisation technology for horticultural irrigation applications in the NAP/Northern Corridor area. The intended outcome of this is that a greater proportion of the reclaimed water is taken up for productive use and that groundwater in the areas where it is currently considered marginally too saline for horticultural purposes also becomes a potentially productive water resource.
