Analysis of treated ballast seawater quality for potential reuse

Ballast water is very important to provide safety for the ship and effect the efficiency of the ship’s operation. 80% of the commodities are moving throughout the world by shipping and per annum, ballast water is being shifted for roughly 5 billion metric tonnes. Ballast water provides safety for a ship but on the other hand, cause a major problem to the environment through the introduction of the invasive aquatic species. The International Convention for the Control and Management of Ships’ Ballast Water and Sediments (BWM Convention) has already commencing on 8 September 2017 after ratified by 51 States represent 35% of the global gross tonnage in September 2016. However, there is no value recovered for the treated ballast water as it simply discharged during de-ballasting. The purpose of this project is to evaluate the quality of the treated ballast water and thus explore its potential for reuse to enhance environmental protection. In order to evaluate value creation of treated ballast water, three seawater applications which are seawater toilet flushing, cooling tower and desalination was studied and compared with treated ballast seawater. This project is approached by understand the treated ballast water and comparing treated ballast water and seawater at pre-treatment of desalination plant using portable WTW multi 340i pH/O2/Conductivity meter, pH meter, turbidity meter, the spectrophotometric method and membrane filtration technique. Based on the results, the treated ballast water is suitable to remove the usage of the raw seawater for desalination. However, this research only covers temperature, pH, turbidity, conductivity, dissolved oxygen and Escherichia coli, and further analysis and technical development is required.