Current Affairs Question - 10 February 2020

Explanation :

• On 3^rd February, 2020, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) announced thatit had discovered a new natural gas field with 80 trillion standard cubic feet (tscf) of shallow gas resources.
• The reservoir, named ‘Jebel Ali’, is located between the emirates of Dubai and Abu Dhabi, which along with five other emirates form the UAE.
• The gas find is the largest since the discovery of the Galkynysh field in Turkmenistan in 2005. At 80 tscf, the new reservoir would now be ranked the fourth largest by size in the Middle East, behind the North Field in Qatar, South Pars in Iran, and the Bab field in Abu Dhabi. The Qatari and Iranian fields are part of the same deposit.

Impact

• The Jebel Ali reserve contains shallow gas, which refers to organic gas found just beneath the earth’s surface. The nature of the gas means the cost of the production is much lower than that for reaching deeper resources.
• Further, the discovery is expected to reduce the UAE’s dependence on gas supplies for electricity from Qatar, a nation with which the former has had a bitter standoff since 2017.

Explanation :

• Reverse osmosis (RO) is a process that removes foreign contaminants, solid substances, large molecules and minerals from water by using pressure to push it through specialized membranes.
• As its name implies, RO takes osmosis, a natural process that occurs in every cell-based organism—plants, animals and even people—and reverses it.
• Unlike osmosis, which is a passive process, reverse osmosis requires external force (pressure) to work.
• Pressure is applied to a highly concentrated solute solution (e.g., salt water) to pass through a membrane to a lower concentrate solution.

Application

• RO is used to produce highly purified water for drinking water systems, industrial boilers, food and beverage processing, cosmetics, pharmaceutical production, seawater desalination, and many other applications.