Comments on “Comparison of energy consumption in desalination by capacitive deionization and reverse osmosis”

Capacitive deionization (CDI) is an emerging brackish water desalination technology in which ions are removed from water by electrostatically adsorbing them onto porous electrodes. Recently, Qin et al. presented an estimate of energy consumption for CDI schemes, and compared the energy consumption of CDI to the energy consumption of a particular reverse osmosis operation scheme which they propose. Qin et al. estimate very high values of energy consumption in CDI for brackish water desalination (e.g. ~1 to 2 g/L salt solution), and these values and trends do not agree with published experiments for CDI or with experimentally validated models for CDI. The current comment identifies important scaling errors and incorrect values in their model resistance parameters, and then discusses unphysical trends predicted by their model. We do not attempt provide a comprehensive review of their model, operation, estimates, and figures, but rather concentrate on several key issues. We present our comments in two sections dealing with resistances and energy metrics, respectively.