Did you know...

• Tampa Bay Seawater Desalination's 25-million-gallon per day (mgd) rated production capacity makes it the largest seawater desalination plant in North America.

• The total surface area of the 10,032 Reverse Osmosis (RO) membranes in the plant is 85.2 acres or 64.5 football fields.  The facility sits on land one-tenth that size.

• If the plant's RO membranes were unrolled and connected, they would stretch the 223 miles from Tampa to Tallahassee.

• The size of each RO membrane pore is about 0.001 microns or 1/100,000th the size of one human hair.

• The 1.4 billion gallons of warm water that typically flow through the Big Bend power plant's cooling system daily could provide every New York City resident with three hot showers.

• The plant's high pressure RO feed pumps push source water through RO membranes at up to 1,000 pounds per square inch (psi).  That's the same pressure high quality pressure washers use to clean concrete driveways.

• All the plant's high pressure RO feed pumps have energy recovery units which help cut the plant's energy costs and boost pump horse power as much as 40 percent.

• The transmission main connecting the desalination facility with Tampa Bay Water's facility site crosses the Alafia River.  This crossing spans more than one-half mile and is the longest horizontal directional drill involving a 36-inch fiberglass pipe in the country.