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Northern Chile is characterized by significant mineral resources, particularly copper, nitrate, lithium, molybdenum, rhenium, among others. Moreover, these resources are located in the Atacama Desert, the driest in the world. Water resources are exhausted, but Chile has an extensive coast from where to get water. Then, any new operation or expansion of a current operation must use seawater. The distance from the coast to mining operations ranging from a few kilometers to about 300 kilometers, but even more significant, these operations can be found from 600 to 4,000 meters above sea level. Then, the cost of transporting desalinated water can be greater than the cost of desalination.

This paper presents a methodology to design the system of desalination plant and desalinated water transport. The objective is to determine the location and size of desalination plants and the water distribution system that minimizes capital and operational costs. The methodology uses a superstructure that represents the set of alternatives on which the optimal solution is found. A mathematical model is generated to represent the desalination plant and water distribution system. The end model corresponds to a MINLP problem which is solved in two steps using commercial software. A case study is used to demonstrate the applicability of the methodology developed.