Water. desalination + reuse

PROJECTS | 24 | Desalination & Water Reuse | August-September 2014 _________ Charles Desportes director of thermal desalination for the Aqua-chem ICD Division of Aquatech International ___ Editor's note: the Rabigh desalination plant in Saudi Arabia has outstripped its design output and water quality for nearly ten years. Designer of the plant's multiple effect distillation heart, Aquatech, sought at the outset to rein in operating costs while maintaining the plant's reliability and resilience. ONE OF THE key challenges for desalination project developers arises when they invest in new technologies to offer a low-cost product while avoiding compromise on specifications for plant reliability and resilience. So it was when a joint venture of Hajj Abdullah Alireza Group and Aquatech International Corporation designed and supplied a 10,000 m³/d seawater desalination plant for Aramco's Rabigh Refinery in Saudi Arabia (currently PetroRabigh Refinery and Petrochemicals Complex). A major goal of this project was the provision of desalinated process and potable water at low-cost. The Modern United Water Desalination Company joint venture delivered the facility on a design-build-own-operate-transfer basis - Saudi Arabia's first industrial project undertaken on such terms. The plant's leading-edge multiple effect distillation (MED) evaporator and distillate condenser units were designed, built, tested and stamped in accordance with the 2001 American Society of Mechanical Engineers' Section VIII standards. As the plant - located on the Red Sea, New technology and long-term reliability in process and potable water production about 150 km north of Jeddah – approaches its tenth year of operation, it has been free from significant design, operation or maintenance issues since it was started up in 2005. The Rabigh plant's two 5,000 m³/d MED thermal vapour compression seawater desalination units produce about 4,000 m³/d of process water according to the site demand, and the remaining 6,000 m³/d is used as potable water after remineralization. The plant's output has been consistently Figure 1. A 3-D view of Rabigh desalination plant

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