Water. Desalination + reuse
Issue link: https://fhpublishing.uberflip.com/i/724419
10 Interview September 2016 Water. desalination + reuse Australia desalination plant in 2013 selected IDE's Progreen modular RO system, a chemical-free, all-in- one seawater RO package that ranges from 500 m3/d to 20,000 m3/d capacity, to supply the luxury five star resort island on the Great Barrier Reef off Australia's north east coast. In IDE's view, the need to reduce costs will continue to drive down the amount of energy and chemicals used in water production and treatment, as well as pushing improvements in membrane technology. "We of course follow all the developments in membranes, and pilot all the new innovations that are made in labs worldwide. For the next 10 years, more chemical stable membranes that can handle more difficult waters, and that reduce energy consumption, will be the mainstream," Felber says. However, he cautions those who seek to make direct links between renewable energy sources and desalination plants. "I don't see the logic, except for the political logic. Many RO plants and some thermal plants connect to the grid and use electricity as the source of power. Electricity is electricity, you can get it from renewables, from fossil fuel, from wherever. A government may have a policy to have some renewable energy in the grid, but there's no real connection between that and the desalination plant," he says. IDE is looking at technologies to power thermal desalination off solar energy, but this requires "very specific circumstances", explains Felber. "Mainly, that the place is near the sea and has land for thermal power, or some other way to create steam from thermal power." Where Felber sees a "real revolution" in water technology is in pressure-retarded osmosis (PRO), or extracting osmotic energy from brine or seawater, a process it is piloting in Israel. "You can recover the osmotic energy in your seawater or brine by mixing it with the stream of a river, or the stream of discharge of municipal waste plant. This idea has been around for a long time, and now we are making it practical," says Felber. This could be particularly beneficial at a site like IDE's desalination plant in Larnaca, Cyprus, which is situated next to a wastewater treatment plant. "If you take the brine from the desalination plant and mix it with the discharge of the municipal waste plant, you can create double the energy and bypass the electricity phase, going directly to pressure in the desalination plant, so this is a win-win situation," he says. IDE will begin promoting the technology in the next few years, "as one of our new innovations, pushing the industry forward as we have always done. This idea, combined with a desalination plant, can be a real revolution because if you take the entire brine stream and squeeze out of it, through a membrane process, the pressure back into your system, you have lowered very much the energy consumption of your plant," Felber adds. Globally, IDE sees further potential for combined solutions such as it offers for municipal reuse, industrial water treatment, and desalination, in markets in Australia, China, and India, where it is already the largest supplier by far, as well as the US; and in South America, Chile, Peru, and parts of Brazil. Texas, US, is a big target market for IDE in the next few years, with its strategy to offer a one-stop-shop solution for industry and municipal clients. "We opened an office in Texas for oil and gas and for desalination. Texas is suffering from severe drought, and desalination will become part of a cocktail of solutions there, in industrial and municipal segments," says Felber. "Generally speaking, the US market is developing in terms of desalination, reuse of municipal waste, and reuse of industrial waste, and all of this in the strongest economy in the world. We believe that there is very large potential in the US, and it's definitely one of our focus areas in the next few years," says Felber. Additionally, it is eyeing the global mining industry, particularly in China and other regions where regulations are encouraging industral water reuse. "Mining is a very large and interesting potential market, because many of their processes don't take account enough of the amount of water used. The more pressure that comes on mining companies to manage their water properly, so we will see desalination plants coming in as source of water in some places, and more than that, treating the effluent, and recycling water back into the process, so as to reduce the overall water consumption of the rig," explains Felber. "Water treatment in mining is very difficult because it's complicated chemistry, ožen involving both thermal and membrane processes, and IDE is one of few companies that offers both of those technologies. We see big potential in industrial water reuse," he says. In its focus on oil and gas, the company is targeting both traditional producers, and oil sands and fracking "The potable reuse market ... will be a very large one." IDE thinks that the real revolution in desalination technology will be in pressure-retarded osmosis (PRO), a process that it is developing in a pilot project in Israel. While the science behind PRO has been known about for some time, IDE believes that it can develop it to the point of offering it in the commercial marketplace.