Water. Desalination + reuse
Issue link: https://fhpublishing.uberflip.com/i/867173
30 FAR SITE September 2017 Water. desalination + reuse Q & A P E T E R H O L M E J E N S E N "We want to be the Gore-Tex of the water industry." • Aquaporin was founded by myself and Morgan Jensen in 2005. It has grown into a group of ve companies, even before we have gone commercial with our technology. We have worked in the technology and development phase with business development, integrating business and technology development a little bit more than you normally do. We have worked a lot with public-private partnerships, collaborations betwe en companies and universities and other institutions, and for that reason we have received quite a lot of governmental funding for our • Aquaporin is a technology provider. Our goal is to make a company that is world-leading in making membranes. We are trying to compete with the big guys like Dow and GE. That's the only thing we do. We want to be the Gore-Tex of the water industry. That means we do not have competencies in the eld of systems, so we need systems integrators and Darco is a good example of a system integrator. • In total we invested around €65 million ($77 milion) into the technology development and production facilities, and around €35 million has come from private investors, and around €30 million from government funding. It has all been focused on development of Aquaporin-based membranes. • Together with Darco we are taking our forward osmosis (FO) technology and integrating that into a combined FO osmosis with reverse osmosis (RO) system where you use the FO as a pre-polishing step and then we do the recovery using the RO step. You use FO as the pre-treatment step, you take all the small inorganic compounds out and they you also exchange the speci c salt irons so you know exactly what you're treating in your RO step a' erwards. It's a lot easier to treat and the membranes have a much lower tendency to foul than if • Today we are around 100 people and our focus for is to take it to the next level and go into large scale adoption with the technology. In the past two years, we have invested $15 million into large scale production facilities. We are going from ground zero to full scale production. In Copenhagen, Denmark, Aquaporin now has capacity of two million metres square. Until now, our prime focus has been technology development, but we have never been able to provide 1,000s of modules to a customer. Our goal is to nalise process optimisation and running of the facility during the next quarter or two. The next facility that we will begin to establish by the end of 2017 will be in Beijing, China. It will be approximately double of the size of the facility in How did Aquaporin start out? What's your business today? Where does your investment come from? What are you piloting with Darco? What's next? Peter Holme Jensen, CEO of Aquaporin Asia, on the story so far for the membrane technology group Aquaporin begins forward osmosis pilot project in Singapore Aquaporin of Denmark and Darco Water Technologies of Singapore are to run a joint pilot project on industrial wastewater treatment using forward osmosis (FO) technology. The project will focus on wastewater streams from the semiconductor industry, and will use Aquaporin Inside forward osmosis membrane elements. Darco, which designs and de- livers water treatment systems for industries including electronics, semiconductors, and pharmaceu- ticals, and Aquaporin, a biomi- metic membrane specialist, are both investing in the project with a view to bringing the FO technol- ogy to market faster. "This is an important project for us in the fast-growing water industry in Singapore, and we see Darco as a very capable and innovative development partner," said Aquaporin chief operating oœ cer Thomas Chris- tian Beck. The project follows on from a three-year study by Aquaporin Asia that began in November 2014, 'Aquaporin based biomi- metic forward osmosis mem- branes: from lab scale produc- tion of membranes to pilot scale production and industrial test bedding of membrane mod- ules', which was supported by Singapore National Research Foundation as part of PUB's environment and water research programme. "The next production facility will be in China" P E T E R H O L M E J E N S E N "This is an important project for us in the fast-growing water industry in Singapore." Aquaporin chief operating offi cer, Thomas Christian Beck