www.mcilvainecompany.com

INDUSTRY NEWS

NEW PLANT CONSTRUCTION NEWS

TECHNOLOGY/NEW PRODUCT NEWS

Aquatech Eastern has awarded Toray a contract to provide 4,788 units of its TM 820 R – 440 Sea Water Reverse Osmosis (SWRO) membrane elements to its Galilah project in Ras Al Khaimah. Owned by the Federal Electricity and Water Authority (FEWA), the plant is planned to have an output of 68,000m3 per day, with completion scheduled for late next year.

Toray has previously supplied the same membrane elements to FEWA for its Al Zawrah plant in Ajman earlier this year. The firm says that the membranes feature the highest salt rejection available on the market, together with significantly lower feed pressure. The membranes have also been selected for use in the world’s biggest SWRO plant in Magtaa, Algeria.

AEROMIX Systems, a subsidiary of global water solutions provider RWL Water Group, was selected by Port Qasim in Karachi, Pakistan, to develop drinking water desalination facilities estimated at $775 million.

The project involves the design, construction, operation and financing of a desalination plant. The facility will serve the fresh water needs of approximately 500 industrial buildings in the Textile City industrial park by providing up to 97 million imperial gallons per day of fresh water from seawater.

A similar agreement was signed with AEROMIX and the Karachi Water and Sewage Board for up to 12.5 million imperial gallons per day. These facilities are a significant part of efforts by the Pakistani government to continue growing their economy by providing key infrastructures to local businesses.

"We are excited to participate in these projects while helping to build infrastructure in Pakistan," said Peter Gross, President and CEO of AEROMIX Systems. "These projects compliment our other work throughout the region for the supply of water and wastewater treatment equipment."

The International Water Association gave an award to The Coca-Cola Co. for its new beverage process water recovery system piloted in India and Mexico.

Atlanta-based Coca-Cola said its system takes highly treated process water and treats it again using biological treatment in a membrane bioreactor, ultrafiltration, reverse osmosis, ozonation, and ultraviolet disinfection. The water produced meets and/or exceeds stringent drinking water standards, Coca-Cola said.

If eventually put into use at all of its bottling plants, the system could save as much as 100 billion liters of water each year.

Coca-Cola also said the system could help it cut its operational water needs and improve water use efficiency by up to 35 percent.

The system won the ‘Innovation in Small Projects Award’ by the International Water Association at its Asia Pacific Regional Innovation Awards.

Aquatech, a global leader in water purification technology for industrial and infrastructure markets, has been awarded a contract for the design, engineering, supply and supervision of installation and commissioning of a concentrated brine treatment plant at the Chinacoal Tuke Fertilizer Project in China. The project is located in the city of Ordos in the Inner Mongolia region.

"With this order intake, Aquatech is now well-equipped to offer optimized wastewater recycle and zero liquid discharge solutions not only to the emerging coal chemical market segment but also to other complex wastewater recycle and ZLD requirements in other industries in the Chinese market," said Tom Tseng, General Manager, Aquatech (Guangzhou) Water Treatment Co. Ltd.

Ordos is in a locality in China where water scarcity is critical and the area is under the threat of desertification. Hence, the pollution control norms are very strict, and a zero liquid discharge (ZLD) facility in local projects is a mandatory requirement. The EPC contractor for the project, East China Engineering Science & Technology (ECEC), selected Aquatech to implement a wastewater recycle and ZLD system at the site.

Chinacoal Tuke fertilizer project (Phase I) is invested by Chinacoal Ordos Energy Chemicals Limited Company. Phase I will manufacture 1 million tons per year of synthetic ammonia and 1.75 million tons per year of urea. When the whole project is completed, it will produce 2 million tons of synthetic ammonia and 3.5 million tons of urea. This project uses the rich coal resources in the Ordos coal mines to realize local resource transformation with mature, advanced and reliable technology.

In this project, the coal chemical process uses broken coal slag pressurized gasification technology to make raw gas, which is converted to hydrogen production. After cooling, purification and removal of impurities such as sulfide, CO2 and methane, hydrogen will be compressed with nitrogen in a synthesis gas compressor. The final product, urea, will come out from the ammonia synthesis working section. The product is urea, and the byproducts are methane gas and oil, etc. This project includes a urea unit, ammonia synthesis unit, gasification unit, air separation unit and utilities.

As part of the water treatment system, Aquatech is supplying two units - a high efficiency reverse osmosis (HERO™) unit and a ZLD unit. The reject water from the effluent treatment plant is fed to the HERO plant, which consists of a clarifier, followed by a dual media filter, a weak acid cation unit, and then a reverse osmosis (RO) unit. The reject from the RO is sent to a brine concentrator and then to an evaporation pond. The RO permeate and the distillate from the brine concentrator is collected in the RO permeate tank.

Aquatech will provide the concentrated brine treatment plant in the utilities unit. It will treat concentrated brine from the water reuse plant. The reuse water plant is for treating discharge from the waste water treatment plant, reject/waste from the demineralization plant, and blow down from the circulating water station.

The wastewater treatment plant treats all the industrial waste from the fertilizer project. The wastes are mainly recycled wastewater from phenol ammonia, blow down from gasification circulating water, wash waste from low temperature methyl alcohol and other integrated wastewater (such as ground rinse water, sanitary wastewater). The main pollutants in wastewater are from phenol ammonia waste in the gasification process.

ECEC has evaluated various technologies available in the industry, and has selected this process offered by Aquatech in view of its proven record of higher recovery from wastewater systems and better life cycle costs. ECEC's decision was also influenced by Aquatech's installation in the YTH project in China, which has a similar scheme.

A recent industry report projects GCC governments will invest over US$100 billion in the water sector between 2011 and 2016 to improve desalination technologies, involving solar energy, and maximize on wastewater treatments and recycling.

GCC nations are seeking to overcome water shortage and ensure sustainable resources for the future, as their population grew on a rapid pace and water quality deteriorated.

The Arab world is likely to witness a water crisis around 2025 unless the Arab states execute effective mechanisms for sustainable water management and measures to reduce the agricultural consumption of water, said a joint research by the Euro Arab Organization for Environment, Water and Desert Ranches and the University of Jordan.

In the UAE, Abu Dhabi plans to add more than 30 million gallons per day of desalination capacity to its water network through a power and water plant extension at Mirfa.

Also, FEWA, the electricity and water authority for Ajman, Ras Al Khaima, Umm Al Quwain and Fujairah, plans to produce 115 million liters per day of pre-treated seawater to feed the reverse osmosis membrane system through its Al Zawrah seawater reverse osmosis plant in Ajman.

The Public Authority of Electricity & Water in Oman is seeking to set up strategic water storage reservoirs in Muscat to overcome a crisis situation if desalination plants are disrupted.

In Qatar, the government is seeking to increase its capacity in both the wastewater and water areas through independent water and power projects, the largest being the Ras Girtas project, currently under construction in the Ras Laffan industrial complex.

Kuwait Ministry of Electricity and Water plans to build two reverse osmosis desalination plants in Doha and Kuwait to produce nearly 50 million gallons of water per day.

Dubai-based Metito has landed two new seawater reverse-osmosis (SWRO) desalination plants in Australia and is currently nearing completion of one in Qatar.

The Australian plants are part of a long-term partnership with Bechtel International Inc and are located on Curtis Island near Gladstone, Queensland.

Bechtel is constructing three separate liquefied natural gas plants on the island, and Metito's work includes design, fabrication and supervision of installation of its own equipment including SWRO desalination plants and sewage treatment plants to be used for the construction sites.

The specification required these plants to meet challenging feed water quality and very strict discharge limits. To meet the needs for the construction schedule, plant construction was fast-tracked.

The Qatar desalination plant will supply water for drinking, district cooling and irrigation with a total capacity of 35,000 m³/d at the Pearl Qatar resort. A project requirement was maintaining water salinity at less than 400 ppm and complying with local environmental standards.

Meito group business development director, Bassem Halabi, said, "The design and construction of the plant room constituted a major challenge since the only way to build it was to construct it as a multiple-storey structure." As Halabi explained, the building was constructed in four levels with the basement standing at 9 m below seawater level and housing the pressure filter, pumps gallery and air scouring blowers.

The ground floor housed the chemical preparation and dosing systems, carbon dioxide storage and cartridge filters. The mezzanine floor housed motor control centers, and the first floor accommodated the first and second-pass RO modules, high-pressure pumps with energy recovery devices and chemical cleaning systems for the RO modules. Cooling towers were installed on the upper floor.

Amiad, a leading global producer of water treatment and filtration solutions, is pleased to announce that it has signed a contract, valued at $1.67 million, to provide an Arkal Super Galaxy automatic disc filtration system (SpinKlin R) for the protection of ultra-filtration ("UF") membranes at the Mekorot Group’s Ashdod Desalination Plant (the "Plant"), which will be one of the largest such facilities in Israel. The contract was awarded by IVM Minrav Sadyt: a consortium including Minrav Holdings Ltd, an Israeli infrastructure company, and SADYT, a Spanish construction business. Mekorot Development Enterprise Ltd, a subsidiary of Mekorot, Israel’s national water company, will plan, build and operate the Plant.

The Ashdod Desalination Plant, which is due to commence operation in early 2013, will produce 100 million cubic metres of water per year, accounting for approximately 15 percent of Israeli domestic water consumption. It will be the fourth reverse osmosis desalination plant to be built along Israel’s Mediterranean coast, which, in addition to a further plant due to become operational in 2013, will have a combined annual output of 540 million cubic metres of water. Mekorot is also constructing a new National Water Carrier of Israel, which will receive water from all of the desalination plants. This will enhance the existing system, which delivers water from the Sea of Galilee in the north of the country to the highly populated centre and arid south, by enabling water to be transported in all directions, which will improve the efficiency of Israel’s water use and regulation of supply.

Shimon Ben Hamo, Mekorot’s CEO, commented: "For 75 years, 'Mekorot', Israel’s National Water Company, has been developing Israel’s water economy and integrating advanced technologies for seawater and brackish water desalination in its activities. The desalination facility in Ashdod is an additional link in the long chain of accomplishments in providing high-quality water with the utmost reliability at all times and under all conditions. The integration of filtration systems at the facility coincides with the company’s policy of technological development."

Amiad will provide a solution comprising of its polymer-based Arkal Super Galaxy automatic self-cleaning disc filters. The system will have a filtration degree of 100 micron and will be required to withstand a flow rate of 40,000 cubic metres per hour. Amiad will begin supplying the units from October 2012, with installation due to occur in March 2013.

Arik Dayan, CEO of Amiad, said, "We are very proud that Amiad has been chosen to participate in this significant project in Israel. It provides further evidence of our industry-leading position as well as the strength of our enlarged offering, which now includes UF membrane protection for desalination. We look forward to working with IVM Minrav Sadyt and Mekorot in bringing this important development to fruition."

The new plant will be built at the site of the existing Ghubrah Power and Water plant.

The Oman Daily Observer has reported that five firms remain in the frame for a license to build the planned Ghubrah IWP project in Muscat Governorate. The project, which is valued at between US $350 and $400 million, will see the construction of a 42 million imperial gallons per day desalination plant, based on seawater reverse osmosis technology.

Still under consideration by Oman Power and Water Procurement Company (OPWP) are Singapore-based Hyflux Ltd, Japan’s Marubeni Corporation, Spain’s Acciona Agua and Grupo Cobra, and Malakoff International of Malaysia.

The new plant is set to be built at the site of the existing Ghubrah Power and Water plant, which is going to be decommissioned.

Oman is investing substantially in its water sector, with an announcement back in May stating that the country’s Public Authority for Electricity and Water was planning $7.5 billion in investments in water infrastructure projects over the next 20 years.

A 1,500 m³/d reverse osmosis (RO) brackish-water desalination plant has been supplied to a mine in Mauritania by Veolia Water Solutions & Technologies South Africa, with a heat-exchanger to cool the water.

The contract included design, fabrication and supply.

Raw water from on-site boreholes is pumped to multimedia filters and then to a filtered water tank, before being sent through a set of heat-exchangers. This step is necessary due to the high ambient temperatures of the area, which can see the water reaching temperatures as high as 50°C.

Before RO treatment can begin, the water temperature has to be reduced to a maximum of 30°C. This is achieved through a cooling system consisting of two air-cooled chiller systems, each with a plate heat-exchanger at the process interface.

"This project posed a few challenges that required innovative solutions. Its remote location in a very harsh desert environment brings climatic challenges," explains André Loots, Veolia project engineer. "The client also had high level specifications, such as all motor-driven equipment being rated for high and premium energy efficiency."

To fulfill this requirement, Veolia included optimum energy efficiency in the design for the motor-driven equipment.

The plant is due for commissioning towards the start of 2013. Veolia has offered assistance in the form of supervision during the installation and commissioning phases to ensure that they are carried out according to specified procedure. In addition, Veolia has assumed responsibility to ensure that operators receive the necessary training.

Tucson-based Solon Corp. has begun construction of a 460-kilowatt photovoltaic system for the town of Gila Bend's reverse-osmosis water-treatment plant.

Solon will engineer, design, construct and commission the fixed-tilt solar system, which is expected to be completed later this year. The company also will operate and maintain the system on the town's behalf.

The project is being financed through a $2 million loan through the state Water Infrastructure Finance Authority, which announced the loan closing in March. Once completed, the system is expected to offset 86 percent of the facility's energy usage.

GE today introduced its new Integrated Pump and Energy Recovery (IPER) system, a major engineering breakthrough that overcomes a significant technical obstacle for larger desalination facilities by reducing the energy demands associated with pumping water by at least 10 percent.

GE announced its breakthrough IPER solution during the 2012 Singapore International Water Week in Singapore.

Considerable progress has been made in membrane and energy recovery device improvements, dramatically lowering the energy requirement of seawater reverse osmosis (SWRO) desalination plants over the past 10 years. Until now, energy efficient positive displacement (PD) pumps have been able to achieve significant energy savings in smaller desalination operations. Meanwhile, modest improvements to large, conventional centrifugal pumps have been able to deliver only incremental energy savings.

However, with IPER, GE is offering a new positive displacement pump system that will significantly lower energy requirements for large desalination plants.

Water and Sewerage Corporation, a desalination facility in Tarpum Bay, Bahamas, has installed a pilot IPER system to further demonstrate the efficiency and reliability of the technology.

"IPER is designed to offer customers reliable uptime for their packaged desalination water treatment plants while reducing their energy costs in a significant and quantifiable way," said Heiner Markhoff, president and CEO--water and process technologies for GE Power & Water. "IPER represents a major economic and technical break-through that is poised to help desalination operators play an even greater role in addressing the world's mounting water scarcity problems."

The Earth's surface is 70 percent water, yet less than 1 percent of it is usable. With water scarcity already affecting one in five people around the world--a number that is expected to climb to three in five within 20 years--IPER illustrates GE's ongoing commitment to drive innovation in the global water treatment and reuse, enabling the delivery of cleaner water where it is needed most.

Lower-capacity desalination plants have often utilized PD pumps because of their high efficiency and availability. These small but efficient pumps are based on the use of a fixed geometry and either rotating axial pistons or crank-driven pistons to pressurize water in the chambers. As the size and pumping capacity of these chambers increase, these smaller PD pumps face mechanical challenges. As a result, previous larger PD pumps have either featured a larger crankshaft or high crankshaft speeds to overcome these mechanical challenges. But due to the larger size and operating speeds, these solutions have led to significant vibration and maintenance issues.

IPER solves these problems by eliminating the crankshaft and replacing it with a unique hydraulic drive system for both functions. This hydraulic drive powers three double acting pistons in the water displacement unit and does this at very slow cycle speeds as compared to traditional PD pumps.

These innovations allow larger SWRO systems that today use less efficient centrifugal pumps to incorporate IPER positive displacement pumps in the future. Since positive displacement pumps are typically used on systems with a capacity of less than 1,000 m(3)/day, this offers opportunities for any plant of 1,000 m(3)/day or larger to achieve substantial energy savings.

IPER is the latest solution to join GE's industry leading desalination platform, which also features innovative membrane technologies that transform seawater and brackish water into fresh water for drinking, irrigation and industrial applications. GE's versatile, energy efficient SWRO and electrodialysis reversal technologies produces water reliably and affordably while accommodating a range of sizes, across continents, for almost any salt or brackish water source.

Since RO facilities typically require 53 percent less energy than thermal desalination facilities, IPER's introduction underscores how GE is committed to helping desalination operators reduce their energy costs during both the filtration and pumping stages.

The earth harbors about 1.4 billion cubic kilometers of water. Unfortunately, the vast majority of that water comes from the sea and is not potable unless treated by expensive, energy-hungry desalination plants. Those problems stem largely from inefficiency in the way salt ions are separated from water molecules, and the solution, says a team of materials scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, lies in fundamentally revising that process.

The predominant desalination method today, reverse osmosis (RO), relies on polymer-based membranes to remove salt and requires great pressure to push water through a semi-permeable film.The more pressure applied, the higher the cost. The M.I.T. researchers, led by Jeffrey Grossman and David Cohen-Tanugi, propose that films made of graphene could filter out salt without inhibiting the water flow as much. Graphene, a super strong sheet of carbon that is only one atom thick, has mostly been seen as a material for improving electronics and optical communications.

Reverse osmosis requires less energy than other desalination approaches, such as thermal distillation, but graphene membranes containing nanoscale pores that are more permeable than the polymers currently used would further cut energy requirements, the researchers reported online last month in Nano Letters.

The idea is to discriminate between water molecules and salt ions based on size. "Reverse osmosis uses size exclusion, except it excludes everything," says Grossman, an associate professor of power engineering.

A graphene membrane would provide well-defined channels that allow water molecules to flow through at lower pressures while blocking salt ions, Grossman says.

Using software simulations, the M.I.T. researchers experimented with different pore sizes to desalinate seawater with a salt concentration of 72 grams per liter, about twice the salinity normally found in the ocean. They found that, theoretically at least, pores 0.7 to 0.9 nanometer in diameter were most effective at passing water molecules while blocking sodium ions. "That's the sweet spot," Grossman says. "If it's bigger, salt's going to flow through. If it's smaller, nothing flows through."

Grossman and his team are trying to determine whether chemical reactions might be used to tweak desalination performance. The researchers programmed their digital graphene pores to be coated with either hydrophobic (water-repelling) or hydrophilic (water-loving) atoms. The former slowed the flow but cut down on the salt ions passing through, while the latter allowed faster flow but blocked fewer salt ions. The type of coating may ultimately depend on conditions at a given facility. Still, the scientists report, simulations indicate that graphene nanopores could reject salt ions with a water permeability two-to-three orders of magnitude higher than RO membranes.

Of course, working with graphene in reality is more challenging than filtering pixilated salt from digital water molecules on a computer. For starters, although chemical etching and ion beams can be used to create holes in graphene, it is difficult to produce holes of a specific size in an even configuration, Grossman acknowledges. Nor does graphene eliminate the quandary of how much leftover brine can be safely returned to the ocean without hurting underwater habitats. Toxicity could also be an important issue, he says, "although there are no real answers right now in terms of [graphene's] potential impact on [the safety of] drinking water."

Grossman does not know when graphene-based desalination might be ready for commercial use. He and his team, though, continue to run simulations and have begun testing actual membranes in the lab to study flow rates and salinity.

Demand for potable water is expected to escalate worldwide in the coming years. Grossman says the key to meeting that need is not necessarily tweaking existing technology. "We looked around at who's working on desalination in the scientific community, and it's mostly mechanical engineers working at the systems level," he says. "Little is being done on the system design side using basic science and working from the bottom up."

Australian wave-energy developer Carnegie Wave Energy Ltd (CWE) announced on 5 July 2012 that it had been advised by West Australia's Water Corporation that it wished to move forward on discussions for up to 2MW of renewable energy supply for the Southern Seawater Desalination Plant on an exclusive basis.

The arrangement could be long‑term or short‑term depending on a satisfactory commercial deal for Water Corporation.

The seawater reverse osmosis plant is already committed to purchasing renewable energy from the Greenough River solar farm and the Mumbida wind farm. A provision in these agreements accommodates supply by CWE.

Carnegie has previously announced alternative power off take options for its Perth Wave Energy Project including the Australian Department of Defense. A decision on the final power supply arrangements for that project is expected shortly.

The CETO system has an array of fully submerged buoys tethered to seabed pump units. The buoys move in harmony with the motion of the passing waves, driving the pumps which in turn pressurise water that is delivered ashore via a pipeline.

On shore, high‑pressure water is used to drive hydroelectric turbines, generating zero‑emission electricity. The high‑pressure water can also be used to supply a reverse osmosis desalination plant, replacing electrically driven pumps.

www.mcilvainecompany.com