Veolia Water Solutions and Technologies

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From Sea to Shining Sea

Figure 1. Pictured is a Chevron facility in San Ardo, Calif., where Veolias OPUS system has been operating
Siemens Water Technologies

though the municipal water demand is considerably greater than that of industry, many of the municipal needs are addressed by relatively basic technologies, while industrial requirements can only be met with advanced treatment options. And, as industrial water demands continue to grow due to regulatory restrictions and mandates, water treatment providers are developing innovative desalination technologies, which allow saltwater and brackish water supplies to be cleaned up in a more cost effective, energy efficient manner. Municipalities are beginning to reserve fresh water supplies for the population, which means industry is now required to find alternative water sources, such as seawater and brackish water to support manufacturing processes, notes Gary Martin, segment general manager of water and wastewater solutions, with Siemens Water Technologies (Warrendale, Pa.). Were finding this especially true in applications for the power, chemical and mining industries where we are increasingly being asked to find solutions for retrofits, expansions, upgrades or new installations.

Figure 2. This photo shows an installation of an RO high-pressure pump and the energy recovery devices (in the background)

Typically brackish water is used more broadly in industry, but that doesnt preclude the use of desalination of seawater as a key technology solution to the overall issue of industrial water scarcity around the globe. Just as you have multiple ways to generate electricity, such as coal, wind, sun and gas based on geography and atmospheric conditions, the same can be said of water, notes Joseph Such, general manager of reverse osmosis and electrodialysis systems with GE Power & Water (Trevose, Pa.). We can clean up water using different technologies such as desalination of seawater or reuse of brackish water. Clearly, with water scarcity, we are looking at all the different levers we can pull to assist with this issue, and that may include desalination of saltwater if the customer is near the sea, or reusing municipal or industrial wastewater if the customer is inland.

He continues to say that this will remain a persistent issue for industry even in areas where fresh water is plentiful due to mandates that prohibit facilities from disposing of wastewater, permits being withheld due to high water use or by economic drivers such as the increasing cost of fresh water. In any of those situations, desalination will undoubtedly be part of the solution.

Industrial technologies

Although municipal- and industrialdesalination needs share some common technologies in that most advanced treatment technology uses membranes for removal of suspended solids and dissolved solids, in municipal applications these two methods are usually sufficient to meet the quality requirements. In industrial applications, however, the water often needs additional treatments, such as
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GE Water and Process Technology

Figure 3. GE Waters SeaPRO seawater RO desalination system offers flowrates of 100 to 2,500 m3/d (20 to 460 gal/min)

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ion exchange or electrodeionization, or specialized membranes to increase the quality beyond potable standards. For example, if desalinated water is being used to feed a high-pressure boiler, more salts will need to be removed because under high pressures and high temperatures, the salts tend to corrode the materials inside the boilers. So in addition to the reverse osmosis (RO) systems, which will remove about 97% of the salts, an additional process, or polishing step, such as ion exchange media or electrodeionization, may be added on the back end. Another factor for industrial desalination may be the temperature of the water. Many processors try to reuse condensate. This fairly hightemperature water is cleaned up and put back at the front end of the boiler. If industrial desalination or brackishwater reverse-osmosis technologies are employed, it is likely that the best, most energy efficient solution will be to keep as much of the temperature in the water as is possible and feed it to the boiler at the higher temperature so it doesnt have to be reheated. This would require advanced, high temperature membranes. Water treatment providers are also working on membranes that are more efficient. Everyone is looking to get more water for less energy and less cost, notes Ian Lomax, global market manager for desalination, with Dow Water and Process Solutions (Minneapolis, Minn.). Flux is the amount of water you get for a given area for a given pressure, and over the last 20 years, the flux of the membrane has improved by about two to three times. And were still looking for the next level. Today were working on products that we expect will achieve higher flow for lower energy than the products we have today.

GE Water and Process Technology

Figure 4. The GE PROPAK is an integrated ultrafiltration (UF) and reverse osmosis (RO) system for providing high quality water from high variability surface water

Energy efficiency

However, advanced membranes arent the only way to skin the energy efficiency cat. Energy recovery devices, which capture some of the waste energy from the process and recycle it, are also helping to increase the energy efficiency of desalination processes. These devices are especially important in seawater desalination because there is so much salt in the water that it must be driven at high pressures at the input of the membrane system, explains GEs Such. Typically the input pressure is about 900 psi and the output pressure is roughly 800 psi. Energy recovery devices can be put there, almost like a turbo charger on a car, to capture the energy that would otherwise be put down the drain and allow it to prefeed the high-pressure pump on the front end. Now instead of taking it from feed pressure to 900 psi, it only needs to go from 800 to 900 psi. When energy recovery devices are combined with membranes that require less energy, the driving pressure up front becomes less and less, which lowers both the cost of the pump and the amount of energy required to operate the pump. It is a multi-pronged approach when you look at energy consumption in a membrane plant, says Such. It isnt any one component, but rather all the components used that create a robust, highly effective and more efficient desalination system. For this reason, many water treatment providers are offering pre-engineered modular system, says Siemens Martin. When matching standard re-

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Solar deSalination
orldwide, more and more people are obtaining drinking water either from the sea or from increasingly salty inland sources. Analysts at Global Water Intelligence, an industry service, estimated that in 2008, desalination facilities around the world produced nearly 12-billion gallons of water each day. This amount is expected to more than double by 2016. The bulk of this amount is attributable to the Arab countries around the Persian Gulf. Other countries such as Spain, France, Greece and Italy are also turning to desalination. While most large desalination plants are fueled by oil or gas, smaller and medium-sized plants can run partly or even entirely on renewable energies. Often people in these plants dont know how reliable and efficient solar-powered desalination plants, or wind-powered and, perhaps someday tidal-energy-driven plants, work, says Marcel Wieghaus of the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (ISE; Freiburg, Germany; www.ise.fhg.de). The European ProDes initiative, of which ISE is a member, intends to change that by conducting a study of examining how renewable energies can be harnessed more effectively in the future to transform seawater and brackish water into drinking water. ProDes, which stands for Promotion of Renewable Energy for Water Production through Desalination, has established an array of processes for desalinating seawater and brackish water. Currently most European desalination plants rely on reverse osmosis, where high-pressure and semi-permeable membranes separate water from salt and unwanted organic constituents. Plants operating on conventional energy forms deliver around 400,000 m3/d of drinking water. When it comes to desalination plants running on renewable energy, the spectrum ranges from simple solar distillation plants with a capacity of a few liters a day to wind-powered reverse osmosis plants capable of desalinating nearly 2,000 m3. Ultimately the best technology for the task depends on the salinity of untreated water, the local infrastructure and the quantity of water required. The more remote the location, the more worthwhile and profitable it is to use plant systems run on renewable energy and to set up a water treatment operation that is not dependent on an external energy supply, explains Weighaus. He and a team of researchers have installed solar-powered desalination plants on the Canary Islands of Gran Canaria and Tenerife.

In a similar vein, IBM (Armonk, N.Y.) and the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) (Riyadh, Saudi Arabia) are collaborating to create a water desalination plant powered by solar electricity, which could significantly reduce water and energy costs. A new, energy efficient desalination plant with an expected production capacity of 30,000 m3/d will be built in the city of Al Khafji to serve 100,000 people. KACST plans to power the plant with the ultra-high concentrator photovoltaic (UHCPV) technology that is being jointly developed by IBM and KACST. This technology is capable of operating a CPV system at a concentration greater than 1,500 suns. Inside the plant, the desalination process will hinge on an IBM-KACST developed technology, a nanomembrane that filters out salts as well as potentially harmful toxins in water while using less energy than other forms of water purification. According to KACST scientists, the two most commonly used methods for seawater desalination are thermal technology and reverse osmosis, both at a cost ranging from 2.5 to 5.5 Saudi Riyals per cubic meter. Combining solar power with the new nanomembrane, the project may significantly reduce the cost of desalinating seawater at these plants. Currently Saudi Arabia is the largest producer of desalinated water in the world and we continue to invest in new ways of making access to fresh water more affordable, says Dr. Turki Al Saud, vice president for research institutes, KACST. Because over 97% of the worlds water is in the oceans, turning salt water into fresh water cost effectively and energy efficiently offers tremendous potential for addressing the growing worldwide demand for clean water. One of the most efficient means of desalination is reverse osmosis. But there are obstacles to unlocking this reserve principally biofouling, degradation by chlorine and low flux challenges. The joint research focuses on improving polymeric membranes through nanoscale modification of polymer properties to make desalination much more efficient and much less costly. Our collaborative research with KACST has led to innovative technologies in the areas of solar power and of water desalination, says Sharon Nunes, vice president, IBM Big Green Innovations. Using these new technologies, we will create energy-efficient systems we believe can be implemented across Saudi Arabia and around the world.

verse osmosis modules with standard pre-treatment and post-treatment products, it has the multiple effect of reducing energy use, reducing costs, increasing availability through the use of products that are proven to work together and shorter schedules and start up times. Brad Biagini, a product manager with Veolia Water Solutions and Technologies (Cary, N.C.) agrees that all-in-one treatment technologies are efficient solutions. For example, the Amdro from Veolia, which he says was initially developed for water treatment in the phosphate fertilizer industry, is a reverse osmosis technology operated in double-pass mode. By combining the companys Actiflo high-rate clarification process with filtration, RO and
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Water treatment providerS

ion exchange, the technology generates high-quality effluent with minimum pre-treatment requirements. Similarly, the companys OPUS technology uses a reverse osmosis process operated at an elevated pH. By com-

bining a proprietary high-rate chemical softening process, known as Multiflow with filtration, ion exchange and reverse osmosis, this technology generates high quality water with a low waste volume. And GE Waters Propak NA Series, which was designed for industrial applications in boiler feed, combines ultrafiltration hollow-fiber membranes to take out solids with spiral wound RO membranes to take out dissolved salts on a single skid. Being on one skid saves on footprint, and because they arent buying two separate systems, it also saves on capital costs. Operational cost savings can also be had because the systems are optimized to work together. Joy LePree

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