Water Desalination ReporT

Tom Pankratz, Editor, P.O. Box 75064, Houston, Texas 77234-5064 USATelephone: +1-281-857-6571, www.desalination.com/wdr, email: tp@globalwaterintel.com

© 2015 Media Analytics. Published in cooperation with Global Water Intelligence.

Volume 51, Number 36

The international weekly for desalination and advanced water treatment since 196514 September 2015

CompanyFast-track answers to large-size problemsFor most of its past 24 years, Osmoflo focused on the equipment supply and EPC side of the desal and membrane filtration business. However, as its list of installations grew, so did its operating services capabilities, which sparked the development of PlantConnect, its proprietary remote monitoring and control system that enables the Adelaide-based company to operate installations all across Australia, including its isolated Outback.

According to Marc Fabig, Osmoflo’s president and CEO, that’s all changed. “For a long time, the US’s mobile RO market was unique. But over the past ten years, we’ve seen a dramatic growth in the market for addressing emergency and short-term water needs in the rest of the world. Breakdowns, demand growth, unplanned maintenance, changes in water quality and natural disasters all require fast-track solutions, and our mobile business has really taken off,” said Fabig.

“We now have over 100 containerized assets and many more skid-mounted units that are available for immediate shipment. The company now has mobile units in operation in Australia, Southeast Asia, South America and the Middle East.”

Osmoflo’s mobile fleet—which has been branded ‘Desal Now’—does not just consist of small, single container units; it also includes large-capacity systems, many of which are skid-mounted:

• 20,000 m3/d (5.3 MGD) BWRO• 28,000 m3/d (7.4 MGD) UF/SWRO• 37,000 m3/d (9.8 MGD) Multimedia filters/SWRO• 56,000 m3/d (14.8 MGD) SWRO• 90,000 m3/d (24 MGD) Multimedia filtration• 100,000 m3/d (26.5 MGD) UF (seawater service)• 150,000 m3/d (39.6 MGD) UF (seawater service)

Bobby Watson, the manager of Osmoflo’s rental and special projects business, said, “The larger systems can usually be shipped in a few weeks and installed in a few months, which can reduce a typical project schedule by up to a full year.”

The units are all equipped with PlantConnect monitoring and control, and Osmoflo can include installation and startup services. Fabig said that a range of project delivery options

can be provided, ranging from a conventional equipment sale to leasing to rent-to-own.

Fast-track SWRO: It’s not just for small systems anymore

“Having these large-scale systems sitting on the shelf is unique in this industry. And after all of our years in this business, the rental/mobile business is the most fun and satisfying: it’s fast and furious and solves problems that people really seem to appreciate,” noted Fabig.

Company newsChemical dosing software released“Our industry has come a long way in the last fifty years, but many people still rely on outdated information when designing or operating RO systems,” Avista Technologies’ president Dave Walker told WDR at the recent IDA Congress in San Diego. “We continue to see people rely on silica solubility curves that were chosen—often somewhat arbitrarily—by the DuPont engineers for their now-discontinued hollow-fiber membranes in the 1980s.”

Walker predicts that AdvisorCi, his company’s new chemical dosing software, which was released at the conference, will do a lot to change the way RO systems are designed and operated.

The proprietary software program calculates a feedwater’s saturation potential based on the free concentration of ions, overcoming a critical weakness in contemporary indices that typically include bonded ions. It uses new ion dosing curves and considers reaction rates to accurately predict the

Page 3WATER DESALINATION REPORT – 14 September 2015

Environment & Sustainability categoryTroy Walker (Hazen & Sawyer) “Safety & Reliability of direct potable reuse using the critical control point of methodology”

Young Leaders Program categoryJohanna Ludwig (akvola Technologies)“Ceramic membrane treatment for saline water reuse in a large marine aquarium”

Emerging Leader award (sponsored by ARWADEX)Prakash Govindan (Gradiant)

The flowing people were selected to receive $500 cash awards in the categories indicated by the conference delegates:Most Appreciated Presenter categoryJaichander Swaminathan, MITExperimental Investigation of High Efficiency Single-stage Membrane Distillation Configurations

Most Appreciated Poster categoryDavid Martin Warsinger, MITEffect of Filtration & Particulate Fouling in MD

Most Appreciated Moderator categoryDr Heike GladeSession 24 – Thermal Desal: Membrane Distillation

In briefGermany’s Lanxess has provided 630 of its Lewabrane membranes for Slovnaft’s oil refinery in Bratislava, Slovakia. The pretreatment system for the 3,240 m3/d (0.86 MGD) BWRO plant includes coagulation, flocculation and ultrafiltration prior to desalting water from the Danube River, which contains a TDS ranging from 320-400 mg/L. The system operates at an 85 percent recovery and reduces the feedwater conductivity from 580 μS/cm to less than 10 μS/cm, prior to mixed bed ion exchange demineralization. The system has been operational since December 2014.

The Netherlands-based Voltea and California-based Atlantis Technologies have reached a supply and licensing agreement that enables Atlantis to utilize Voltea’s membrane technology in the construction of their capacitive deionization devices. This partnership represents a step forward in the expansion of CapDI technology, and became effective on 1 September.

Dow Water & Process Solutions celebrated the company’s 30th anniversary in the RO industry last month. In August 1985, Dow Chemical Company acquired FilmTec, a firm that was started in September 1977 by several people from North Star Research Institute, a Minneapolis facility.

IDA World Congress AwardsThe following people were selected to receive $5,000 cash awards, which were presented by the IDA election committee chaired by Guillaume Clairet (H2O Innovation), and presented at the World Congress’ closing luncheon:State of the Art categoryGlen Byrne (Rolled Alloys) “Stray Current Corrosion in SWRO systems”Innovation categoryBart Nelemans (Aquastill)“New Module design for membrane distillation”R&D categoryJim Lozier (CH2M)“Innovative, membrane-based treatment method for brines from coal seam gas production”

100%

80%

60%

40%

20%

0%

MediumPlants

MediumPlants

MediumPlants

LargePlants

LargePlants

LargePlants

SmallPlants

SmallPlantsSmall

PlantsMedium

Municipal Drinking WaterIndustrial WW ReuseSWRO Pretreat

Membrane FiltrationOne highly regarded paper presented at the IDA World Congress was Dr Graeme Pearce’s paper reviewing trends in the membrane filtration pretreatment market. Pearce, the director of Membrane Consultancy Associates, examined the 5,500 references from the 15 leading international suppliers spanning the industry’s 30-year history.This graph, below, analyzes flow categories for Small (<10MLD; 2.5 MGD), Medium (10-50 MLD; 2.5-13 MGD) and Large (>50 MLD; 13 GD) plants where the width of the column represents the relative value of the application and the height of the sub-segment represents the relative importance of the different plant sizes.As expected, small plants are more important in industrial and large plants in SWRO pretreatment. Municipal drinking water and wastewater reuse are broadly balanced between the importance of the different plant sizes. MF/UF is used for RO pretreatment for all of the SWRO segment and for the majority of the industrial water segment, which is dominated by small projects. It is also used for a high proportion of reuse projects.

Rate for one year: £305 or US$550. Subscribe and renew online at: www.desalination.com/wdr Reproduction or electronic distribution is forbidden. Subscribers may circulate their copy on their immediate premises. To email or create additional

copies for other office locations, contact Ekaterina Edmondson (ee@globalwaterintel.com) to arrange a site license.

Page 4WATER DESALINATION REPORT – 14 September 2015

The City of Santa Barbara has issued IDE Technologies a Notice to Proceed with its DBO contract to reactivate the 3,125 AFY (10,560 m3/d) Charles Meyer SWRO plant. The 406-calendar day schedule extends to 7 October 2016.

The Water Environment Federation will hold its 88th Annual WEFTEC Technical Conference and Exhibition in Chicago, Illinois, on 26-30 September. For more information, visit http://mydigimag.rrd.com/publication/?i=259763.

Osmoflo has won a DBO contract to supply a 1,000 m3/d (0.26 MGD) MF/RO plant for Santos to support its Narrabi Gas Plant in northwest NSW, Australia. The plant will treat produced water from coal seam gas operations having a blended RO feedwater salinity of 17,000 to 36,000 mg/L. The system will include Osmoflo’s Brine Squeezer technology, which will recover 35 to 45 percent of additional water from the RO concentrate stream. The contract includes three years of operations and maintenance, which may be extended to five years.

PeopleEric Seo has joined Water Planet, Inc. as a product development engineer where his primary role will be the PolyCera membrane product research and development. Formerly an environmental engineer for Smith and Emery Environmental and Geo-Service. He will be based in the Los Angeles area and may be contacted at Erics@waterplanet.com.

After working for Shell as a process engineer in New Orleans for the past three years, Catalina Reyna is available to consider other options. Her previous experience includes 15 years with Veolia/USFilter as a senior applications and sales engineer in addition to prior positions with Degrémont de Mexico and Aqua Sistemas. She has an MS from the UK’s Loughborough University of Technology, a BS from Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana in Mexico and can speak English, Spanish and French. She may be contacted at catalina.reynaruiz@gmail.com.

Mohammad Tanhaemami has earned an MS degree in Chemical Engineering from New Mexico State University following a graduate assistantship during which he completed research work on microbial desalination cells that was conducted in collaboration with the US Bureau of Reclamation. He is currently looking for an engineering position and is available for immediate relocation. He may be contacted at mtanhaem@nmsu.edu.

California-based Biwater introduced an open plat-form UF rack system at the IDA World Congress. Biwater’s Richard White told WDR that the rack accommodates a variety of different UF modules by changing the port connecting spools while its controls package accommodates the opera-tions required by various manufacturers.

PUB, Singapore’s national water agency, has contracted Mitsubishi to build a demonstration-scale Integrated Validation Plant to test the technologies that could potentially be implemented at the future Tuas Water Reclamation Plant (WRP). The demo plant, which is aimed at enhancing cost savings and energy efficiency, will have a capacity of 12,500 m3/d (3.3 MGD) and will be constructed at PUB’s Ulu Pandan WRP. The plant will also serve as an operators training ground and to validate parameters for optimum water reclamation. The facility is slated for February 2017 completion.

It has been reported that Seqwater, Queensland’s water agency, could permanently reactivate the Gold Coast seawater desalination plant in Tugun, Australia, due to the region’s steady growth. For the most part, the 125,000 m3/d (33 MGD) SWRO plant has been operated at a minimum continuous capacity of 44,000 m3/d (11.6 MGD) during 2009 and 2010, and was placed in ‘hot standby’ in 2011. For the next six weeks, it will reportedly operate at 44,000 m3/d or more to meet the current demand.

The Southwest Membrane Operator Association (SWMOA) will hold a workshop entitled “Recycling with MBR” in Irvine, California, on 10 November. For more information, visit http://tinyurl.com/ocyjsja.