Water Supply & Municipal Wastewater Management

 

Challenges:

Water supply and wastewater management sector is a

resilient market due to strong fundamental drivers

such as worsening water scarcity and increasing

industrial water demand. Desalination and water reuse

is a core component of this sector and high on the

agenda in China, USA, and many water distressed

regions such as MENA. Therefore, the businesses that

can position themselves to capitalise on these high

growth markets continue to enjoy plenty of project

opportunities. The same drivers are also increasing

interest in brine treatment technologies that can reduce environmental impact while benefitting from values generated from this wasted resource.

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Climate change has highlighted the realities of the elevated carbon footprint of desalination wastewater treatment systems which has so far neglected including the footprint of brine discharge as part of life cycle assessment of water products from desalination and other supply systems.  

 

Whilst desalination is expected to reach up to 8.1% year-on-year growth, reaching 5.1 million cubic metres per day of additional contracted capacity in 2021 the main obstacles for seawater desalination industry, are carbon footprint, marine impact, and its pricing outside the GCC region due to high costs of conventional energy. For inland brackish water desalination, the main obstacle is brine disposal.

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Our Capabilities:

We draw from over 35 years of technical, market, and product recovery expertise of our Lead Technologist Dr. Aharon Arakel, and our advisor Dr. Michael Mickley, to offer unique and sustainable technology-based solutions to cater for desalination based water production and wastewater management industries. While our solutions can include one, or many needs of this major industry, the followings represent the key capabilities that we offer in general:

 

• High level and detailed techno-economic studies leading to systematic evaluation options for generation of VAPs from waste streams of water supply and wastewater treatment plants

• Life cycle and embodied carbon evaluations followed by definition of the options for technology-based solutions for reduction of carbon footprint of saline waste streams from a variety of sources, including inland and seawater desalination processes, and municipal wastewater treatment plants

• Design and preliminary costing of waste minimisation processes via product recovery, specifically from reject brine of desalination plants, associated with water production, integrated water/energy generation, and renewable energy (geothermal, solar, hydrogen) generation

• Selective recovery of high value salts using our proprietary technology platform

• Advice on ZLD options for brine management through recovery of VAPs and additional water

• Advice on application of negative emission technologies (NET) to a desalination plant using  reject brine as a resource to capture and remove  CO2 using solar energy

• Optimisation of mineral recovery processes from reject brines for post-treatment usage

• Options for waste reduction from chemical waste streams generated by municipal water treatment processes and related techno-economic analysis

• Technology-based solution for reduction of evaporative loss of water in water and wastewater retention ponds