Water desalination report 30 january 2012

1. Water Desalination ReporT
California
Carlsbad ‘final’ schedule taking shape
Last week, San Diego County Water Authority’s staff told
its Board of Directors that it was making progress towards
finalizing a draft agreement with Poseidon Resources to pur-
chase water from the Carlsbad Desal Project. Ken Weinberg,
the Authority’s Director of Water Resources, said he expects
that a draft water purchase agreement (WPA) will be released
to member agencies and the public this spring. The agencies
will then have 60 days to review the agreement and declare
how much of the 50 MGD (189,250 m3
/d) of desalted water
they intend to purchase.
In November 2011, the Water Authority and Poseidon began
direct negotiations on the draft WPA, and Poseidon is now
reviewing a second draft of the agreement. The parties plan
to have their next negotiating session in mid-February. At
least two public workshops, which could take place in May
and June, will be part of the review process, and the WPA
could be presented to the board for consideration at its June
or July board meetings.
The Water Authority staff and consultants are also conduct-
ing a due diligence review of financial and other project
documents as part of the project’s bond rating process, in-
cluding the following agreements between Poseidon and its
contractors:
• An agreement between Poseidon and a Kiewit In-
frastructure–JF Shea Construction joint venture to
construct the facility and conveyance pipeline,
• An agreement between the joint venture and IDE
Technologies to design the desal plant, and,
• An agreement between Poseidon and IDE to operate
the plant.
At last week’s meeting, the Board also agreed to approve
consultant contract amendments and to increase its current
budget from $2 million to $4.8 million to reflect the current
WPA negotiations.
The project’s current cost of water is estimated at $1,865/
AF ($1.51/m3
; $5.72/kgal) and its capital cost is estimated
at $780 million.
If the Water Authority approves the WPA this summer, de-
salted water from the Carlsbad project should be available
by 2016 – 18 years after Poseidon began to develop the proj-
ect – and will comprise seven percent of the total regional
supply.
Tom Pankratz, Editor, P.O. Box 75064, Houston, Texas 77234-5064 USA
Telephone: +1-281-857-6571, www.waterdesalreport.com, email: tp@globalwaterintel.com
© 2012 Media Analytics. Published in cooperation with Global Water Intelligence.
30 January 2012Volume 48, Number 4
The international weekly for desalination and advanced water treatment since 1965
Energy
Desal and Renewable Energy
Two years ago, during a Tehran desal conference, an Iranian
television station aired a live panel discussion in which the
country’s desal future was being discussed. The moderator
asked all of the usual questions about the energy efficiency
of various desal processes and the potential improvements
that lay ahead.
Then, unexpectedly, the Iranian moderator turned to your
correspondent, who was one of the two panel members,
and asked, “Don’t you agree that our country’s need for
desalinated water could be effectively developed and
integrated along with a nuclear power program?” The
response seemed to satisfy the interviewer: “As desalters, we
are concerned with how to best remove salt from water. We
are more concerned with minimizing energy consumption
than where it comes from. After the power people advise
us of quality and quantity of energy available, we can then
decide how it can best be used.”
In retrospect, it was not only accurate, it was also the safest
answer. The same answer could be used today when a
desalter is asked, “What is the best renewable energy (RE)
system for use with desalination?” However, it is becoming
increasingly obvious that RE will play a key role in the
future of both brackish and seawater desal – Saudi Arabia
has said that it would like to convert all of its seawater desal
plants to RE by 2019 – and desalters will have to become
more conversant in the various RE options.
Recently, at the 56th
Annual New Mexico Water Conference,
the New Mexico Water Resources Research Institute and the
Desalination.com launched
Desalters have a new online resource and WDR has a new
internet home: Desalination.com.
Please watch for an email later this week which will have
important news about your password and access.
Whether you’re a subscriber who wants to search back issues,
a plant operator looking for a career change, a student writing
a paper on desal’s history or a purchasing agent looking for
a new membrane manufacturer, you will be able to find the
answer at Desalination.com.
Have patience while we make the transition to this new
address. In the meantime, you can still access WDR at www.
waterdesalreport.com.

2. Richard White, Biwater’s project engineering manager, told
WDR that the firm had been pre-qualified by AECOM, the
owner’s engineer, and the selection was made by Ortega
Industrial Contractors, the general contractor constructing
the facility.
According to White, the two-train BWRO system will be part
of a water treatment plant that reclaims 2.45 MGD (9,273
m3
/d) of surface runoff water and demineralizer wastewater
from an existing pond on the WTE site. The pond water,
which has a TDS of 1,900-3,300 mg/L, is pretreated using
coagulation, clarification and microfiltration, before being
introduced to a 60,000 g (227 m3
) break tank.
From the break tank, 2.2 MGD (8,327 m3
/d) of pretreated
water undergoes cartridge filtration before it is fed to
Biwater’s two-train RO. The three-stage system is configured
in a 16:8:4 vessel array with seven elements per vessel,
although provisions have been made for future expansion
to a 20:10:5 arrangement. Each train is fed by a dedicated
high-pressure feed pump and two inter-stage booster pumps,
and designed at a minimum system recovery of 87 percent.
Approximately 0.3 MGD (1,135 m3
/d) of the 50 mg/L TDS
permeate will be used directly for boiler feedwater, while the
remaining 1.6 MGD (6,056 m3
/d) will be blended with 0.55
MGD (2,082 m3
/d) of pretreated water from the break tank
for use in the cooling towers. The RO concentrate will be
discharged to the sewer.
Plans currently call for the system to be commissioned in
March 2013.
Morocco
EPC contractor selected for BWRO
Italy’s OSMO Sistemi has been selected to supply a 17,280
m3
/d (4.6 MGD) BWRO system for Office National de l’Eau
Potable’s (ONEP) Dakhla project in southern Morocco.
Negotiations for the MAD100 million ($11.8 million) EPC
project – which was initially planned as a SWRO before
ONEP switched to a brackish groundwater source – are
nearing completion, and the project should be awarded by
mid-February.
Evangelos Kantilaftis, OSMO Sistemi’s managing director,
toldWDRthatthefeedwaterforthetwo-trainsystemwillhave
a TDS of approximately 2,500 mg/L, and the pretreatment
system will include ammonium and H2
S removal in addition
to sand filtration. Commissioning is expected to take place
in mid-2013.
OSMO Sistemi is a member of the Cyprus-based
Caramondani Group.
Page 2 WATER DESALINATION REPORT – 30 January 2012
Bureau of Reclamation brought desal experts from around
the world to Alamogordo to discuss ways to advance desal
projects employing RE and to develop research projects and
potential collaboration opportunities.
Last November, CambridgeIP released a patent landscape
report prepared for the World Intellectual Property Organ-
ization entitled Desalination Technologies and the Use
of Alternative Energies. The report notes that progress is
being made in advancing the integration of desal and RE
sources, and that continued development and deployment of
desal technologies powered by RE sources could provide a
more affordable fresh water source for both developed and
developing countries now under threat of water shortages.
The report shows that the growth in the number of desal/RE
patent applications and patent families – i.e., multiple patents
in more than one country protecting the same technology or
invention – has grown from a total of about 800 in 1980 to
more than 4,550 in 2011. Although the number of patents
is not an indication of an RE technology’s desal integration
suitability, it does provide some insight into the potential
relevance based on the level of research activity.
Last week, the World Bank held an internal workshop to
review a draft of a new report on the integration of RE with
desal as an emerging solution to close the growing water
gap in 21 Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries.
The report was prepared by a team led by Bekele Debele
Negewo, a senior water resources specialist in the World
Bank’s MENA region.
According to Dr Debele, “Simply put, there is not enough
freshwater to maintain MENA’s economic growth. The
region’s water deficit will grow to 200 billion m3
/y by
2050 and closing this estimated $104 billion deficit will
be challenging. Demand management should be the first
priority. However, desalination will remain important in
MENA, and RE should be part of the energy mix to ensure
its sustainability.”
That logic is universally applicable.
Florida
Waste-to-energy plant will get RO
Biwater AEWT has been selected to supply a 2 MGD (7,570
m3
/d) BWRO system at Pinellas County Utilities’ waste-to-
energy (WTE) facility in St Petersburg, Florida. The solid
waste facility will use the RO system to treat water from an
existing pond for use as boiler and cooling tower makeup
water at the WTE facility, which processes about one million
tons of garbage every year, producing up to 60 MW of
electricity for distribution within the nearby community.

3. Page 3WATER DESALINATION REPORT – 30 January 2012
“Although the plants employ all of the energy efficiency
features of a modern, state-of-the-art SWRO plant, the main
goal of TAOZ operation is to minimize energy cost, not the
specific energy required per cubic meter of water produced,”
said Egozy.
Building a desal plant based on a load and time variable
electricity tariff is more expensive than building one that
operates at a flat capacity because there are many hours when
the plant’s production capacity is only partially utilized.
Plant production can be reduced dramatically, twice a day
and by up to 60 percent within a half hour time period. This
requires changing recovery ratios, feed flow rates, pressures,
fluxes, chemical dosing and more.
While this type of operation is complicated, it does reduce
equipment wear, shortens startup times, saves water for
flushing and shortens the time to stabilize the process and
water quality after the change. It is also the only way that
one can imagine achieving a total water cost of $0.585/m3
($2.21/kgal).
Metrics
Consistently inconsistent
For new readers and those regular readers who may be
mystified by WDR’s use of various units of measure in our
stories, we offer the following explanation:
Nothing illustrates the local complexion of the global desal
market more than the units used to measure a facility’s
production capacity. The primary units of measure used in a
WDR article are those used by the facility that is the subject
of the article itself, or those commonly used in the region in
which the facility is located.
The most frequently used and universally understood unit
used to measure water volume is the cubic meter (m3
).
Conveniently, a cubic meter of water weighs one metric ton.
The term many Australasian countries use to measure water
volume is the megaliter (ML), which equals one million
liters, or one thousand cubic meters.
Americans measure water volume using the US gallon, and
plant capacity is described in terms of million gallons per
day (MGD). However, many Western US states rely on the
acre-foot (ac-ft, or AF), a unit used in agriculture to describe
the volume of water that would cover a one-acre area to a
depth of one foot.
Many Middle Eastern countries measure desal plant output
in million Imperial gallons per day (MIGD), where one
Imperial gallon is 20 percent greater than a US gallon.
Israel
flexibility offsets high energy costs
All large-scale SWRO plants installed in Israel have been
designed with hourly peak production capabilities that are
much higher than their nominal capacities would indicate.
The Sorek plant, profiled in last week’s WDR, is one example.
Sorek’s production capacity is generally referred to as being
150 million m3
/y. This equates to an average of 411,000
m3
/d (108.5 MGD), or 17,125 m3
/hr (4.5 Mgph). However,
the plant actually has a maximum production capability of
26,000 m3
/hr (6.9 Mgph), which equates to 624,000 m3
/d
(164.9 MGD), or 227.8 million m3
/y.
The 51 percent increase in Sorek’s maximum production
capacity over its contracted production is necessary due to
the country’s seasonal fluctuation in water demand, and this
also allows plants to reduce production during the day, when
electricity tariffs are at their highest, and increase production
during nighttime, off-peak periods when electricity tariffs
are significantly lower.
IDE’s Yaron Egozy told WDR that the monthly/bimonthly
production quantities differ from month to month because
the summer production requirements are much higher than
the winter requirements.
“The daily production quantities change from day to day and
are limited within minimum and maximum boundaries. The
hourly production also changes from hour to hour based on
Israel Electric Company’s load and time variable electricity
tariff [TAOZ]. According to this tariff plan, shown below,
there are three different levels of electricity costs, depending
on the time of day: a peak, shoulder and base tariff.
“The changing electricity prices dictate the hourly production
capacity, and our plant designs are based on two modes of
operation: maximum water production at low electricity
rates and minimum water production at high electricity rates.
US$perkWh
0.05
0.11
0.16
0.21
0.27
0.32
0.06
0.070.08
0.10
0.14
0.24
0.26
0.10
0.06
Spring-Autumn Winter
Peak Tariff
Shoulder Tariff
Base Tariff
Summer
Electricity Prices at Variable Tariffs

4. The use of the various units is further complicated when
projects are delivered on a BOO or BOT basis and a plant’s
production capacity is expressed on a per-year, rather than
per-day or per-hour basis. When projects are described in
terms of million cubic meters per year (MCM/y) – or when
US plants are referred to in terms of acre-feet per year
(AFY) – the volumes do not reflect the actual production
capacity of a plant, but rather, the amount of water the plant
has been contracted to furnish over the course of the year;
the actual production capacity is usually significantly higher
(see “Energy Cost” story, this issue).
In most WDR articles, a secondary unit is routinely included,
parenthetically, as a reference. Some frequently used
volumetric units and their conversions are:
• 1 cubic meter = 264.2 US gallons, or 1,000 liters
• 1 US gallon = 3.785 liters
• 1 Imperial gallon = 1.2 US gallons, or 4.546 liters
• 1 acre-foot = 325,900 US gallons, or 1,233.6 m3
• 1 megaliter (ML) = 1,000 cubic meters
• 1 gigaliter (GL) = 1 million m3
• 100 million m3
/y = 72.4 MGD (avg)
• 1 MGD = 1,120 acre-feet/year (AFY)
• 1 gigaliter = 1,000,000 cubic meters
Texas
Desal advocacy group formed
Prompted by the state’s recent drought and the resulting water
shortages, desal boosters have formed the Texas Desalination
Association (TDA), a non-profit trade organization that will
focus on developing mechanisms for making desalination
more accessible.
Kyle Frazier, an agent for the group, told WDR that the
Austin-based organization will advocate on behalf of desal
technology before the Texas Legislature and regulatory
agencies and will work to streamline the regulatory process.
“We will bring together experts in desal technology with
those who need new sources of water,” he said.
The TDA is now finalizing the organization’s by-laws and
establishing a nine-member board of directors. Membership
is open to public utilities, municipalities, desal companies
and technologists, academics and private citizens.
For more information, contact Kyle Frazier at jkf1@texas.
net. The website, www.TexasDesal.org, should be online
later this week.
In brief
New York’s Department of Environmental Conservation
(DEC) has accepted United Water’s Draft Environmental
Impact Statement (DEIS) for the proposed 7.5 MGD (28,385
m3
/d) Haverstraw Desalination Plant as complete. Public
hearings are scheduled for 28 February and, last week, the
DEC agreed to extend the public comment period by an
additional month, to 18 April. United Water has conducted
a one-year pilot study at the plant site in Haverstraw, on the
Hudson River’s western shore, 35 miles north of New York
City. The plant is planned to be operational in 2015.
Earlier this month, the Environment Agency-Abu Dhabi
(EAD) announced that it had completed the construction
of 22 solar-powered BWRO plants across the Emirate.
Each unit consists of 300m2
(3,230 ft2
) of solar panels that
generate approximately 35 kWh to produce 30 m3
/d (8,000
GPD) of fresh water. The pilot project is intended to provide
findings that will help reduce the capital cost and increase
the efficiency of future units.
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Page 4WATER DESALINATION REPORT – 30 January 2012
The NationalWaterResearch Institute (NWRI) will accept
nominations for its 19th Annual Athalie Richardson Irvine
Clarke Prize for excellence in water research. The Prize is
awarded to individuals contributing towards the discovery,
development, improvement and/or understanding of the
issues associated with water quality, quantity, technology or
public policy. Last year’s recipient was Duke University’s
Mark Wiesner. Nomination procedures are available at:
www.nwri-usa.org/nominations.htm.
Zulal Water Technology’s Tripoli office has announced that
it has resumed full operations in Libya. The company said
that it has already restored water and wastewater operations
for a major oil company and has received an order to supply
emergency water at another oil production facility.
NanoH2O has released Version 1.2 of its Q+ membrane
projection software. The new version provides an option for
permeate split flow calculations and the ability to convert
the results report into PDF formats. The software can be
downloaded at www.nanoh2o.com/software-tools.
A Solar-powered BWRO Plant