Page 16 - DIVA_1_2013

From seawater

to drinking water

Interview with

Christian Wee

Managing Director, Aqualyng, one of the
leading companies in the world today of desalination

Water and access to water are some of the main concerns of a lot of
countries today. One of the leading companies in the world today
in the field of desalination is Aqualyng, and we had a chance to
meet Mr Wee in Dubai. Now we leave the floor to Mr Wee.

Q. Could you give a brief biogra- the company gets a license to pro- it comes to water supply. Govern-
phical sketch of your company? duce water instead of selling the ments typically start looking into
equipment. The company has its desalination when there has been
Aqualyng was formed in the mid- main focus on the Asia water market. two or three years of drought. If then
1990S and has, since 2002, been the rain comes and reservoirs fill up,
headquartered in Norway. The com- Q. Considering the lack of those plans are scrapped -- until a
pany delivers desalination solu- water in many places in the world, new drought comes. Keeping in mind
tions based upon Reverse Osmosis why has desalination techno- that it takes two years to construct a
Technology, and has its own paten- logy been so little developed? large-scale plant, long-term planning
ted energy recovery system -- the is important.
Recuperator. This system recovers The main reason is the fact that de-
up to 98.5% of the energy from the salination requires energy and, un- Q. When you talk about desa-
desalination process, and has helped fortunately, it is common that where lination, what exactly does it
to reduce the cost of desalination glo- one lacks water one also lacks energy. mean?
bally. The company has installations Historically, desalination has also
There are various types of desalina-
tion. Today, about 70% of all newly
installed capacity is based upon re-
osmosis/membrane-based
verse
desalination. The principle is fairly
simple: you boost seawater up to a
pressure of 40-60 bar, all depending
on the salinity of the seawater, and
the water is then sent through mem-
branes under high pressure. During
this process, about 40% of the water
will come out as fresh water, while
6o% will be returned to the sea --
with all of the salt.

in Egypt, Morocco, Oman, Saudi been expensive, but with new R&D, In addition to the membrane process
Arabia, Spain and Taiwan, as well as better membranes and improved en- itself, you need to add pre-treatment,
Mainland China. ergy recovery, the cost of desalina- energy recovery and post-treatment.
tion is today so low that it is more at- This all has to be tailor-made to
Since 2007, the main focus of the tractive to less-developed countries. the situation based upon the sea-
company has been to become a de- water quality and the water product
veloper of desalination plants on Another reason is that governments required.
a build/own/operate basis, where seem to lack a long-term plan when

14 International