Aquatech International Awarded Desalination Contract for Power Plant in India

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--Aquatech International Corporation (Canonsburg, Pennsylvania) has been awarded the engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) contract to design, build and operate a seawater desalination plant for the 4,000-megawatt (MW) coal-fired power plant owned by Coastal Gujarat Power Limited, a member of the Tata Power Company Limited (BOM:500400) (Mumbai). In addition, Aquatech has also won an operations and maintenance contract for the same project.

The power plant, located in Mundra in Coastal Gujarat, is India's first ultra mega power project and will be India's most efficient power plant, as well as the first private-sector power plant to use supercritical boiler technology in India.

Under the terms of the EPC contract, Aquatech will supply a pre-treatment system consisting of lamella clarifiers to remove solids present in the water to be treated. This will be followed by a two-stage pressure filtration system and a seawater reverse osmosis (SWRO) system, which will consist of 4 streams of SWRO units and 2 streams of brackish water reverse osmosis (BWRO) banks.

The desalination plant, one of the larger such plants planned in India, will have a production capacity of 25,200 cubic meters of desalinated water each day when commissioned in mid-2010. Aquatech plans to have the plant producing up to 12 million liters of water per day by November of this year. Part of the desalinated water will be passed through another BWRO and ion-exchange system to provide water of the high purity required for the boilers.

Clean water is rapidly becoming a strategic resource, not only for drinking, but also for use in modern technological processes such as power production. Water reserves contained in small- to medium-size dams in India at the moment are much less than in previous years because of a poor monsoon season last year. Desalination is a possible solution to future water shortages.

The Indian government set up the National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT) in 1993, which has a desalination group specifically set up to investigate alternative methods of obtaining fresh water, including low temperature thermal desalination. This method uses the temperature difference of deep-sea cold water to condense seawater already evaporated at low pressure and has already been proven at the land-based Kavaratti desalination plant, commissioned in 2005, which delivers 100,000 liters per day of potable water from seawater.

Another project of NIOT is the world's first floating desalination plant located off the coast of Chennai, which has the capacity to deliver up to 1 million liters of water per day with a dissolvable solid proportion of just 10 particles per million (ppm). This compares very favorably with the national standard of 2,000 ppm. The complete plant is located on a floating barge that is 65 meters long and 16 meter wide. Surface ocean water is boiled in a vacuum container and then cooled rapidly by seawater piped up from 600 meters below the surface. This water is three times cooler than the surface water and condenses the steam from the boiled water to produce fresh water.

However, a much larger project, the Minjur desalination plant, designed to produce 100 million liters per day of water, has suffered delays. Last month it was reported that while the 30-kilometer pipeline from Red Hills to Minjur has been completed, the actual desalination plant is yet to be completed. The plant is designed to supply water to the Madhavaram municipality, while a separate 2.5 million-liter tank (already completed) will supply drinking water to Manali.

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