Aquatech wins seawater desal project in India

Canonsburg, Penn.-based Aquatech International said today it won a contract to design, build and operate one of the largest desalination plants in India.

Aquatech plans to pre-treat the seawater using lamella clarifiers and a two-stage pressure filtration. Then, four streams of seawater reverse osmosis banks are followed by two banks of brackish water reverse osmosis.

The Gujarat project is expected to produce 12 million liters (3.17 million U.S. gallons) per day of desalinated water by November 2009. When fully commissioned in mid-2010, the plant is expected to produce 25.2 million liters per day for various applications.

Part of the water is expected to be used for a 4-gigawatt coal-fired power plant being built by Coastal Gujarat Power, a subsidiary of Mumbai-based Tata Power, which is part of the Tata Group. The project is considered India's first ultra-mega power project and is expected to be the most energy-efficient coal plant in the country.

According to the World Bank, roughly 40 percent of residences in India are without electricity, and blackouts are common in cities with access to the electric grid (see India readies for shift away from oil).

As India's largest private power utility, Tata Power has an installed generation capacity of 2.3 GW, and is aggressively pursuing solar, wind and geothermal in addition to this 4 GW coal plant (see Tata Power plans geothermal, solar for Gujarat).

The project is India's first private sector power project using supercritical boiler technology, which will employ the high purity water from the desalination process.

Aquatech is an original equipment manufacturer of industrial water and wastewater treatment systems, and a supplier of water management services.