For the last several years, the Port of Corpus Christi has been laying the groundwork to bring a seawater desalination facility to Harbor Island. However, they don’t intend to own it.
It was certainly a positive change, thanks to a desalination plant that started operating in August, five years after construction began in 2019, with a US$ 61,000 investment by the Granma Provincial Delegation of Hydraulic Resources.
A consortium of Neom subsidiary Enowa, Japan’s Itochu and France’s Veolia signed a JDA for the scheme in December 2022, approximately six months after they signed a memorandum of understanding to develop the renewable-energy powered advanced seawater reverse osmosis project in Oxagon, Neom’s industrial cluster.
The scope of the JDA covers the first phase of the project with a desalination plant that can produce 500,000 cubic metres a day (cm/d) of desalinated water by 2030.
This in turn has resulted in business opportunities for companies providing desalination technologies and services.
In June, Namibia – which was facing its worst drought in over a century – said it would start constructing its long-awaited second desalination plant in January 2025
OSMOSUN installed an OSMOSUN 6 BW plant capable of producing up to 140 million cubic metres of freshwater per day. The water is drawn from underground reserves of brackish water. After treatment, it is used to irrigate 31 hectares of fig, pomegranate and carob tree plantations, as well as plants such as geraniums and rosemary. Maintenance of the installation will be carried out by the OSMOSUN Morocco teams.
The two awarded lots include the management of the Santa Eulària and San Antonio desalination plants, as well as the management of the Ibiza Town desalination plant and the system that connects the three plants, consisting of an island interconnection network with 74 kilometers of pipelines.
Los Pelambres is pioneering the use of desalinated water in an area of Chile that has endured a 15-year drought, depleting reservoirs and raising concerns about freshwater availability. Chilean President Gabriel Boric commended the initiative, emphasizing the worrisome situation in the Coquimbo region, where Los Pelambres is situated.
The Toukley Desalination Water Treatment Plant project is a planning project as part of our commitment to be ‘plan ready’ in continuing to deliver safe and secure drinking water in response a potential severe and prolonged drought in the future.
Located in the heart of the South Pacific, the Republic of Vanuatu is an archipelago-state of 83 islands, most of which are volcanic in origin. Water insecurity is exacerbated by rainfall patterns that have become unpredictable because of climate change. The freshwater resources traditionally used – rainwater harvesting and wells – can no longer guarantee year-round access to drinking water. Desalination units have already been installed in the past, but these, operating via fossil-fuel powered generators, are proving unsatisfactory from an environmental point of view and very energy-intensive, with prohibitive costs for the community.
The proposal is to build and operate a desalination plant, including a seawater extraction pipeline at either Pebbly Beach or Jenny Dixon Beach, needing a pipeline at least two kilometres in length.
