The new brackish water installation encompasses a 50 gallon per minute Nexed system at the Kay Bailey Hutchison Desalination Plant in El Paso, and builds upon the current Evoqua pilot for seawater desalination underway in Tuas, Singapore.
The demonstration will study the economics and value proposition of the Nexed technology in comparison to incumbent reverse osmosis (RO) technology with a focus on higher recovery and lower energy consumption.
The system is expected to be fully operational in June 2017.
“This demonstration is an important and exciting benchmark for the commercially available Nexed system and brackish water desalination technology as a whole,” says James Kohosek, President of Evoqua’s Products and Technologies division. “The partnership between AccelerateH2O, The Center for Inland Desalination Systems at the University of Texas – El Paso, and Evoqua allows some of the leading minds in brackish water desalination to work together for the betterment of all Texas and beyond.”
“Texas is an ideal location in that it faces many of the water challenges that Nexed electrochemical desalination can address, including a high concentration of industries which present applications that the Nexed system can address, such as power generation; food and beverage; agriculture; oil and gas; produced water; municipal desalination; and wastewater reuse,” reports Richard Seline, AccelerateH2O Executive Director.
Nexed modules are already employed in a desalination demonstration facility for seawater desalination in Tuas, Singapore, that will expand to 500,000 gallons of desalinated water a day. Evoqua is working with PUB, Singapore’s national water agency, with support from the Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB), through the TechPioneer piloting programme.
Evoqua has also completed a brackish water pilot with the US Bureau of Reclamation and the Brackish Groundwater Desalination Research in New Mexico.
How Nexed modules work
Electrodialysis is a membrane process in which ions are transported through selective ion permeable membranes from one solution to another under the influence of an electrical potential gradient. Alternating ion selective membranes (anionic and cationic) can be configured to create separated streams of purified and concentrated water.
