Veolia Water Selected to Help Alleviate Australian Drought

Veolia Water has been selected for two projects in Australia to alleviate the severest drought that the State of Queensland has ever recorded.

The Queensland Government has chosen Veolia Water to accompany it on one of the biggest recycled water infrastructure projects in the southern hemisphere. In addition, the Queensland Government and the Gold Coast City municipality have awarded Veolia Water, in partnership with the John Holland Group, the realization of a major desalination plant.

Both projects form a part of the South East Queensland Regional Water Supply Strategy for effective management of the region's water resources.

"These two contracts illustrate the company's longstanding and far reaching capacity in providing innovative sustainable solutions to one of the world's toughest environmental challenges - sufficient water supply for all from a rare resource,” said Antoine Frérot, Veolia Water's chief executive officer.

For the Western Corridor Recycled Water (WCRW) scheme, Veolia Water will initially provide advice to the Queensland Government for development of all installations and infrastructure, and will then become the operating partner, in an agreement where the terms will soon be defined.

This program, which is a major drought relief initiative of the State Government, will enable water from treatment plants around Brisbane to be recycled and used by industry.

The project, scheduled for completion in 2008, represents a total investment of 1 billion Euros (about US $1,332,599,520) for the State of Queensland.

The project consists of two stages, the first one involves the recycling of wastewater from the sites of Oxley, Wacol, Goodoa and Bundamba, and the second stage includes the recycling of wastewater from Luggage Point and Gibson Island.

The volume of water treated by microfiltration or ultrafiltration, reverse osmosis and UV, will be more than 200,000m3 per day.

The second contract is for the design, construction and operation of a desalination plant for the treatment of seawater using reverse osmosis technology to produce an average of 125,000m3/day of potable water for a population of up to 450,000 residents of the Gold Coast and the South Eastern Region of Queensland.

Veolia Water will keep up the operations and maintenance of the plant for a term of 10 years, with a potential 5-year extension period.

The plant will be in operation late 2008, and full production capacity is scheduled for early 2009. The plant will be located at Tugun, adjacent to the Gold Coast Airport, at the Southern end of the Gold Coast.

Source: Veolia Water