Dow Water & Process Solutions, a business unit of The Dow Chemical Company, announced that the company’s FILMTEC reverse osmosis (RO) elements have been selected for the new Southern Seawater Desalination Plant (SSDP) outside Perth, Australia. The SSDP will use SWRO 440-series DOW FILMTEC elements in a two-pass RO system for seawater and brackish water, producing 50 billion liters of drinking water annually with the capacity to expand to 100 billion liters per year.
SSDP will be the second major seawater desalination plant in Western Australia, a state with inland reservoirs that contain one quarter of the water available 30 years ago. By 2031, Perth expects to need an additional 150 billion liters of water to meet population demands.
“The new Southern Seawater Desalination Plant will utilize 440 sq ft DOW FILMTEC membrane elements,” said Kai-Uwe Hoehn, senior account manager for large projects, Dow Water & Process Solutions. “This project is also utilizing a combination of advanced design features--internally staged design and a permeate split--to maximize performance of the desalination technologies.”
Currently, the Perth Seawater Desalination Plant located off of the coast of Cockburn Sound provides 17% of Perth’s water needs. At the completion of the Southern Seawater Desalination Plant project in late 2011, more than 30% of Western Australia’s water supply will come from climate independent sources like desalination, according to Dow.
Construction of the plant began in July 2009, and, upon completion, an ocean monitoring program will analyze the plant’s seawater discharge to ensure the ongoing health of marine environments.
Source: Dow Water & Process Solutions
