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hen apartheid crumbled in 1994, an estimated 14 million South Africans lacked access to a formal water supply and about half the country – some 21 million people – had no formal sanitation, according to the Department of Water Affairs. Since then, access to water has increased dramatically, but backlogs persist. At least 26 towns in the Free State, for instance, currently have no water at all in certain areas, water supply disruptions, or extremely unhygienic water coming from their taps. Water problems in these towns are mainly being caused through water treatment plants and pipes that are dilapidated while some dams are completely dry. Now, as that sinks in, this is a great point at which to introduce NuWater, a specialist provider of solutions and services for the treatment, reclamation and re-use of wastewater (and the desalination of sea and brackish water). NuWater can pretty much do it all and a central part of its offering is based on Reverse Osmosis (RO), the technology of choice for large-scale desalination applications, be that desalination of seawater or wastewater containing high levels of dissolved salts. “We service our two main geographical markets of sub-Saharan Africa and South-East Asia from our offices in Cape Town and Singapore,” says NuWater’s Michael Avant-Smith, who explains that the firm was established in 2010 following the acquisition of the GrahamTek largediameter RO technology patents and intellectual property. Since then the company has secured a number of significant projects, specifically in the mining sector. “We are continuing to develop large-scale wastewater reclamation and seawater desalination projects in a number of countries in Asia and Africa based on our 16” RO technology and our
successful projects in Singapore,” says Avant-Smith. More recently NuWater has similarly pioneered completely modular largecapacity wastewater reclamation and seawater desalination plants based on its 16” RO technology. These plants are extremely compact, rapidly deployable and where necessary re-deployable. “These new ‘modular & mobile’ plant designs are based on the technologies and learning’s in use in our more conventional Singapore plants but are engineered with a very different mindset – one that prioritises speed of deployment and flexibility,” Avant-Smith says. In addition to confirming the technical feasibility of large-scale completely modular and re-deployable plants, Nuwater has also taken the opportunity to prove that such plants present the opportunity for commercially viable shorter-term ‘own & operate’ models. In late 2010 Anglo American awarded NuWater a contract to treat up to 20 million litres per day (MLD) of mine wastewater at it New Vaal Colliery near Johannesburg. Counter-intuitively the issue at the mine was that they had too much water on site, were unable to store this water, and therefore needed to get rid of the water back into the environment. The nature of this wastewater, pumped from the coal pits, however made it unsuitable for either discharge into the adjacent river or reuse as industrial process water. Suspended solids and dissolved salts in the wastewater therefore needed to be removed first. “We were able to offer a complete service where the mine paid for the water treatment rather than investing in capital equipment and taking on the associated technology risk. While this ‘Build, Own and Operate’ model is not uncommon for conventional infrastructure with 15 or 20 year Continued
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