Energy Recovery announced $15 million in contracts to supply its PX® Pressure Exchanger® energy recovery devices to seawater reverse osmosis (SWRO) desalination plants in India. All orders are expected to ship in 2024.
All together, these plants will provide over 670,000 cubic meters of clean drinking water to communities in India each day. As one of the most water stressed countries in the world, India continues to invest in desalination projects in order to supplement its freshwater supply. The country is home to 18% of the world’s population but has only 4% of the world’s water resources.
“India continues to face threats to its water supply on numerous levels including climate change, increasing demand for municipal, industrial, and agricultural use, as well as seawater intrusion into its diminishing groundwater supply,” said Rodney Clemente, Energy Recovery Senior Vice President of Water. “We have been helping India incorporate desalination technologies since our first mega-project installation in 2007. Desalination allows India to utilize its vast coastline to help offset these threats, and incorporating the PX into desalination facilities brings the operating cost to produce fresh water down significantly by reducing energy consumption while increasing operational flexibility and availability.”
Energy Recovery’s PX recaptures otherwise wasted pressure energy within the SWRO desalination process to improve system performance and energy efficiency and reduce operational costs and carbon emissions. The PX can reduce the energy consumption of a SWRO desalination system by as much as 60%. When installed, Energy Recovery estimates the PX will prevent over 300,000 metric tons of carbon emissions from entering the atmosphere from these projects each year.
