Energy Recovery announced contract awards totaling $11.7 million to provide its flagship PX® Pressure Exchanger® (“PX”) energy recovery devices and related equipment and services to multiple seawater reverse osmosis (“SWRO”) desalination facilities in the United Arab Emirates (“UAE”). These orders are currently shipping to customers and are scheduled to be fulfilled by Q2 2021.
Energy Recovery estimates the PXs supplied to these facilities will prevent more than 400,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year, equivalent to removing more than 90,000 passenger vehicles from the road annually. The facilities will collectively produce over 680,000 cubic meters of water per day.
These SWRO facilities are part of a larger initiative to expand sustainable access to clean water throughout the UAE under the country’s Water Security Strategy 2036. Seawater desalination is critical to meeting water demand in the Middle East, contributing to more than 90 percent of all daily water requirements for the region.
“These contracts are another testament to the strength of our core seawater desalination business and the continued demand we see in the Middle East. In Abu Dhabi, for example, SWRO constituted 16 percent of the Emirate’s total desalination technology mix in 2019, an increase of five percent since 2016, with thermal desalination making up the remaining 84 percent,” said Rodney Clemente, Energy Recovery’s Senior Vice President of Water. “We expect the share of SWRO to continue increasing, driven both by conversions of aging thermal facilities to more economical SWRO technology and by new build facilities such as Abu Dhabi’s Taweelah Reverse Osmosis Independent Water Project, which will be the world’s largest SWRO facility once completed.”
