IVRCL, a company from India, has finished a high-tech desalination plant in the city of Madras. According to officials, this plant is the biggest in South Asia, using seawater to generate 100 million liters of potable water a day for the city’s seven million residents. They also said it will supply 1,000 liters of drinking water for just over $1.
The desalination plant works by filtering sea water under high pressure. The best part of this technique is that it removes all lime, salt, and other particles, without using so much energy, compared to other conventional plants which desalinate water by boiling it first.
“We are using the advanced reverse osmosis technology. We are purifying the water by filtering it under high pressure. Unlike other desalination plants we are not boiling the water and as a result we are saving a lot of energy,” said Natarajan Ganesan, Joint General Manager of the Chennai Water Desalination company.
Due to the plant’s “energy recovering technology”, the electricity consumption was reduced and this way the water produced became very cheap. The $140 million plant is the fruit of a collaboration between IVRCL and Befessa of Spain.
[Source: BBC]
