ACWA Power and Water Global Access announce partnership in green desalination

Saudi developer and operator ACWA Power and R&D company Water Global Access on Thursday announced a strategic partnership to further develop WGA’s disruptive, green water desalination technology, on the sidelines of the Saudi Water Forum.

The partnership represents a key element within ACWA Power’s ambitious technology innovation roadmap that aims to deliver exceptional value to future projects and to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as it will involve the integration of WGA’s Hydraulic Injection Desalination (HID) into ACWA Power projects.

“Seawater desalination is an energy-intensive process and ACWA Power has already pioneered a paradigm shift in the industry and significantly reduced the energy consumption to unprecedented low levels,” Thomas Altmann, EVP Innovation & New Technology of ACWA Power, said in a statement.

“This partnership with WGA will fast-track the next step-change in energy efficiency to pave the way towards the deployment of greener technologies through innovation,” he said.

Classified as “green” technology, HID is considered as an environmentally friendly option in desalination as chemical treatment of water is not required and the brine released is entirely green.

Additionally, the HID energy consumption is substantially lower than that required by existing desalinisation technologies and its thermodynamic principles have been proven in a prototype unit.

Recent computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modelling has successfully confirmed that WGA’s technology allows for the desalination of 40,000-ppm seawater with a specific energy consumption (SEC) of less than 1.9 kWh/m3 – nearly one third lower than existing SWRO projects.

“Our goal is to reach society by the end of this year with scalable, robust seawater desalination technology with low maintenance costs and minimal environmental impact, capable of transforming the freshwater paradigm,” Eusebi Nomen, one of WGA HID inventors, said in a statement.