Energy Recovery Devices Play Role in Desal Plant

Aqua Engineering GmbH has awarded a contract to Energy Recovery, Inc. (ERI), to provide energy recovery technology for the Hamriyah (Phase 1) Power Station Seawater Reverse Osmosis Desalination Plant, according to an Aug. 5 press release from ERI.

Aqua Engineering GmbH, an Austrian-based subsidiary of Christ Water Technology AG., won the plant award from the Sharjah Electricity and Water Authority of the United Arab Emirates.

The technology agreement is for PX® energy recovery devices for plant in Sharjah.

The overall capacity of the Hamriyah facility will be 120 million gallons per day (mgd) of fresh water by reverse osmosis technology and 48 mgd by a thermal desalination process called multiple effect distillation. This phase of the project will include 104 PX-260 PX Pressure Exchanger® energy recovery devices that will save an estimated 13 megawatts of power. Designed with a total of eight seawater reverse osmosis trains operating in parallel, the devices will provide fail-safe redundancy and reliability with little or no down-time.

Currently, the plant is under construction and scheduled for start-up in 2009. Initial work on the site included a 600 MW power plant. The project eventually will supply 2,000 MW of power and 168 mgd of desalinated water.

In late 2007, ERI announced the release of its PX-260 device, which is the company's largest commercially available energy recovery device, handling brine flow rates of up to 260 gallons per minute.