POWER December 2015 - 61

WATER TREATMENT
FO systems feeding a new breed of thin-film,
precipitating crystallizers. Example process
flows are shown in Figure 2.
The trend for companies in the larger industrial
wastewater markets such as petroleum,
power, and steel is to move to higher
levels of water recovery in their operations.
Additional water recovery from RO reject
streams and treatment to higher recovery for
cooling tower blowdown are two examples.
As a result of this trend toward higher levels
of industrial water reuse, together with general
industrial sector growth in India, GWI
predicts a doubling of demand in India for industrial
wastewater treatment spending, from
$1 billion in 2013 to $2 billion in 2020. For
the power industry in particular, growth will
be higher-from approximately $150 million
in 2013 to almost $500 million in 2020.
North America Wastewater Volume
Reduction and Water Reuse
Until recent years, North American companies
operating in water-intensive industries
such as oil and gas extraction, thermal power
production, and chemicals manufacturing
entered into ZLD and high-recovery water
treatment projects only when absolutely required.
Mickley and Associates reports from
2003 and 2008, analyzing municipal RO reject
ZLD projects in the U.S. Southwest, have
provided baseline data on capital and energy
costs for pretreatment, brine concentration,
and crystallization processes comprising the
traditional ZLD process flow. Operators and
engineering firms have had good benchmarks
for evaluating the costs of evaporative highrecovery
and ZLD versus alternatives such as
deep well injection of saline waste streams
or construction of evaporation ponds, when
basic treatment and discharge are not an option.
As
newer technologies such as FO, other
membrane-based technologies, or electrochemical
technologies have proven themselves
in other worldwide markets-and as
water scarcity and water stewardship have
become more important issues-the application
space of industrial water recovery projects
has grown. More plants in a wider range
of industrial sectors are actively investigating
advanced wastewater projects.
Industry needs such as minimization of discharge
of saline effluents to evaporation ponds
or treatment plants from cooling towers, process
waste streams, or oil and gas produced
waters, by recovering reusable water, are being
considered in many more cases than just five
years ago. Using FO, evaporation, or other processes
to recover an additional 60% to 70% of
freshwater from a saline cooling tower blowdown
source becomes more viable as treatment
costs diminish with new technologies.
CIRCLE 21 ON READER SERVICE CARD
December 2015 | POWER
www.powermag.com
61
Power and industrial users of recirculating
cooling systems are increasingly exploring
ways to recover and reuse cooling tower
blowdown to reduce makeup water requirements
and to reduce discharge volumes.
Cooling water reuse is on the roadmaps of
companies as diverse as the large petrochemicals
producers, including Shell and BP, to
large data center operators such as Google
and Amazon. FO and other technologies that
can economically process complex wastewater
streams such as cooling tower blowdown
and recover additional quantities of freshwater
are in a position to provide significant
value for new and existing industrial plants.
ZLD and high-recovery treatment processes
in the U.S. power industry have been
employed in recent projects to help streamline
the path to project approval and to help
more easily navigate the permitting process.
Panda Power Funds, for example, recently
built combined cycle plants in Temple and
Sherman, Texas, and incorporated ZLD in
the Sherman plant and high-recovery brine
concentration in the Temple plant for cooling
water blowdown and boiler feedwater plant
waste streams. (See the September 2015 issue
of POWER, where these plants are profiled as
gas-fired Top Plant Award winners.) In both
cases, the designs reduced the volume of intake
water required to run the plants as well
as the wastewater discharged. For one of its
newly announced projects, in Leesburg, Va.,
Panda Power Funds will use Leesburg municipal
wastewater as a portion of the intake
and will use ZLD waste treatment to eliminate
outflows, benefiting the Chesapeake
Bay watershed in both cases.
The progress in high-recovery, saline
wastewater treatment and ZLD being made
in other parts of the globe, to improve the
cost and reliability of treating complex industrial
streams, provides new options for
consideration by U.S. power and other industrial
water treaters. As federal and local
regulations tighten and as forward-thinking
companies such as Panda Power Funds look
to incorporate ZLD processes into new plant
designs to meet the requirements of more
stringent water regulations and tougher permitting
processes, the technologies being adopted
in other markets provide new options
to be considered in order to optimize cost
and performance. These innovative, highrecovery
technologies can help to broaden
the adoption of ZLD throughout the power
industry and other water-intensive industries
throughout the U.S. and the Americas.■
-John Tracy (jtracy@oasyswater.com) is
director of marketing for Oasys Water.
http://www.powermag.com
POWER December 2015

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of POWER December 2015
