Antonio Casanas. Water reuse using UF and RO – An old story in Spain.
There is good potential for the development of desalination of wastewater to meet human needs. Casanas presents the Spanish example, citing 67% of water is used for agricultural purposes and only 11% of treatment schemes include membranes. He notes the process of double membrane filtration and multi-barrier solutions for bacteria and pathogen removal to produce ‘safe’ water.
‘Early’ use membranes were not apparently well suited to trated wastewater RO because of high fouling rates, but recently bespoke technologies have improved this.
Casanas gives three case studies of wastewater reuse in Spain:
1. Tias, Lanzarote: agreement in 1992 and in 1994 the first water reuse experiment centre using ultrafiltartion (UF) and RO in combination. Production 240m3 per day for gardens, agriculture, leisure. The facility used standard brackish water membranes – nobody considering the fouling problems at this time. In the Canaries since there have been further developments (Teide, Galdar with 3500m3 per day each) and the expansion of the Tias facility.
2. Ricon de Leon, Alicante: a large scale UF+RO reuse plant taking an effluent mixture from industrial and municipal sites and producing water for irrigation. Since 2006 there has been the addition of tertiary treatment.
3. Camp de Tarragona, Vilaseca (Catalonia): a 19K m3 per day facility but likely to double in size. The facility is expected to start up later in 2011 and will be piloting new bespoke elements from Dow Filmtec.
A question from the audience asked whether this product water could be used for domestic consumers? Casanas answered that it too early to say… It would be interesting to know whether this is because it is technologically tricky or cost prohibitive, or whether this is more a case of public perception.
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