AQUATECH, a global leader in water purification technology for industrial and infrastructure markets, has received Frost & Sullivan’s Award for Growth Excellence in the Middle East and North Africa Desalination Plant Market in 2011.

The excellence award in desalination highlights the high degree of innovation with products and technologies and the resulting leadership in terms of customer value, market penetration and an abiding environmental consciousness.

“We are honoured to receive this prestigious award from Frost & Sullivan. Aquatech has a strong track record in leveraging our deep technology portfolio to offer competitive solutions to the markets we serve,” says Devesh Sharma, executive vice-president of Aquatech.

The company developed and patented multistage flash (MSF) technology in the late 1950s, installing the first large MSF plants in the Middle East in the early 1960s. It patented the multiple effect distillation (MED) process and built plants in the Middle and Far East in the 1970s and pursued membrane technology development in the 1980s.

“Whether it’s making zero liquid discharge more affordable, or increasing the economic viability of oil and gas extraction through cost-effective produced water treatment, we are focused on finding innovative ways to deliver the optimal lifecycle cost to our clients. The award is further validation of these efforts for the very important desalination marketplace,” says Sharma.

The award criteria include the ability to grow in a competitive market, effective management of existing product portfolio, strong sales force strategy, and brand awareness. Since 2007, Aquatech has received five awards from Frost & Sullivan, a growth partnership company, for its technology leadership in water treatment as well as several global water awards presented by Global Water Intelligence.

Aquatech is currently executing an order by the UAE’s Federal Electricity and Water Authority (Fewa) to provide a 15-million-gallons-per-day seawater reverse osmosis (SWRO)-based desalination facility. The project, located at Ghalilah, will provide drinking water for Ras Al Khaimah.

According to Frost & Sullivan, the Ghalilah project is one of the most competitive bids in recent times with as many as 20 bidders including the top global companies. The contract is valued at more than $82 million.

Aquatech has also been awarded a contract to provide water treatment services that will help to enhance the heavy oil extraction rate in the Amal oilfields in Oman. Under terms of the contract, Aquatech will construct a 237-cu-m per hour produced water softening plant for the Amal Steam Facilities Phase 1B, owned by Petroleum Development Oman (PDO), the premier hydrocarbon exploration and production company in the sultanate.

In this project, Aquatech is supplying a unique ion exchange technology-based super softening plant for treating high TDS (total dissolved solids) and high temperature produced water. The treated water will be fed to the steam generators for generating steam, which will be injected into the heavy oil wells to enhance the extraction rate of oil. The technology involved will include a nutshell filtering unit (NSK), followed by a primary strong acid cation unit and a polishing strong acid cation unit (SAC), and finally by a weak acid cation unit (WAC). The end-product will have hardness reduced to less than 1 ppm, and will be used for process water.

Furthermore, Aquatech is also among the first companies in the GCC region to work with the oil and gas industry to recycle and reuse wastewater, and is currently executing one of the Middle East’s first petrochemical wastewater reuse projects in Kuwait. These developments follow other recent desalination projects in mega power plants being developed in Asia, such as Coastal Gujarat Power in Gujarat and Coastal Energen in Tamil Nadu, India.

Sharma says Aquatech is one of very few companies in the world to offer both thermal and membrane desalination. The company’s range of desalination technologies includes Spray Film MED, mechanical vapour compression (MVC) distillation, MSF and seawater reverse osmosis. Since the establishment of its global centre of excellence for membrane desalination in Pune, India, Aquatech has executed several state-of-the-art desalination projects in the region.

Aquatech is headquartered in the US, and has a significant presence worldwide through subsidiaries in India, Europe, the Middle East, and China. Aquatech strives to provide technology leadership and performance excellence to the global water industry, and aims to support its clients with cutting-edge sustainable solutions, minimising their life cycle cost, as well as their carbon and water footprint. Its focus is on desalination, water reuse, and zero liquid discharge.