TAIWAN – Approval of Formosa Petrochemical Corporation’s desalination project at its naphta cracker facility in Yunlin County has received initial approval following environmental impact assessment (EIA), but is still awaiting a further review to “request the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) to relax certain regulations.”

The project involves a seawater desalination plant with a total capacity of 105,000 cubic metres per day, which will treat water discharged from the Mailiao power plant, which is also operated by Formosa. The plant will be constructed by Israeli firm IDE technologies and will use IDE’s proprietary boron removal systems to become the first in the world to achieve boron concentration levels below 0.01 ppm.

The plant will provide welcome relief for the local community, as Formosa has been accused diminishing the water supply of agricultural and residential users. Construction is expected to take three years after the project passes the final stage of review. Once finished, it will be the country’s first large scale desalination plant.^[1]

EGYPT – Egypt is embarking on a national water management program to tackle the country’s water shortage, which currently stands at 30 billion cubic meters per day.^[2] During the Egypt Can 3 Conference held in Luxor, the Minister of Irrigation and Water Resources, Mohamed Abdel Atti, announced that Egypt is preparing a $51 billion national plan for water management over the next 20 years to develop solutions for water scarcity.^[3]

The plans calls for 25% of all water used in agriculture to be sourced from desalinated ground water, modernisation of irrigation techniques to improve agricultural water efficiency, and the development of additional water resources through desalination of water from the Red Sea and the Mediterranean.^[4]

The past few years has seen a dramatic build-out of desalination capacity in Egypt, with 700,000 cubic metres per day of capacity contracted since 2015 and a similar quantity planned over the next five years. The most recent major project to begin production was the 110,000 cubic metre per day Al Yusr plant, which was commissioned in January 2018.

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TUNISIA –Tunisia’s water utility, Société Nationale d'Exploitation et de Distribution des Eaux (SONEDE), has announced the completion of work on 10 brackish water desalination plants (ranging from 2,000 m³/d to 8,000 m³/d) in 2017, at a total cost of $33 million. An additional six groundwater plants are under construction.

2018 will see SONEDE a commission a $74 million seawater desalination plant in Djerba with a capacity of 50,000 cubic meters water per day. Two additional seawater desalination plants, located at Sfax, costing $371 million, and Gabes, costing $82 million, are in the planning stages.^[5]