Veolia Water Technologies by GineersNow Engineering Magazine GineersNow Engineering Magazine September 2016 | Page 9

Water treatment
and more widely
Environmental Engineering
contribute directly to creating
a better world tomorrow
of clean water and waste
water (locally or globally)?
What are the latest water
technologies today?
Froment: A lot of the trends
we see have to do with
reducing carbon footprint,
increasing renewable energies
and with water reuse. With
climate change concerns,
there is a strong push to
reduce carbon footprint.
Although carbon dioxide is
released into the atmosphere
in much greater amounts,
methane has contributed just
as much to global warming
over the past two decades.
Waste and wastewater
treatment activities can
produce a lot of methane,
which can be repurposed to
produce renewable energy
through biogas, quickly
producing positive effects.
Obviously, sludge offers a lot
of potential as far as energy
production goes and it is
viewed more and more as a
valuable resource to capitalize
on rather than a waste
that needs to be discarded.
Our innovative Exelys™
technology, for instance,
represents the next generation
of thermal hydrolysis. By
concentrating the matter to
be treated, the volume to be
heated is reduced, yielding
20-40 percent more biogas
than conventional digestion
and up to 50 percent more
capacity for existing digesters.
We also see a lot of interest in
evaporation and Zero Liquid
Discharge (ZLD) technologies.
As
regulatory
issues,
environmental sensitivity,
and long term water supply
concerns increase, many
industrial companies are
considering ways to reduce
their water discharges and
ZLD is a great solution. Shell
is one of the many companies
that chose to implement
a sustainable ZLD water
management solution, at
their Pearl GTL complex in
Qatar.
Water scarcity is a serious
problem in many parts of
the world particularly the
Middle East. More and more
industries are interested in
implementing solutions that
use as little fresh water as
possible, and reuse as much
as possible. Veolia has
been working with Nestlé
at several of its plants to
reduce the company’s water
consumption and results
have been particularly good
at its new dairy plant in
Lagos de Moreno, Mexico.
Nestlé has reduced its water
consumption globally by
one third during the past 10
years and by 50 percent at
its plants in Mexico, even
while global production has
increased. Antero Resources,
one of the top ten producers
of natural gas in the USA,
is another company that is
proactively addressing water
consumption by building a
US$275 million centralized
water treatment facility to
treat 9,500 cubic meters of
produced water per day for
reuse. Recycling the produced
water from its shale oil and
gas operations will enable
Antero to realize substantial
savings, as well as reducing
its environmental footprint.
Most companies nowadays,
big and small, are looking into
ways to reduce their water
footprint and we definitely
see this trend going on and
accelerating in the future
particularly in the Middle East.
GN: Where should water tech
head 20 years from now? Are
we on the right track? Are we
delayed? Are we progressing?
Froment: As mentioned
above,
Veolia
already
has in housed most of the
technologies necessary to
generate water with any
desired characteristics from
any waste water so we believe
the next challenges are to
make these technologies
more competitive and more
accessible to our clients,
preserve and explore all
the different ways to reuse/
recycle every drop of water
while reducing the carbon
footprint of the plants and
recovering the pollutants in
such a way they can also be
recycled.
THE MICRO LEVEL
GN: What are the initiatives /
projects that you are doing (or
have done) that will provide
clean water to third world
countries?
Froment: Veolia supports
humanitarian, educational,
biodiversity and conservation
programs with 1,000 projects
supported to date. Check out
Veolia Foundation website
to discover all the actions
deployed in the third world
countries: http://fondation.
SEPTEMBER 2016
Clean Water Technologies
9