Water & Wastewater Asia May/Jun 2021

WATER & WASTEWATER ASIA | MAY/JUNE 2021
The idea and company were founded
by Malcolm Aw, who wanted to find
a sustainable alternative approach,
developed an initial concept, and
took his thought process to Cranfield
University in the UK, the global
headquarters for Concentrated
Solar Power initiatives. Together,
they became a consultative partner
and through working with Cranfield
University for about two and a half
years, Solar Water created a possible,
marketable, engineering capable
solution.
“About 18 months ago, we reached
the point of sufficient development to
then market and commercialise our
solution,” said Reavley.
“At that stage, we were honoured to
win the Rushlight 2018 Award for Water
Treatment, promoting the development
and deployment of clean technologies,
innovation and sustainable solutions.”
Solar Water won for being the first
scalable carbon-neutral hydroinfrastructure
solution. In fact,
the company created some noise
initially with their attendance at water
conferences around the world.
“We went to Madrid, Abu Dhabi,
Muscat and Manila, and we told
the audiences there that we had an
alternative, that we had a solution.
We were then invited on a trade
mission to Saudi Arabia. Through
that, we met with a number of Saudi
industrialists and conglomerates who
were very interested in what we do,
including Neom,” explained Reavley.
“The upshot was that at the end
of 2019, we signed a contract with
NEOM (northwestern Saudi Arabia).
And in January 2020, we signed a
contract with a company called Jordan
Phosphate Mine Company, JPMC, at
their plant based in Aqaba (Jordan).”
THE CRISIS
According to WWF (World Wildlife
Fund), water covers 70% of earth and
it is easy to think that it will always be
plentiful. However, freshwater—the stuff
humans drink, bathe in, irrigate the farm
fields with—is incredibly rare. Only 3%
of the world’s water is fresh water.
In addition, to some estimates, global
demand for fresh water will exceed
supply by 40% by 2030; at the same
time, climate change could shrink
rainfall, snowpack and freshwater
availability by 40% by 2050; and the
world’s population is due to grow by a
further 15% by 2035.
“Together these effects will continue
to grow water stress and scarcity
with depleting supplies of freshwater
for socio-economic development —
absolute shortages for domestic use,
agriculture, industry, tourism, and
health & wellbeing. All these needs
and ambitions are reliant on water
and will be limited and stressed by a
lack of it,” commented Reavley. “In
the worst scenarios around the world,
water becomes the new oil and with
that comes all the geopolitical issues
that we know are connected to that,
including water conflict and famine.”
Reverse osmosis (RO) desalination
systems have served water shortage
quite well for many decades, but the
world has woken up to problems within
this interconnected crisis system that
RO adds to, said Reavley. The plants
are energy intensive and fossil fuels
burnt for this are currently leaving a
massive carbon footprint with about
76 million tonnes of CO2 each year,
a number that is expected to rise to
around 2018 million tonnes by 2040 —
all of which will only help to accelerate
climate change. Additionally, RO
membranes have to be disposed of
in landfill and take up to 400 years to
decompose.
SO HOW DOES SOLAR WATER’S
TECHNOLOGY HELPS?
“Our technology is based on
harnessing concentrated solar power
to enhance the natural process of
evaporation, condensation and
precipitation,” explained Reavley.
Solar Water’s SWCSP-D plants are
infrastructurally spherical with the
top half (the dome) being the solar
receiver and the bottom half (the basin)
being the cauldron. The structures
are effectively solar furnaces that
use solar power to produce high
How the process
works
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