Water & Wastewater Asia March/April 2024

SINGAPORE FOCUS
Newater House
by BlueNexus Technologies
time, it begins to degrade. The end users
are unhappy because their expertise
is not in water treatment or managing
this asset. The developer is annoyed
because they are being blamed for the
plant’s underperformance, while the
end user has not cooperated with their
suggested servicing and maintenance
protocols. Additionally, the plant is
taking up a lot of valuable real estate, in
permanent fashion, creating a location
dependence for end users and a massive
liability for asset holders if those end
1
users decide to migrate elsewhere.
Much of this is dramatised, but
1 Newater House
is a prefabricated
vision of the
future of WTPs
2 Newater House
operates nearly
autonomously
3 Newater House is
prefabricated in
our manufacturing
facility, ensuring
consistent
high-quality
results
THE CHALLENGE
The difficulties of large-scale water and
wastewater treatment infrastructure
are well-understood by industry
participants, government, and industrial
end users alike.
One would start by discussing
the capital-intensive nature of
these projects. Civil engineering,
construction, and equipment are all
meaningful expenses, with projects
jumping from tens to hundreds of
millions of dollars. Most engineering
firms prefer to enter into engineering,
procurement, and construction (EPC)
agreements, but many end users are
unable to afford the upfront cost.
Those end users often prefer to pay for
water-as-a-service, but that creates
a burden for water companies whose
specialisation is in engineering, not
asset management. Public-private
partnership (PPP); build, operate,
transfer (BOT); EPC — regardless of
the structure, the upfront cost of these
projects is significant to any party.
When one manages to get through the
cost element, the design of the plant
becomes the next barrier. No two water
treatment plants (WTPs) are the same:
influent quality, chemical pretreatment,
technology of filtration — the
permutations are endless. How much
water are we trying to treat? Is that
going to be true for the entire lifetime
of this plant? All of these elements
drive brilliant, bespoke designs, but we
humans are fallible. The more variability
in inputs, the more complexity
introduced in treatment, the more room
for catastrophe.
Now that finances are in order
and a design is ready, we are onto
execution. The engineering firm has
identified strong local partners to do
the construction, but are the nuances
of this design well-understood by
the construction team? Are they
going to execute at the same level as
the crew from the shift before, or at
another project two continents away?
More variability and, inevitably, time
consumed by operating around that
variability. Delivery timelines stretch
from 12-18 months, costs mount, and
frustration builds.
When the WTP is finally constructed,
initial operations are great. But over
these pain points are real. Even the
strongest partners and agreements
are constrained by or suffer from
these elements in some fashion or the
other. No matter the innovation — new
treatment technology, new business
model — we have seen these same
challenges emerge on projects for
decades without a scalable solution.
THE SOLUTION
The simple answer to this complex
problem is productisation. This
approach, conceptually, answers many
of these nagging problems in an elegant
way. With a well-crafted, repeatable
design in hand, you can attack a lot
of these problems. Costs become
lowered as you identify efficiencies
in your design, require less bespoke
engineering work per project, and
achieve economies of scale in repeated
manufacturing. By relying less on
custom solutions, quality of design
and execution improve via repetition;
prefabrication and an assembly
line-esque approach help deliver
consistent results. A consistent design
structure allows for both a tighter
physical package and a structure that
more easily enables smart operation.
12 Water & Wastewater Asia | March-April 2024