Water & Wastewater Asia March/April 2024

SINGAPORE FOCUS
At BlueNexus Technologies and our parent
company GreenTech Environmental, we
have been pursuing this dream for nearly
a decade and have reached a solution
that we are proud to share with the water
treatment community. Our third generation
— Newater House — with naming inspired
by Singapore’s National Water Agency
PUB’s own innovations, is the culmination of
taking the simple answer of ‘productisation’
and executing against that vision to deliver
a standardised, prefabricated, digitally
empowered product for water supply and
wastewater treatment. With this product,
we have addressed these prevailing pain
points.
2
Almost everything is prefabricated in our
manufacturing facilities, distilling our 20
years of engineering know-how into a
single product. Parts are shipped to their
destination and assembled in plug-and-play
fashion with minimal civil engineering
required. This reduces overhead, rapidly
speeds up overall project delivery time,
and enhances reliability. Newater House is
modular in nature, with unit designs ranging
from 2,500-100,000m 3 /day. These can be
combined in Lego-like fashion, allowing end
users to scale up as needs change over time.
Similarly, the technology application within
different versions of the product will enable
deployment across a range of use cases.
We initially started with an ultrafiltration and
reverse osmosis (RO) combination — given
the prevalence of its applicability for our
focus use cases of industrial wastewater
reuse, industrial pretreatment, and
desalination — and will continue to expand
those offerings in coming years.
Our focus on leveraging intelligent operations
to enable an unattended plant allows us to
radically rethink our design. This enables a
footprint that is ultimately about one-sixth
the size of a traditional WTP, expanding this
offering to space-constrained end users and
providing more room for social and economic
development for others. Further, intelligent
operations drive reduced operating expense,
both by the nature of being unattended as
well as being more precise than most human
operators.
And lastly, it can move. This prefabricated,
enclosed approach with minimal civil
engineering needs creates both a reality
where one can feasibly relocate a WTP
to a new location, in situations where the
designed capacity needs to be lowered or no
longer needed. This physical aspect enables
economic innovation; this movability and
universal approach to large-scale treatment
creates a valuable asset unencumbered by
the burdens of traditional water planets,
making it much more attractive to all parties.
IN PRODUCTION
Our initial deployments of Newater House,
concentrated in the Jiangsu province of
China, have exceeded our expectations.
We have three plants running — one each at
sizes of 5,000, 10,000, and 20,000m 3 /day.
This speaks to both the range of volume
demand of end users and validity of having a
modular approach. Additionally, this design
philosophy not only lowered the land required
by 80% but also shrunk the construction time
to a month for the most recently constructed
plant.
These plants are functioning at a high level
in different environments. We see 70% water
reuse rates, for both water and wastewater
reuse, across industrial customers ranging
from electronics companies to solar panel
manufacturers, with varying influent water
quality. Some customisation and adaptation
have been required initially at the plant,
but those adjustments were almost trivial
3
compared to those of fully custom design
with little performance loss.
Most importantly, the plants operate
nearly autonomously. This is successful
in terms of lowering operating expense,
and also reducing the engagement level
necessary by end users who do not view
this as an area of desired involvement.
Supported by these early results, the
future of water treatment is in the form of
productised plants. While there may never
be a one-size-fits-all solution in our complex
world of water, a few great solutions can
answer most of our problems. We hope that
this is the start of that journey.
Images: BlueNexus
Water & Wastewater Asia | March-April 2024 13