Seawater Desalination

For over 40 years, our highly specialized experts have been handling seawater desalination and water treatment projects. Fichtner has been involved in most major seawater desalination systems in the Middle East, in Singapore, Australia, Italy, India, Spain, Egypt and Chile – initially as technical consultant under contract to mostly state-owned supply utilities, but subsequently in independent water (and power) production (IW(P)P) projects acting as lender’s engineer for financing banks or as owner’s engineer for the project company. Our company has built up an incomparable wealth of experience thanks to our planning of a total desalination capacity of 25 million cubic meters per day.

Alongside the thermal MSF and MED processes, today thanks to developments in membrane research, reverse osmosis technology is finding application even in large-scale facilities. Gaining in significance is tie-in of renewable energies to support energy supply for seawater desalination. Matching the desalination technology to the site conditions and manner of energy supply requires meticulous planning.

Principal technologies:

  • Multiple-Effect Distillation ‒ MED
  • Multi-Stage Flash Distillation ‒ MSF
  • Reverse Osmosis ‒ RO
  • Hybrid plants
  • Integration of regenerative energies