Clean Industry Solutions

Although alternative water resources, wastewater, brackish and seawater, are reliable water sources, their use is very limited in the EU (1.6% of water supply) due to relatively high costs, quality, technical reliability, new stringent EU regulations, and acceptance issues. Alternative water resources contain valuable materials and resources that are not being recovered, which open an attractive approach to generate revenues and reduce the cost of water by activating circular economy wastewater and brine mining schemes. LIFE SALTEAU aims to create new and updated multipurpose infrastructures with revolutionary capabilities to gain the real value of alternative wastewater resources. Innovative technologies will be up-scaled by the six partners Aqualia (Spain), CIEMAT (Spain), NX Filtration BV (Netherlands), Aquaporin (Denmark), Omya (Austria) and SolarSpring (Germany). This will include microbial desalination, membrane-based processes (direct nanofiltration, biomimetic and membrane distillation), capacitive deionization and a Ca/Mg recovery system, coupled to renewable energy (solar, wind and organic matter). Long-term validation will be conducted at two Demo Sites, Mediterranean and Atlantic. This will serve as showcase for early adopters and end-users of freshwater and Ca/Mg products. 

SolarSpring's role in the consortium will be that of technology provider and expert for the intermediate brine concentration step between preconcentration and crystallisation. The topic of resource recovery from brines builds on previous experience gained from e.g. the BrineMine project but exceeds the previous scale and level of process integration by far. For this 4-year project, SolarSpring will receive 351.800 € with a funding rate of 60%.