Two organizations at the forefront of innovation, the multinational Crystal Lagoons®, and the prestigious German Fraunhofer Institute, have united in a scientific cooperative alliance to build the first pilot desalination plant which will use technology created by Crystal Lagoons. It will radically reduce the energy consumption when obtaining fresh water.
Furthermore, the cost of producing desalinated water with the multinational’s technology is cut by 60% in comparison with conventional technologies that use reverse osmosis, according to the simulations and analysis previously carried out by Fraunhofer Germany. These studies were commissioned by Crystal Lagoons as of 2016.
A site for the project is being sought in the North of Chile, in order to start construction during 2019, and will require an investment of US$ 307 thousand dollars. Once it starts operating under real conditions, it will be scaled to an industrial level.
This innovation may well become a viable solution confront the current dramatic shortage of fresh water that affects more than 1.1 billion people in the world, according to estimates by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP).
One of the main characteristics of this technology is its sustainability. It was patented in the United States under the Green Fast Track program, which privileges the granting of patents to technologies considered to be a contribution to the global ecology. For every 1,500 applications submitted for patenting, only 1 is approved.
The President and founder of Crystal Lagoons, Fernando Fischmann, is the Director of the Fraunhofer Institute, the leading applied research organization in Europe and one of the most important in the world, with a total of 72 institutes and research units and 25 thousand employees in Europe, America, Australia and Asia. The institute is linked to 18 Nobel Prizes, through its different networks of scientific cooperation.
Technology
Crystal Lagoons desalination technology consists of a membrane distillation process that uses the temperature difference to obtain fresh water from salt water.
The key innovation with regards to the technology currently available (reverse osmosis), is that this new system does not require additional energy, but rather uses residual energy from industrial processes derived from Crystal Lagoons sustainable cooling system. This significantly reduces costs associated with the process.