Egypt: Mobile Water Treatment Units ensure Use of Desalinated Seawater for Cooling

In water-scarce Egypt, major industrial players have been looking for ways to reduce their water consumption.

Ezz Steel – with the annual capacity to produce seven million tons of steel, one of the leading steel producers in the Middle East and Africa – tasked Veolia Water Technologies Egypt with delivering mobile water solutions that allowed cooling water supply to switch from the Nile River to desalinated seawater.

Ezz Steel rolling mills and Ezz flat steel plants are located in Al-Sokhna, an industrial area near the city of Suez in Egypt. The plants used to be supplied with freshwater from the Nile River before recently changing to desalinated seawater – source water with a relatively high level of chloride, which could affect the cooling process, Veolia Water Technologies informed in June. The company deployed seven brackish water reverse osmosis mobile water treatment units to treat the desalinated water, doing so in two phases: within two months, Veolia provided an initial 8,000 m3/d (cubic meters/day) capacity, which was doubled during the second phase in April 2023 to reach 16,000 m3/d.

“Thanks to Veolia’s mobile water treatment units, Ezz Steel were able to secure 100 percent of their water production with lower chloride and total dissolved solids rates, allowing them to keep the water flowing into their cooling system,” Veolia underlined. “In doing so, Ezz Steel have reduced their water and chemical consumption by approximately 75 percent.”

veoliawatertechnologies.com/en

(Published in GLOBAL RECYCLING Magazine 3/2023, Page 47, Photo: Veolia Water Technologies)