Increasing RO recovery is not just a case of adding stages!

I had an engineer recently tell me he was working on a project where they needed to minimize RO brine volume and he wanted at least 90% recovery, so please quote a 3-stage system… Antiscalant projections on the raw water quality showed 78% recovery at best, even with acid dosing. The chemistry won’t allow any higher recovery on this water on matter how many stages the RO system has, and don’t get me started on whether CCRO can do better (I’ll discuss this later).

That is the fourth inquiry like this I have had in the past 6 months and the second from this engineer who is finding it hard to understand the limitations on recovery… so I thought I would put the explanation in print here.

Before you start to think of how many stages you need to design the RO system for, you first need to look at the water chemistry to see what recovery is possible. All the antiscalant manufacturers have projection programs where the raw water quality data is entered, an antiscalant is selected and from the empirical data the program calculates the maximum recovery that can be achieved and what are the limiting salts. You can adjust the feed pH to see the impact of pH correction and you can also change some feed parameters so see how pretreatment will impact recovery. At this point, stages do not even come into the equation. For a customer that wants to get as high a recovery as possible, I also often ask the antiscalant suppliers to do a projection for me, because sometimes they have a product I may not be aware of or that is not part of the projection software version I have.

PLEASE NOTE - INCREASING THE NUMBER OF STAGES DOES NOT ALLOW A HIGHER RECOVERY THAN WHAT THE ANTISCALANT PROJECTIONS PREDICT!!! ALSO, INCREASING THE NUMBER OF STAGES DOES NOT ALLOW A HIGHER RECOVERY THAN WHAT THE ANTISCALANT PROJECTIONS PREDICT!!! Got the message??

Some antiscalant projection programs incorporate calculations on RO unit arrays, but I prefer to first optimize recovery then use the membrane manufacturer’s projection programs to design the best array – I just feel more confident with the RO/NF system design when I use the membrane vendor programs.

Now that I know the maximum recovery that is possible determined by the water chemistry, not the number of RO unit stages, I then go about working out how many stages are needed to achieve this recovery. When designing an array for an RO system there are several important design conditions that need to be accounted for, including crossflow velocity and flux across the membrane elements. The projection programs have built in warnings when these are too high or low. Operating outside the safe ranges will result in membrane fouling.

A 2-stage RO system is limited to up to 80-85% recovery because somewhere in this range you will violate the minimum crossflow requirements for the membranes. When the crossflow is too low you can get concentration polarization at the membrane surface resulting in scaling. By adding a third stage you can reduce the number of housings required in the first 2 stages to increase the crossflow velocity to within the desired range and add back those housings via the third stage to maintain the desired flux rate. For instance, rather than try achieving 85% recovery using a 4:2, 7M array at an average flux of 15 gfd at a permeate flow of 175 gpm which sends some low crossflow warnings for the first stage, you could change this array to a 3:2:1, 7M 3-stage system which has the same flux but the crossflows are better balanced across the membranes.

When attempting really high recoveries, where the water chemistry allows, you may even need to add a fourth stage. Another option to adding stages, is to recycle some Stage 2 concentrate back to the Stage 1 feed to increase cross flow velocity and allow higher recoveries but this increases the concentration of feed water constituents and subsequently the permeate quality is worse.

 And CCRO is not the silver bullet either!

Now a short discussion on ClosedCircuit RO (CCRO). The recovery rate of a CCRO system, like conventional RO, is limited by the chemistry and how much the feed water salts can be concentrated with antiscalant addition. In most cases, the recovery of CCRO is predicted by the antiscalant projections exactly the same as for conventional RO. Because CCRO purges the recycled concentrate every 15-45 minutes, if silica is the constituent limiting the recovery, due to the saturated silica concentration being reached towards the end of this cycle and the slower induction time for silica to precipitate once it reaches saturation (say 10 minutes), CCRO can push past the maximum recovery predicted by antiscalant projections. For that scenario, CCRO will achieve a higher recovery than a conventional RO system.

But for more common scalants such as calcium carbonate and calcium sulfate, the induction time is just seconds and the CCRO process offers no advantage over conventional RO if these are the limiting salts. I would be happy for someone to give me a good technical explanation how CCRO can achieve a higher recovery when CaCO3 and CaSO4 are the limiting salts because from my investigations I have not found one. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for new technologies that can improve on the recovery of conventional RO systems, but I also want to see good science on how this is achieved.

The main message I want you to get from this post though is the following:

INCREASING THE NUMBER OF STAGES DOES NOT ALLOW A HIGHER RECOVERY THAN WHAT THE ANTISCALANT PROJECTIONS PREDICT!!!

The comments and opinions in this post are my own and not those of my employer.

Westech joins Club of Foreign Aquired Companies

The announcement in late November that Westech was being acquired Swire, a diversified global group headquartered in the UK, signaled another previously US owned water treatment company being purchased by foreign interests. This follows Wigen being purchased by Metawater earlier in the year and Tonka/US Water and Avista being purchased by Kurita in recent years. Metawater also purchased Aqua-Aerobic Systems in 2016. Suez bought the RO business of Lanxess in late 2020 making it a very active year for acquisitions by foreign companies (of course Lanxess is German).

It raises the question; why are foreign investors so interested in acquiring home grown US water treatment companies while large US companies are not? A few decades ago there was US Filter who quickly gobbled up a lot of water companies to create the US Filter empire before these were eventually sold off to Veolia in 1999…..we also had GE getting into the water treatment business in 2006 with the notable acquisition of membrane company Zenon which has since been sold to Suez. But in the last 10 years the purchases have mostly all been off shore with companies such as Suez, Veolia, Siemens, Xylem, Kurita and Metawater picking up the best of the local companies. The notable exception is Dupont’s acquisition spree in 2019 (see previous post).

 

I don’t know much about M&As but from my perspective it seems like US investors are not interested in the steady but unspectacular rate of growth of the water treatment market. The potential for water treatment products in a drier and more crowded planet is alluring, but those companies that have bought into it expecting water will be the ‘new oil’ have been disappointed by the long sales cycles for capital infrastructure and government procurement processes and rules. You can’t just buy say an OEM in the desalination market, cut costs, standardize the products, increase revenue then flip the company… In fact, for large custom capital equipment you standardize at your own peril as some large OEMs have found out when trying to cut costs then becoming uncompetitive for large custom projects.

 

I understand that as a small self-funded company you can only grow so much before outside investment is needed to provide the resources to take that next growth leap, but from a local industry perspective it is disappointing there are not large local companies willing to invest in so many successful local homegrown businesses.

The comments and opinions in this post are my own and not those of my employer.

Non-Communication of Bid Results...

With a lack of in-person networking events, conferences, etc. I don’t have any breaking industry news to talk about lately. So, I’m going to ramble about a pet peeve of mine – not receiving any response or feedback when you are an unsuccessful bidder…

To submit a bid/proposal for process equipment requires a lot of work for no return unless you win the bid. Just pricing a custom designed piece of equipment can require quotes from dozens of vendors and many hours of work by a number of engineers combing detailed specifications, not to mention preparing the proposal and sometimes even preparing custom drawings and lifecycle cost analyses for the bid. The very least the recipient of the bid can do is inform the unsuccessful bidders who won the bid and the decision-making process uses in selecting the winner. 

Ideally I also like to see the price spread of the bids or an evaluation matrix that was used so I know if we were competitive and may have a chance of winning next time or if we should not waste our efforts. Often that feedback is provided, particularly for government projects where it is a requirement to provide a bid tab, but there are also many cases where no feedback is provided at all. I haven’t heard back on an industrial job bid a few months ago where we were begged to submit a bid and had to drop everything to get this together in less than 2 weeks, it was submitted at 11pm on a Friday night (bids due by 12pm) and since then it has been all crickets… I did find out indirectly after the bid that we were just there to provide another number so I haven’t pursued a response (plus I was a bit bitter about not being seriously considered after the owner pleading for us to bid). You can’t win them all but a response that we were not successful and why would be nice.

Here are my rankings from worst to best on the types of bids that provide feedback and why I think this is the case:

 

1. Industrial Projects

These are the worst for feedback. My theory for this is that to the owner, this is a one-off transaction and they don’t think they will need to bid this out again, so who cares what the losing bidders think… It is these projects, bidding either direct to the owner or via a consulting firm, where more often than not I have not had any feedback after a bid without badgering them. Good luck getting bidders if they need to rebid the project!

 

2. Design-Build and CMAR Bids

These can be confusing where the contractors ask for firm pricing at 30%, 70% and maybe 90% design and you never know if a selection will be made at the earlier stage quotes or the contractor is just checking the budget. That is often not communicated, so you can put in a lot of work on a proposal when a decision will not be made yet. On the other hand, you could throw a swag budget number out there at 30% design and find out a few months later someone else was selected based on a lower price… I think the contractors like to keep their options open and not commit too early unless they really need to pick a vendor early to help with the design.

 

3. Preselection Bids

In this case you are often sending bids to the design engineer or the owner, where the engineer makes the evaluation based on a selection criterion. Typically, you find out formally who won, but often no reason or a very vague reason is provided for the selection. So there is little you can learn about why you were not selected. These bids are the ones that often require specific system drawings and detailed lifecycle analyses. Where very little feedback is provided, I suspect the engineer or owner had a preferred bidder from the start and you were just making up the numbers. If the bids are sent to a municipality, in most cases you will get a detailed bid tab after the evaluation is complete (see Municipal Bids).

 

4. Municipal Bids

Where a bid is made directly to a municipality, it is a requirement that a bid tab be provided showing the ranked prices submitted. Selection criteria is usually very transparent and a manufacturer is left in no doubt where it finished up and why.

 

There are exceptions when there are some qualitative evaluation factors used as well as price with percentages or points applied to each factor to select a winner. This is where the grey kicks in and the owner (or engineer) can massage the numbers to pick who they want. The evaluation matrix will be published but the results can be very subjective. This also applies to direct/pre-selection bids.

 

5. Design-Bid-Build Contractor Bids

These are bids where you are providing your price to contractors on bid day and the contractors are submitting a total project bid to the owner. There are usually no grey areas here – the contactor will go with the lowest price in nearly all cases unless an OEM has a special relationship or the contractor has had a bad experience with an OEM. If the contractor must write in the suppliers on the bid form, you know within 24 hours if you were selected. If not, you rely on the honesty of the winning contractor to go with the low bidder on bid day and hope there is not post bid backroom deals done (if you were low on bid day). It is possible to get an idea of where the competitor pricing was if you know one of the bidding contractors well enough who will give some feedback. It is in a contractor’s best interest to provide some feedback if he thinks you may be working together on a future project. Otherwise, there is no way to find out if you were way low, or way high.

 

With all that said, it is nearly impossible to predict what feedback you will get despite the type of bid unless you have bid to that entity in the past. If you suspect you are just making up the numbers with another bidder preferred, you could very well be wasting your time and don’t expect any useful post bid feedback.

The comments and opinions in this post are my own and not those of my employer.

More Membrane Market Consolidation!

Suez Purchase of Lanxess’s RO Product Line

We may be stuck in our homes or offices in these unusual times but that hasn’t stopped players in the membrane market from making some interesting acquisitions in the past few months. The biggest recent news is Suez’s purchase of the RO membrane portfolio from Lanxess. In 2019 we saw a membrane manufacturer (Dupont) buying an OEM (Memcor), and now we have an OEM getting into the membrane manufacturing business. I am wondering what Suez’s motives are here. 

One of the points in the July 16 press release from Suez says the acquisition will “expand its international RO membrane production capabilities and expertise to help meet growing global demand”. See here for full release. That implies to me that Suez will not only use the membranes for its own RO products, but also plans to sell these to other OEMs and end users – unless it will just be chasing the RO membrane replacement market, which is significant. I doubt other OEMs will be interested in buying membranes from a competitor where there are plenty of alternative RO membrane suppliers available.

Now if Suez is mainly targeting the membrane replacement market, that is a different story. Lanxess has had very competitive pricing and if that pricing is sustainable, and not just an attempt to get reference installations, Suez may be able to pick up a good chunk of business. Not being known as a membrane company and with the RO membrane market pretty much commoditized, I think it was hard for Lanxess to break into the market. Now with the backing and reputation of Suez, that should provide more opportunities to bid projects and then it will just depend on whether the pricing remains competitive. Suez will also provide instant references from the RO systems it sells and from replacements at existing systems.

So now that I have thrown this idea around a bit, I think I have worked it out – Suez plans to use the Lanxess membranes in its own RO systems (which is a no brainer) and will also be chasing the RO membrane replacement market, but will not necessarily be expecting to sell many membranes to other OEMs, which makes sense. This will certainly put a hole in sales for the major RO membrane manufacturer who has been private labelling RO elements for Suez up to now.

Metawater Purchase of Wigen Water Technologies

I also must mention the purchase by Metawater of Wigen Water Technologies in April. See press release. While I am an employee of Wigen, I think all would agree the acquisition will certainly provide Wigen with the resources to pursue larger projects and grow faster than would be possible as a small business. It is also a reasonably seamless purchase where there are no management changes, Wigen retains its name and operates as a subsidiary of Metawater. Aqua Aerobic Systems, which was purchased by Metawater in 2016 has virtually no product overlaps with Wigen. So, I would say this is one of the less controversial acquisitions in the past 12 months.

Who is next?

There are still some smaller membrane OEMs out there ripe for the picking for larger companies wanting to expand in the market and maybe there are some larger OEMs hurting in these tough economic times and looking to exit the market so let’s see what happens in the next 6 months!

The comments and opinions in this post are my own and not those of my employer.

Filling the Conference Gap

In past years at this time I would be writing about technology developments and industry news I had picked up at the AMTA/AWWA Membrane Technology Conference (MTC) and the California WateReuse Conference in March but as we all know, this year these conferences and many more have been cancelled due to the Coronavirus outbreak. These two shows were one week away when most of the country started to go into lockdown, which was a shame for the many who had put so much hard work into planning these events, but obviously the right decisions were made to not cram so many people together in meeting rooms, exhibit halls and social events during these times. Also, as there had been so many attendee and exhibitor withdrawals, it was probably not feasible for the shows to proceed anyway.

Now with AWWA’s ACE20 and many other regional shows being cancelled through July so far, how will this impact the water industry in the short and long term?

In the short term, personally, I am missing out on the networking at these conferences where stronger relationships are developed from direct interactions with engineers, water utilities and manufacturers/service providers. It is through these interactions that you can find out about upcoming projects and industry developments well in advance of public announcements. I know Dupont was really looking forward to being the major sponsor at MTC following the acquisition of several membrane businesses in late 2019 and as I noted in a previous post, I was hoping to spend some time with Dupont at the show to see how these acquisitions would impact the relationship with its existing OEM customers. I am sure many similar meetings would have been planned at MTC. In the everyday hustle and bustle of working on projects and chasing new opportunities when you feel like you are always in firefighting mode, these conferences are important opportunities to break away and spend some quality time to look at new technologies, develop new relationships and strategize with current and future business partners.

The Coronavirus cancellations hit just when the busy spring conference season was starting and now that season is wiped out, we will have a void of at least five months with no shows. For manufacturers and consultants with well-established networks I don’t think there will be long term damage to industry relationships and finding new projects. This pause in shows is actually providing an opportunity to explore and utilize video conferencing and ancient means of communication like talking on the phone. Companies looking to introduce new technologies or enter new markets will be more impacted where the shows are an important avenue to launch these companies or technologies.

So far, I am not seeing a pause in projects bidding, although a few bid dates have been extended, but nothing cancelled yet. If anything, the bidding seems a little busier, maybe because engineers and owners have more time to get these bids on the street and are hoping by the time contractors are awarded the shutdowns will be relaxed and the projects can break ground in late summer. I don’t know if that means some projects are being brought forward so that here will be a lull in bids over summer/fall. I will update on that in a few months.

Long term there could be an impact on the attendance at conferences. Personally, with less travel I have been able to work on a few papers, write a few project case-studies, sort out some projection software issues, and other items I have had on the backburner for years. It has me wondering if it would be more productive for me to possibly cut back on some of the shows. I’m sure others will be thinking the same. There will also be reluctance to travel as much due to the risk of catching a virus, at least for the next year or two if not longer. For exhibitors, this pause in shows is probably also providing time for some reflection on the return they are getting from committing expenditure and resources to these shows and could result in some prioritization on what shows they exhibit at and redirecting these resources into webinars, etc – I am seeing a lot more webinars on new technologies and product information lately, obviously in response to less conferences and sales travel. Normally I wouldn’t have time to watch these, but with no travel I have been happy to sign in.

More Virtual Conferences?

We are seeing some of the cancelled shows now going to be presented virtually and depending on the success of the online versions, there could be more demand for this format. If so, the conference organizers will have to work out how to monetize the virtual offerings to make up for much-needed revenue from the conferences to keep these organizations going. As an industry we need organizations like AWWA and AMTA, plus local AWWA and WEA Sections, to be healthy and active so we have forums for technology exchanges, networking, training, government lobbying, regulation setting and many other services these groups provide. It is in our best interests to keep these organizations strong. I also do work on the industrial water treatment market and you only have to look at how fragmented that market is in terms of conferences and networking opportunities to really appreciate what we have in the municipal market with organizations such at AWWA, WEA, AMTA and WateReuse.

The comments and opinions in this post are my own and not those of my employer.

My Five and a Half Best Membrane Developments of the Decade

In January, Global Water Intelligence published the ten biggest water technology breakthroughs and busts of the past decade and many of those whose companies were mentioned on the listed breakthroughs (including myself) were happy to pass on the list. Just for fun I thought I would list my top five and a half membrane technology breakthroughs of the past decade, a number of which were on GWI’s list, and provide my reasoning. I won’t list my busts so I avoid getting bombarded with complaints, especially with the Membrane Technology Conference in a week, although if you look at my post from last February you will see a few I mentioned that are on GWI’s list.

Part of GWI's List

In no particular order, here is my list:

1/ Universal Rack for Ultrafiltration/Microfiltration Membranes

I might be biased here but this concept has really taken off in the last 6 years, where the availability of a number of similar UF/MF modules from different suppliers has allowed some OEMs to develop racks that can accommodate these modules and for the first time allow competitive bidding for the replacement modules. See a number of my pervious posts describing this concept in more detail. What makes this development sustainable is that it is not proprietary as a number of OEMs have developed these racks, which allows competitive bidding to supply these systems, which is very attractive to municipalities. As noted by GWI, H2O Innovation and Wigen along with Suez were the pioneers of this concept. While Suez was probably the first to market their rack, they are a minor player in this market in North America. GWI listed this development as #5.

2/ Retrofit UF/MF Modules

Hot on the heels of the development of the Universal Rack has been the introduction of retrofit UF/MF modules; exact replicas of existing modules in terms of dimensions, so they can be directly swapped out. Pall’s Microza module has been the main target of these replicas with the first replacement developed by Scinor followed by replacements developed by Dow/Dupont and Toray. Scinor has also developed replacements for Toray, Dow and Memcor (now Dupont) modules. Another target has been GE/Suez’s MBR membranes with several replacement modules on the market. Pall, Evoqua and Suez have been targeted due to their large installed base. With the development of retrofit modules and Universal Racks, the days of making money on replacing UF/MF modules are disappearing.

3/ Multibore UF Membranes

This was listed by GWI at #9. These are inside-out PES membranes which historically have had a bad reputation in the US due to integrity issues, but these multi-bore inside-out membranes manufactured by Inge/BASF (now Dupont) are different and are very tough and rarely break and have very high permeability. Adoption has been much more widespread outside the US, but there have still been a good number of municipal and industrial systems installed here in the past several years. Use on Universal racks is more limited because these racks are usually designed for outside-in PVDF membranes. Inge’s module has also had some success as a replacement option for Norit/Pentair inside-out modules. Dupont’s recent purchase of Inge from BASF could help increase the marketing reach of this product.

4/ Nanostone Ceramic Membranes

Nanostone’s ceramic membrane module is different from other ceramic membranes in a number of ways. The membrane is contained in a PVC housing, just like a polymeric membrane. The cleaning and backwashing regimes are also similar to polymeric membranes which has allowed Nanostone to retrofit these modules at installations using existing Pall, Dupont and probably other modules. As a result, Nanostone likely has quickly accumulated the largest number of ceramic membrane installations in the US. Other players such as Metawater with conventional stainless steel housings still only have a handful of US installations. While everyone likes the durability of ceramic membranes, the high cost has inhibited widespread adoption. Nanostone’s innovative method of module construction has helped reduce costs, but these are still a lot higher than polymeric membranes per square foot of membrane area and Nanostone’s installations are usually where polymeric membrane fluxes are low due to challenging water characteristics that don’t impact the ceramic membranes as much. GWI did not list the Nanostone membrane, possibly because it is still relatively new on the market and not proven as a long-term technology yet.

5/ Closed Circuit Desalination (CCD)

This is my lone high pressure membrane breakthrough where this market has been commoditized for some time. Desalitech (now Dupont also - do you see a trend here?) has certainly had success in rolling out this proprietary high recovery RO process, with a lot of industrial sales and some municipal sales. I don’t think this is a widespread replacement for conventional two and three-stage RO systems but rather a niche application where feed characteristics such as high silica or organic carbon (of wastewater origin) allow the CCD configuration to get higher recoveries. This was #7 on GWI’s list.

5.5/ Non-Exclusive MF/UF Modules

This isn’t really a new product or technology development but the introduction of new MF/UF modules in the past 10 years is worthy of mention as this has helped develop the market for the Universal UF rack, which would not be possible if a number of good quality modules were not available to OEMs. Module suppliers include Toray, Dow/Dupont, Hydranautics, Inge/Dupont, Scinor and Memstar. This has loosened the grip the previous Big Three MF/UF system suppliers had on this market with their proprietary systems.

I know there have also been some great breakthroughs with MBR membranes and systems but that is not my area of expertise.

The comments and opinions in this post are my own and not that of my employer.

Dupont goes on Membrane Technology Buying Spree!

I was just about to write a post speculating on how DuPont will integrate the recently acquired

BASF/Inge and Memcor Microfiltration/Ultrafiltration membrane products into its portfolio when it came to my attention that it was announced today they have just come to an agreement to also acquire Desalitech! Thoughts of Black Friday deals come to mind at this time of the year, but I won’t go there…

The first acquisition announced in late September was that of the Inge UF membrane product line from BASF which makes sense to me as it will complement Dupont’s range of membrane products where this membrane is a very durable inside-out PES membrane with some benefits over DuPont’s existing IntegraFlux outside-in PVDF membrane in challenging applications, plus established customers in Europe. It also does not change the relationships with existing OEM customers who would potentially buy from both membrane module suppliers.

The shortly after announced acquisition of Memcor from Evoqua is a little more complicated to work out. In my opinion, I don’t see how the Memcor MF module complements DuPont’s existing membrane portfolio since it is outside-in PVDF and from what I can see is losing a lot of market share to new higher surface area UF modules, including DuPont’s - unless DuPont wanted to acquire Memcor’s existing global customer base and add a submerged module to the portfolio, although for non-MBR applications, I rarely see submerged MF/UF systems being installed these days. DuPont wanting to add a MBR product to the portfolio makes the most sense and that seems to be the consensus amongst others speculating from the outside. I don’t know what percentage of Memcor’s sales are from MBRs, but it seems like DuPont is acquiring a lot of other Memcor products just to get an MBR membrane.

I was asking some of my DuPont contacts at recent conferences about the acquisitions but understandably they can’t disclose any details until the deals are finalized at the end of the year, plus it is my understanding all the details of how the businesses will combine are still being worked out. I did also talk to some Memcor/Evoqua employees and they said the whole engineering group will be coming over to DuPont. That raises a big question to me. Is DuPont thinking of not just being a membrane module supplier, but also expanding into the membrane system market and becoming an OEM? Now that would open up a whole can of worms!

As an OEM you would now have DuPont competing against their membrane module customers in many instances. That is going to be very sticky to manage and will make other OEMs very wary about disclosing project information when asking for quotes or just going to other membrane module suppliers. If DuPont is just looking at building MBR systems, there would be less conflict with its customers, since DuPont is currently not in the MBR market, although some of its customers for UF modules do also build MBRs so there would be some competition with these OEMs.

Does acquisition of Desalitech confirm DuPont is becoming an OEM?

Now how do we interpret the recent announcement of the pending acquisition of Desalitech? Desalitech has a proprietary high recovery Reverse Osmosis process and I believe a lot of the time uses Dupont’s FilmTec membranes in this process, although it has not been exclusive. Desalitech uses a number of fab-shops around the US to build its systems, has its own salesforce and is essentially an OEM. So, what the heck is behind this move! I have spoken to folks at Desalitech and some of their reps in the past and they have said they are not competing against conventional RO OEMs and are only looking at applications that need a recovery higher than what conventional RO can achieve and want to work with conventional RO OEMs to build their systems – but that is a whole lot of baloney. I hope DuPont hasn’t bought into that and think they can become an OEM with the Desalitech system and not run into conflict with their traditional RO membrane customers, who incidentally would make up the largest percent of sales for all of their membrane products. That would be suicide for them. If DuPont licenses the technology to OEMs and stops manufacturing themselves that would make a lot more sense.

I just heard the news about the Desalitech acquisition and may be jumping to conclusions, but it is fun to speculate. Unfortunately, there are no conferences left this year to hear what the industry may be saying about this. But the Memcor and Desalitech acquisitions do suggest DuPont may be looking at some sort of involvement in the membrane process equipment supply market and that will result in some interesting discussions with their existing OEM customers. I am sure all will be revealed regarding DuPont’s strategy in the membrane market in early 2020. Should make for a very interesting AMTA/AWWA Membrane Technology Conference in Phoenix in March!

The comments and opinions in this post are my own and not those of my employer.