Christopher Gasson marvels at the way Chinese companies are innovating to cut the cost of water and wastewater treatment.
Comment Published: 8 January 2025
What is the next big step down in the cost of water and wastewater treatment? It is a question that I have been puzzling over since the beginning of 2023, when our industry was suddenly gripped by project price inflation. At the time, it looked as if higher prices might just be the temporary result of the dislocations of COVID, but as the months have passed, nothing has become cheaper. Higher interest rates have added to the cost of ownership of all water infrastructure, while project delivery prices have risen as contractors reassess the risks and returns available in the water infrastructure sector. How do we get the cost of water down now?
Last year I took a delegation from Saudi Arabia to China in search of the innovations which might help solve this problem, and I think I saw the future. It is called the Newater House, and it is supplied by GreenTech Environmental, a Beijing-based membrane systems company. It offers three innovations which I think could provide the way ahead:
1. No people. Eric Zhang, the CEO of GreenTech, argues that 30% of the cost of water treatment facilities has nothing to do with water treatment. It is required to facilitate the presence of people on sit, and it includes offices, toilets, canteens, stairways, corridors, car parks, and the like. Zhang isn’t the only person thinking this way in China: on the trip, we also visited Shenzhen Water’s 200,000m3/d Buji wastewater treatment plant. It is entirely underground, is automated using artificial intelligence, and employs just eight people and a robot dog. GreenTech’s Newater House takes this one step further. It doesn't even employ a robot dog. Everything is monitored off-site, with service teams visiting to replenish consumables or maintain the system.
2. No construction risk. The Newater House is a product, rather than a project. It is assembled in modular units at GreenTech’s vast manufacturing facility. These are bolted together in the factory and fully tested before being dismantled and loaded on trucks for delivery. Minimal on-site civil work is required before they can be plugged in and put into operation. The idea that pre-engineering holds the key to reducing construction risk in water projects is not new: it is the rationale behind Veolia’s Barrel desalination unit, as well as the core of Nijhuis’ strategy for containerised industrial water solutions. What makes the Newater House different is its scale: nobody has attempted to build pre-engineered units with capacities of more than 50,000m3/d before. I suspect that it is only in China where people can conceive of factories so large that they can make such things.
3. Continuous improvement. Once you take the people out of a water treatment plant and leave it to run itself, you start creating data feeds on every aspect of plant operation. Feed this data into an AI script and you find that it not only continuously improves the process, but it also helps design the next generation of modules in production. Again, GreenTech is not the only company to see this opportunity: at Shenzhen Water's Buji plant, there are counters to show the savings the AI is delivering (working in partnership with a digital twin), and the company is using the data in the design of its future plants.
GreenTech and Shenzhen Water are two of the major beneficiaries of the massive investment China has made in extending wastewater treatment and reuse over the past decade. With that market now cooling off, both are now looking for opportunities outside the country. They are welcome. Without Chinese innovation, I don’t see how the cost of water and wastewater is ever going to go down.
