Companies Join Forces to Bring Desalination Technology to Remote Islands

memsys Clearwater Pte. Ltd. (Singapore) and PT. Dwiputra Sumber Sukses (DSS) have entered into a license agreement to pursue seawater desalination for remote islands and communities and brine concentration for targeted industrial applications in Indonesia utilizing memsys’ membrane distillation (MD) technology. The first unit, with a capacity of 100 cubic meters per day (m3/d), will be built in 2014.

A progressive Indonesian company, DSS was established and is wholly owned by Justin Margono. For several decades, it has represented various established companies from the US and Europe for the Indonesian market, particularly in the pulp and paper and oil and gas industries.

memsys, which has operations in both Singapore and Germany, has also entered into a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with PT. Meranti Tirta Investasi (MTI), a wholly owned subsidiary of DSS, to jointly build a membrane distillation seawater desalination plant at Selatpanjang, Meranti Islands, Riau Province.

MTI was established to build a desalination plant to supply clean potable water to the city of Selatpanjang. The first phase of its reverse osmosis (RO) system has been brought online and is currently the only facility capable of providing clean, potable water in the area. MTI is working with memsys to provide the second phase expansion of seawater desalination using membrane distillation technology to increase the production capacity and produce distilled drinking water for Selatpanjang and its surrounding areas.

“Indonesia provides incredible opportunities for the memsys membrane distillation process. We are very happy to have DSS as our licensee, especially as we have found a great knowledge of MD technology within the team already. It is extremely encouraging to see the eagerness with which DSS adapts our technology. Building the first unit this year is proof of DSS’s ability to make things happen,” said Götz Lange, Chief Executive Officer of memsys.

Justin Margono, Director of DSS, noted, “We have identified memsys’ membrane distillation as the cutting-edge technology that can help lead our company into developing the market whereby treatment of seawater/brackish water to supply clean, potable water in remote islands and communities in Indonesia can be commercially viable with incorporation of distillation with low cost heat source. As a licensee of memsys, we also look forward to the applications in the industrial sector where further concentration of brine solution from the conventional processes to reduce the wastewater discharge capacity could be critical to protecting the surrounding environment and resources, while reducing both capital and operating costs for the end users.”