Located about six kilometers from the port of Sagunt, the desalination plant that the Government has indicated as a solution to the drought in Catalonia - if it worsens - has been supplying around 20 m3/year to the company Oxígeno, located in the same area, since October 2020. location. Its capacity, however, is much higher, and stands at 22,900 m3/day (equivalent to 8 hm3 annually), distributed across three production lines.
Of course, by virtue of the agreement it has with the town in which it is located, it could also distribute its water to the municipal network by the agreement that the state company Acuamed and the Sagunto City Council signed in January 2007. Even so, until Now the plant has not supplied water to the Sagunt City Council due to lack of demand. Yesterday, the Minister for the Ecological Transition, Teresa Ribera, called the plant an "underused facility" and highlighted that "it does not compete with other uses."
Likewise, Acuamed recalls that, to date, the supply by ship to Catalonia would not affect any current user of the plant and, although the future major consumer of the plant (around 60% of the production capacity) would be the gigafactory of PowerCo batteries, this is not projected until 2026, "and the previous year the volume supplied would already increase," they clarify.
"If there were a water emergency in Sagunt, demand could change, and not only there, since we have a pipeline that reaches the Sagunt water treatment plant and that would supply the entire Camp de Morvedre," explains Mariola Durá, the exploitation director. of the Sagunt desalination plant, the focus of attention since this Saturday the Minister of Ecological Transition, Teresa Ribera, picked up the phone to tell the president of the Generalitat Valenciana Carlos Mazón that she was contemplating this option for a severe drought scenario in Catalonia.
When the technician was asked about the operation proposed by the Government, she explained that "right now the pipeline that goes to the port is the smallest we have, so through that branch we could get a third of the capacity of dairy produce". Durá explains that, in case of having to carry more - "which is possible, because the plant is capable of producing more" - this pipeline would have to be supported with another one of larger diameter doing "emergency" work.
The current pipeline is enabled to divert 7,200 m3/day, but it could reach up to 23,000 m3/day with a larger pumping pipeline and a larger diameter pipeline to the port of Sagunt facilities. He understands Durá that this will depend on the execution times of this work, although he details that "when it is an emergency work, the times are usually quite agile." Times that are, he remembers, in the hands of the Ministry.
According to Durá, the process captures sea water together with the Naturgy combined cycle plant, located right next door. After pumping, the plant filters to eliminate suspended particles - "everything that is not seawater" - then there is one more filtration and it enters the "heart" of the plant, which is the so-called osmosis process. reverse. With high pressure pumps (at 70b), the water is passed through a membrane that divides the product in two: on the one hand, the water that is remineralized for human consumption and that would then go to the network, and the residual water.
The remaining water, with double the concentration of salt, is the brine, which is poured into the sea through a pipeline. This issue was one of the first that the Valencian president Carlos Mazón put on the table, when asking Ribera to guarantee that this overexploitation of the Valencian desalination plant (and that it will entail more brine waste) does not have impacts on the marine environment. . In this regard, Marisol Durá assures that "the impact of the brine is closely controlled to guarantee that when it hits the sea it already has the salinity of seawater. On that part we can be very calm."
