LG Chem to supply desalination filters to Omani plant

Korea’s largest chemical and battery-maker LG Chem is picked as the exclusive supplier of filters to a desalination plant in Oman, the company said Monday.

LG Chem said it won a contract to exclusively provide about 20,000 reverse osmosis desalination filters to a plant being built by SWRO in Sohar by next year. SWRO is based in Sohar, with the largest stake in the company owned by Spanish desalination plant provider Valoriza Agua. 

Reverse osmosis is a water purification technology that uses a semipermeable membrane to remove ions, molecules and particles from seawater to make it suitable to drink or put to other domestic and commercial uses.

The 20,000 reverse osmosis filters will allow the plant to provide desalinated water to about 800,000 residents a day, officials said.

The contract is speculated to be worth tens of billions of won, including the replacement filters, the industry sources said.

The seawater around the Persian Gulf requires the best filter technology and capability, as the salt concentration is the highest in the world and the temperature there is also high.

In the SWRO’s product test, LG Chem’s desalination technology reportedly received highest scores in eliminating salt and boron.

With the latest contract won, the chemical company now provides reverse osmosis filters to 19 countries since it opened its factory late last year. The lit of countries includes Egypt, Israel, Spain and Mexico.

Last year, the company succeeded in raising the performance of its reverse osmosis system by 30 percent and reaching a salt elimination rate of 99.85 percent, the highest in the industry.

LG Chem is seeking to open a new factory line starting from the end of this year to amplify the production size by three times. It previously injected about 40 billion won in building a new factory line, they added.

It is also aiming to expand its global business networks to 17 countries in a bid to pioneer the world’s water purification market. As of now, it has built the network in 12 countries, mostly in Europe and the Middle East.

Experts have anticipated that the size of the global reverse osmosis filter market will reach 2.2 trillion won ($1.8 billion) by 2020, with an annual growth rate of 10 percent. The size of the market reached 1.5 trillion won last year.

By Lee Hyun-jeong (rene@heraldcorp.com)