Suez integrates desalinators and salt pans in Trapani

It has taken four years of research and now, finally, the SEArcularMINE project, financed by the European Union with 5.8 million euros under the Horizon 2020 programme, has borne its first fruits: a pilot plant for the development of a supply system for critical raw materials (such as magnesium, lithium, and cobalt), which was presented in Trapani in recent weeks. This is an ambitious project, which aims to make the most of the brines produced by desalinators (thus reducing the environmental impact of these infrastructures, which are increasingly strategic in responding to the water crisis caused by global warming), as well as to produce, as mentioned, primary resources for industrial development, of which Europe is, however, lacking and therefore too dependent on third countries.

Twelve different partners including universities, research centres, SMEs and companies from nine European and Mediterranean countries worked on the project. Among them is Suez, a French multinational specialising in the design, construction and management of plants for access to integrated water and environmental services, which, together with the University of Palermo, carried out the technical-economic assessment of the integration between the desalination plant and the saltworks, and also provided support for the industrialisation of some technologies, as Massimiliano Bianco, CEO of Suez Italy, explained.

The technologies developed by SEArcularMINE have varying degrees of maturity and will still require some years to be implemented and reach the stage of industrialisation and commercialisation. However, Suez has managed to reach a good level of maturity on its own front, so much so that it has created - again together with the University of Palermo and the start-up ResourSeas - a circular economy patent to be applied to seawater desalination. A sort of spin-off of SEArcularMINE, which has seen the start-up on the island of Lampedusa of a demo plant for the recovery of magnesium hydroxide and chemicals from brines coming from desalination plants, to then promote their reuse in the desalinated water supply chain. "At the end of this project, it will be possible to use the desalter waste to feed the brines and this process will be industrialised and commercialised in our technological solutions," adds Bianco. This is an important step, since salt pans are often located in geographic areas characterised by water scarcity, such as Sicily. The integration of the two systems will therefore make it possible to guarantee the supply of drinking water in these areas, while at the same time increasing the productivity and circularity of the salt pans.