On the 6th of October, Aguas de Antofagasta inaugurated the Tocopilla Desalination Plant, projected with an initial installed production capacity of 75 l/s, expandable in the future to 100 l/s.
With this initiative, Puerto Salitrero has become the first city in the country with more than 20 thousand inhabitants with a 100% drinking water supply from seawater desalination.
The inauguration was attended by regional and local authorities, led by the regional governor Edgar Blanco and the mayor of Tocopilla, Luis Moyano, who, respecting the preventive measures of social distancing learned details of the project and the benefits it will bring to the Tocopillan community.
ECOAGUA has been present in the project since its inception, carrying out the feasibility study of the Plant, a trade-off study of pretreatment alternatives and carrying out the basic engineering of the Plant in the disciplines of process, mechanical, electricity and instrumentation and control.
Seawater is captured by an underwater pipeline that goes 650 meters into the Pacific Ocean and at a depth of 29 meters, to then be propelled from the coast to the process building where the desalination and remineralization of the water takes place.
The investment reaches 46 million dollars with the sanitation company’s own resources. It is worth mentioning that this work establishes Aguas Antofagasta Grupo EPM as one of the few sanitation companies worldwide that directly manages the design and construction of its desalination plants, thus demonstrating its leadership in desalination for almost two decades.
During those 20 years ECOAGUA has been accompanying Aguas de Antofagasta in all its desalination projects and continues to show satisfactory solutions as a result of the work and experience in the desalination industry, currently working on a new project with this client, who once again bets by ECOAGUA in its search for the highest quality standards in its plants.