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The plant is surprisingly quiet. It operates with hardly any noise and is run by just 10 workers. Add a perpetual sea breeze and, as one staff member at the plant noted, it’s practically like being at a holiday resort.
Now, Hyflux, the company behind the Singapore plant, is building a similar facility in China’s coastal city of Tianjin to service a refinery owned by oil and gas giant Sinopec. It will be China’s largest seawater desalination plant, with an output of 100,000 cubic meters, when it is completed in 2009.
"The problems in China, especially environmental ones, are an opportunity for us," said Sam Ong, Hyflux’s chief investment officer.
Indeed, desalination represents the high end of what could be cleantech’s next big growth sector in China - water treatment.
FEELING THE PRESSUREClean water is scarce in China. Economic expansion has led to water sources being squeezed at both ends: Not only is demand rocketing from agriculture, industry, and an increasingly wealthy population, but supplies are shrinking because of unchecked pollution.
A study by the Asian Development Bank found that 60% of China’s 669 cities suffer water shortages, and nearly half of the country’s 800 million farmers have no access to safe drinking water.
"Water is going to be a major problem for China in the coming years," David Arthur, Shanghai regional manager of environmental consultancy ERM, told <EM>China Economic Review</EM> in October.
As if on cue, massive outbreaks of algae erupted across China’s major freshwater lakes this summer. Lake Tai, which borders the city of Wuxi near Shanghai, was covered in bright green algae sludge that thrived on the pollutants being dumped into the water by chemicals factories. The situation got so bad that the city had to cut off water supplies for days.
The government has long realized the scale of the problem. It started a major policy push, under the 11th Five-Year Plan, released in 2005, to increase the country’s supply of clean water. This includes boosting efficiency and raising wastewater treatment standards.
OPENING UPInefficient state-owned enterprises are also being asked to buck up. China’s water industry has been liberalizing since 2002, when new rules separated the ownership of a utility from its operation for the first time. At the same time, the large conglomerates, like France’s Veolia began to enter the municipal wastewater treatment business in earnest.
Five years on, smaller players like Hyflux, and a coterie of Chinese firms like Epure and Sino-Environment listed on the Singapore Stock Exchange, are becoming forces in the industry. These mid-weight companies are trying to grab a share of a municipal water-treatment market in which current foreign investment in is still under 10%, according to a Credit Suisse report.
"We took advantage of this opening up two, three years ago," said Ong. "We have gone from zero to 25 plants in about two years, and our pipeline in China will continue to grow."
It’s no accident that Singapore has become a hub for water businesses. The island-state has long been dependent on imported water supplies from neighboring Malaysia. But government initiatives to create new water sources have helped focus capital and science on the problem.
In China, the biggest opportunity is likely to come from municipal wastewater treatment. Nearly half of China’s cities lacked wastewater treatment facilities in 2005, according to official statistics.
However, the field is quickly becoming crowded. Foreign giants like Veolia and General Electric comprise one end of market, and a fragmented bunch of small local players form the other.
