The desalination market has been a tough place these last few years. 2012 was the most difficult year for the market since 2004. It will take until 2015 for new desal plant orders to reach the levels they were at in 2007. But despite these difficulties, a lot is changing beneath the surface.

During the boom years the main focus of technology development in desalination was bringing down the total cost of water from large-scale municipal seawater desalination plants. The gains were largely driven by better membranes and more efficient energy recovery.

Today the new technology companies which are making a real difference are those focusing on niche areas of desalination where demand has been constrained by technical factors. Here are five examples of desalination problems which need a solution: Inland brackish water desalination plants cannot dispose of brine reject easily; Evaporators for brine disposal are messy and expensive ; Membranes don’t like high temperatures, hydrocarbons or harsh treatment; Recovery rates from both thermal and reverse osmosis desalination are too low; Customers want efficient solar desalination.

In a DesalData webinar today I talked about a few desal start ups such as Desalitech, Memsys, Oasys, Salt Works and PolyCera which are addressing these issues rather than claiming that they can deliver cheaper water from a 200,000m3/d seawater plant. Desalitech for example has a closed-circuit desalination system which recirculates the brine reject until it delivers the required recovery rate. Besides offering some energy savings over conventional RO, it makes it possible to maximize the volume of product water while minimizing the volume of brine reject.

This makes it ideal for inland brackish desalination, particularly where variations in feedwater quality are a problem. Memsys is a membrane distillation technology which (like Oasys and Saltworks) has shown itself to be a useful alternative to traditional evaporators. It could also open up an interesting market for “reject scalping” plants – squeezing more water from the brine stream before it goes back to sea. No one has really cracked solar desal yet, but given the interest from the Gulf, I would be surprised if we don’t have a credible proposition within the next year. Overall I expect that the desalination market will grow from $5.2 billion in 2012 to $6.3 billion in 2013 and $8.9 billion in 2014.

This is good growth but still well below the $9.3 billion achieved in 2007. The market has been constrained by the weakness of the municipal seawater desalination sector, but we are already beginning to see a broadening of desalination applications which will guarantee the long term 8%-9% compound annual growth rate for the industry.