The Company AGSHYA
In June 2023, the company was registered in Jeddah/ KSA and established the development and pilot production centre in Jeddah. A team of 10 people are engaged in the company.
Our Prospective
The main aim of this business is to establish industry in the water treatment field and to be on of the effective names in the region and a part of the solution to prevent the water shortage around the world to come.
We have the following patents:
1- WO/2014/111889, 2- WO/2012/100318, 3- WO/2012/100326 4-US 11,779, 885 B2 (2023)
More patents are still under research.
Our Motivation
The demand for good-quality drinking water is increasing steadily and rapidly worldwide. Increasing population, with the desire to improve and sustain the most basic standards of living, contributes to the increase in this demand. The severity of the problem is much more pronounced in the Middle East, Africa, Southern Europe, Australia and USA (see fig. 1).
Fig 1: The water availability projection for 2025
These countries suffer from shortage of running source water, scanty rainfall and rapid population growth. The planet’s available water resources do not allow many alternatives. With 97% of available water represented by salty water with the Salinity Level above 35,000 mg/l, the largest possible source of alternative water supply requires easily available, cost-effective and ecologically sound, desalination processes. Desalination can be achieved either by thermal processes (phase change) such as Multi-Effect Distillation (MED) and Multi-Stage-Flash (MSF), or membrane processes such as Reverse Osmosis (RO). Both of these conventional desalination processes are energy intensive and are very uneconomical to build and operate.The Middle East and North Africa is home to 6% of the world’s population and less than 2% of the world’s renewable water supply. In fact, it is the world’s driest region with 12 of the world’s most water scarce countries: Algeria, Bahrain, Kuwait, Jordan, Libya, Oman, the Palestinian Territories, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen.
On average, water availability is only 1,200 cubic meters, around six times less than the worldwide average of 7,000 cubic meters.
Most MENA countries cannot sustainably meet their current water demand. With population growth and increased demand, water availability per capita is expected to be halved by 2050.
Saudi Arabia is considered among the poorest countries in the world in terms of natural renewable water resources. It is a desert country with little precipitation and no rivers or lakes, leaving it dependent on an extensive infrastructure of costly and energy-intensive water desalination plants.
Saudi Arabia consumes near 7 billion cubic meters of water daily, 60 % of which is desalinated. Of this, 40 % comes from SWCC desalination stations and 20 % from stations operated by the private sector. The Governor of the SWCC, recently admitted in a press conference: “We have exceeded the economic accounts allotted for providing desalinated water.”
In meeting the demand for the most basic and essential requirement for life, the Saudi authorities face three challenges: bottlenecks in desalination capacity, pricing, and the depletion of existing resources.
While Saudi Arabia is among the most water–poor countries in the world, its water system is one of the least costly for consumers. The tariff paid by consumers per cubic meter desalinated water is SAR 0.12 (about USD 0.03), while, the cost of production for stations that produce 20,000 cubic meters daily reaches SAR 12 (USD 3.20) per cubic meter. This is what costs the public treasury vast sums to produce water.
Membrane Distillation
Membrane distillation (MD) is a hybrid of thermal and membrane desalination processes. MD is a relatively new process that is being investigated worldwide as a low cost and energy saving alternative to conventional desalination techniques. Briefly, MD is a thermally driven process in which a micro-porous membrane acts as a physical support separating a warm solution from a cooler chamber, which contains either a liquid or a gas. As the process is non-isothermal, vapour molecules (water vapour in the case of concentrating non-volatile solutes) migrate through the membrane pores from the high to the low vapour 2 pressure side; that is, from the warmer to the cooler compartment
Our Technology
Currently, in MD process, commercial Polytetraflouroethylene (PTFE), Polypropylene (PP)and Polyvinyldiflouride (PVDF) have been used, although those membranes are designed and manufactured for Microfiltration and Ultraflitration application, however, those membranes have a flux of maximum 20 L/m2.h in the best operating conditions. Our technology is based on the development of a membrane that is manufactured specifically for membrane distillation (MD) in order to improve the efficiency of the treatment system (flux enhancement) by three to six folds. Using the newly developed membranes, the energy consumption is expected to be much lower, compared to other conventional processes. Since the whole system could be run by solar energy for heating, cooling and water circulation processes. MD using our newly developed membranes could be easily integrated to the waste stream of the currently employed desalination processes such as RO and MSF in order to increase the productivity of those desalination plants.
