20 years old RO plant was feeding the treated water to Al-Zubair petrochemical complex in Basrah – south of Iraq, and the plant was partially responsible on feeding the drinking water to the civilians in Al-Zubair town. The plant became completely out of order as no actual maintenance took place since years. The plant was operated manually in very primitive way and producing poor water quality.

UNICEF & DFID asked AES help in order to assess the plant situation and then to determine and quantify the actual requirements to revive the plant.
Later on, UNICES & DFID placed order to AES in order to execute the required agreed works to ensure producing 24,000 CuM/D of treated water

AES decided to provide completely new RO module that capable to produce 8,000 CuM/D in addition to make complete revamping to two existing RO modules where we kept only the steel structure and the membrane vessels.
New electrical and automation system was designed and provided using the higher existing technology.
The big challenge was during commissioning the plant as it was not possible to send our engineers to Iraq because the well known security conditions and that was real problem taking into consideration the specialty of this work for connecting the old system through the new system.
To over jump this problem, AES established internet connection between AES headquarter in Riyadh and the plant. And using special software AES engineers have monitored the site HMI screens and they were able to the required justification and to instruct the step by step action through email or phone.

Plant is producing its full capacity of treated water with effluent TDS of < 100 ppm from raw water coming from Shat Al Arab with TDS of 1,300 ppm.