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New technology to harvest fresh water from the submarines springs in the sea.

 
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15 Jan 2012

Nymphea Environnement introduces a new resource in water never exploited by men until now: the submarine springs of fresh water. Like common surface springs, numerous submarine springs are present all over the world. Sometimes very deep, sometimes at just a few meters from the coast, the springs exist for thousands of years.

The volume of water can be huge. The company has, for example, discovered a spring in Syria that has a flow of 5,000 liters of water per second. This can satisfy the consumption demand for a city of 1,000,000 persons.

10 years ago, Pierre Becker a French geologist, former commercial diver and offshore construction company owner, realized that this phenomenon could be the answer of the growing problem of water scarcity in the world. Therefore, he created in 2000 Nymphea Environnement to take up the challenge to provide people with this fresh water from the sea.

New technology to harvest fresh water from the submarines springs in the sea.

However, Pierre Becker wanted to build a company that deeply respects the environment. This desire to preserve the planet led the company to develop a water tapping technology that makes use of natural energy: gravity, buoyancy, water head, etc. No pumps, electricity or fuel are used to obtain fresh water.

In addition, the system collects only the volume of water that was previously lost in the ocean. Therefore the tapping units will never disturb the hydrogeological balances that have existed for thousands of years in some cases.

The installation is built to resist attack by the sea, particularly storms and swell. The stainless steel structure designed by Nymphea Environnement to fit perfectly on the springs discovered is split in 2 units. The first one insures the water tightness around the spring and avoid any contamination by the sea water.

The second unit is a pressure and overflow management system that hydromechanically regulates different parameters in real time. The result is that the system only collects the natural volume of water given by the spring and enhances the quality of the water to its best.

The main advantage of the water obtained by the Nymphea system is its low cost: 3 to 6 times cheaper than the desalinization plants. Therefore it is mainly intended for human consumption in areas affected by increasing drought. Depending on its quality, this water may also be used for agriculture or industry.

Today, Nymphea Environnement is owned by the Vinci Group, the largest European construction company, and benefits from their worldwide presence, well-established network, and financial capacities.

Several contracts have already been signed all around the world. In the Middle-East, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Koweit, the Sultanate of Oman and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia have a well-known hygrogeological potential in submarine springs.

The company has already worked for the Ministry of Environment in Qatar and has just created a branch office in the UAE to offer this new technology which will become a vital alternative of the conventional solutions tomorrow, in a world where the cost of energy is increasingly a key issue.



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