By opening the tap Peter Vermaat (Evides director) and Marc van Hijfte (Yara director) put the new demineralised water plant into use on 28 April 2010. Evides Industriewater built this plant for the production of demineralised water on the Yara site in Sluiskil. The plant, that has been operational since the summer of 2009, forms part of a 12-year DBFO contract (design, build, finance & operate), and comprises a pre-purification unit, an ion exchanger and a condensate polishing unit.
The new plant produces 5 million cubic metres of demineralised water a year. For Yara, this new collaboration with Evides means that the demineralised water supply is completely outsourced, because from now on, Evides is not just responsible for the supply of the feed water, but also for the production of demineralised water.
The system, entirely designed and built by Evides, uses three different qualities of feed water: groundwater from the Evides production site in Sint Jansteen, pre-treated river water from the Biesbosch in Brabant, and return condensate from Yara. This multi-source concept will guarantee the supply reliability of the process. Also, the connection to the Biesbosch transport pipe contributes to making Yara's water supply sustainable, as surface water is used for the production of industrial process water.
The demineralised water from the new plant is of extremely high quality. Yara uses this not just for the production of steam, but as product water it also forms part of Air1®, a liquid used to reduce NOx emissions from trucks. This requires extremely pure demineralised water: the TOC levels cannot exceed 100 ppb. Following an extensive pilot study, Evides specifically adjusted its ion exchange process of the demineralised water plant to this.
Evides Industriewater has succeeded in realising a future-proof customised solution for Yara on the basis of the knowledge and experience it gained with customised plants at Dow Chemical (Terneuzen, Stade), DuPont (Dordrecht), and the Botlek Demineralised Water Plant (Rotterdam) among others.
