The FO market is small and dominated by four companies, including Modern Water (installation below) |
While there is little reason to consider FO over RO except for more challenging feed waters, FO combined with RO does have potential promise to enhance recovery in seawater desalination to pull more water out of the RO concentrate and increase plant capacity, without increasing the withdrawal rate from existing intake structures.
Forward osmosis is an osmotic process that, like RO, uses a semi-permeable membrane to separate water from dissolved solutes. The driving force for this separation is an osmotic pressure gradient. A “draw” solution of higher concentration than the feed water pulls water through the membrane and into the draw solution, leaving the solutes behind. The water is then separated from the draw solution using a separate process. In contrast, reverse osmosis uses hydraulic pressure to force the feed water through a membrane, again leaving solutes behind, but counteracting the osmotic pressure gradient.
FO has been researched for just as long as reverse osmosis, with the focus of attention being on the theory, membrane development, module design, draw solutions and applications. Until now, FO has failed to gain anywhere near the same success as RO, with some commercial failures giving the technology a reputation for being “over-hyped”, with a disproportionate share of academic and industry attention.
However, the technology is now starting to gain traction, and faster commercial development can be expected. Evaporation and DTRO (Disc Tubular RO) technology are some of the niches that may be disrupted.
The FO market
The market is dominated by FTSH2O, Porifera, Oasys and Modern Water. However, the FO market is small. None of the companies have more than a few commercial installations, so a few breakthroughs and contracts from the other companies covered in this report would make a big difference with regards to market share.
A key distinction between the FO firms is whether they manufacture membranes, modules, draw solutions or full systems. The companies offering full systems are doing so in order to market their core technology to early adopters - in the long term, the systems suppliers recognise that their technology is likely to be implemented by other companies, such as engineering firms.
Market share
The market share of the FO companies is subject to the law of small numbers. Because there are so few installations, the judgement of market share by installation count will change significantly upon further due diligence beyond the self-reporting from this research, as well as growth due to a high number of reported “projects on the books” becoming true installations over the next two years.