By John — Desalination News
Energy Recovery Inc., the California-based maker of pressure exchanger technology used to cut energy consumption at desalination plants worldwide, has secured a contract to supply its newest PX Q650 energy recovery devices to a major seawater reverse osmosis (SWRO) plant under construction in Saudi Arabia, the company announced this week.
Energy Recovery said the facility, once complete, is expected to rank among the ten largest desalination plants in the world, though it has not disclosed the plant’s name, operator, exact capacity or the value of the contract. The order follows a string of PX Q650 wins the company has landed across Asia and the Middle East earlier this year, as the device line builds a track record on live projects rather than remaining a newly launched product on paper.
The PX Q650 is the newest and highest-capacity device in Energy Recovery’s PX Pressure Exchanger series, first released in March 2026. Pressure exchangers work by transferring the pressure energy from a SWRO plant’s concentrated reject brine stream to the incoming seawater feed, sharply cutting the amount of electricity a plant’s high-pressure pumps must supply. Energy Recovery says the Q650 has a single moving part and a 30-year design life, which the company argues lowers maintenance costs and downtime risk over a plant’s operating lifetime compared with older-generation recovery equipment.
Saudi Arabia draws more than 70% of its potable water from desalination, making it one of the most desalination-dependent countries on Earth and a priority market for equipment suppliers competing on energy efficiency. The Kingdom’s Vision 2030 strategy has pushed for larger, more efficient SWRO capacity as an alternative to the thermal desalination technology that historically dominated its coastline, and major component suppliers have followed that shift. Desalination News previously covered Energy Recovery landing $31 million across several international pressure-exchanger contracts last September, underscoring how routinely the company’s technology is now specified into new SWRO builds rather than being an occasional add-on.
Energy Recovery is also building new manufacturing capacity in the Kingdom itself: the company has a facility planned near Dammam Second Industrial City, separate from this contract, that will allow it to produce and service pressure exchanger equipment closer to its biggest Gulf customers rather than shipping finished units from the United States.
For plant operators, the appeal of energy recovery devices is straightforward: desalination’s largest single operating cost is the electricity needed to force seawater through reverse osmosis membranes at high pressure, and even incremental efficiency gains compound across a 25-to-30-year plant lifetime into substantial savings. For a facility expected to rank among the world’s ten largest, those savings would be measured in the tens of millions of dollars over the plant’s life, even without an initial contract value disclosed.
What happens next will depend on Energy Recovery’s customer disclosing more about the underlying project — construction timelines, final capacity and the plant’s operator are all still unconfirmed publicly. Given the scale implied by a top-ten global ranking, further detail is likely to surface as the broader EPC contract and financing for the plant itself become public, which would also let Desalination News confirm whether this is a new project or an expansion tied to one of the Kingdom’s existing SWRO pipelines.
(Source: Stockhouse, H2O Global News)