By John — Desalination News
Flocean’s subsea desalination system off Norway’s west coast has moved from prototype to working infrastructure, with the company confirming its Flocean One unit has reached “first water” and is now producing freshwater at full capacity. The industrial-scale system sits roughly 500 metres below the surface near Mongstad, using the ocean’s own hydrostatic pressure to drive reverse osmosis instead of the energy-intensive pumps conventional coastal plants rely on.
The milestone follows more than a year of continuous testing on an earlier prototype at the same site, which Desalination News covered in January as the company prepared to scale up to a commercial unit. Flocean says the approach cuts energy use by 40 to 50 percent compared with land-based plants, largely by letting depth do the work that pumps otherwise handle, while also avoiding the coastal land footprint and brine-outfall disputes that complicate many onshore projects.
Water technology group Xylem, which took a strategic stake in Flocean last year, framed the achievement as the proof point the industry needed to move from pilot agreements to firm commitments. The company says it now has more than 15 projects in active development, including a partnership with Norway’s Alver Municipality and an agreement with WaterConnect to bring the technology to the Maldives, where limited land and chronic freshwater scarcity make conventional plants difficult to site.
Subsea desalination has circulated as an engineering concept for decades without a commercial-scale demonstration to back it. Flocean One’s sustained output changes that calculus for utilities and financiers, who can now point to a working reference plant rather than a theoretical one when evaluating whether to commit to similar projects elsewhere.
(Source: Flocean, Smart Water Magazine)