Asia’s water hub Singapore will build a third desalination plant as it has experienced its longest dry spell in 149 years.
As part of a Committee of Supply speech in Parliament held this week, environment minister Dr Vivian Balakrishnan confirmed the third project will be going ahead and also said additional desalination plants will be sited in other parts of Singapore.
Currently, the nation’s desalination and recycling plants are functioning at 70% capacity.
The size of the third plant has not been disclosed. However, Singapore’s first project – SingSpring has a 136,000 m3/day capacity and the second – Tuaspring – over 300,000 m3/day capacity.
The announcement fits in with utility PUB’s aims to increase desalinated water to meet 30% of demand until 2060.
Desalination is one of the country’s “Four National Taps”, which also includes water from local catchments, imported water and reused wastewater, known as NEWater.
The minister added that “water infrastructure takes land and land is precious” and that the government is “exploring the possibility of building the Water Reclamation plant and the NEWater Factory in Kranji, underground”.
He added: “This obviously will be more expensive, so we have to carefully study the financial and technical aspects of doing so. But, nevertheless, I think we have to start conserving land on a Whole-of-Government basis.”
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