S'pore opens third desalination plant in Tuas
Singapore's third and smallest desalination plant officially opened yesterday, with the promise of turning seawater into drinking water more productively and cheaply.
The $217 million Tuas Desalination Plant can produce up to 30 million gallons a day (mgd), enough for 200,000 of Singapore's 1.3 million households.
This is as much as the volume produced by the SingSpring Desalination Plant, despite being half its size at 3.5ha.
With the new plant, 30 per cent of Singapore's water needs can be met by desalination, up from 25 per cent.
Two more such plants are in the works in Marina East and on Jurong Island, and when these 30mgd plants are up by 2020, they will bring total desalination capacity to 190mgd.
With Singapore's water use set to double to 860mgd by 2060, such "heavy, but necessary investments" must be made ahead of time and demand, said Minister for the Environment and Water Resources Masagos Zulkifli.
Such investment "is made possible by right-pricing water to reflect the long-run marginal cost of producing our next drop of water which is likely to come from Newater and desalination".
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