Page 1497 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 6 June 2007
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of the ACT and is considered to be water scarce. High population densities, flat terrain and lack of available land do not allow Singapore to operate what we would consider a traditional water supply network reliant on local catchments and large storages.
The Public Utilities Board of Singapore, or PUB, have developed an integrated management plan for water that is designed to be diversified and robust. They have branded this the four national taps policy, which includes water from local catchments, imported water from Malaysia, desalinated water and purified water known in Singapore as NEWater. Due to its exceptionally high quality, NEWater is principally used to cater for demand from industry for pure water. As production of NEWater is expanded, it is anticipated it will be further used or more greatly used for potable supply.
Before visiting the various Public Utilities Board sites, I met with the Minister for the Environment and Water Resources for Singapore, Dr Yaacob Ibrahim. The delegation then visited Bedok NEWater factory, where the visitors centre is central to the PUB NEWater public education and engagement program. We also visited the Seletar NEWater Factory, the Marina Barrage, which is an innovative project that involves the construction of a dam across the Marina Channel forming a reservoir in the middle of the city, the SingSpring desalination plant located at Tuas and the Keppel Seghers Ulu Pandan NEWater plant.
We also visited the WaterHub facility established by PUB to be a premier centre for research and development in cutting-edge water technologies. The Hub comprises a Centre for Advanced Water Technology, a venue for partnering with the private sector and overseas partners and a centre of academic and industry training. Of most interest was the Seletar NEWater factory, which uses a similar process to that which has been under consideration in the ACT, namely ultrafiltration membranes, reverse osmosis membranes and ultraviolet disinfection equipment.
The plant has a current capacity of 24 megalitres a day, which is a similar size to the plant currently under consideration in the ACT. Due to its high quality, 75 per cent of Seletar’s production water is sent to local electronics industry wafer fabrication plants. The remaining 25 per cent is sent to storage in the lower Seletar reservoir and is used for drinking purposes.
The key message from Singapore was that of the critical nature of NEWater in diversifying water management within Singapore. The NEWater program’s key objective is to free up more of the natural catchment water for domestic use by replacing water used by industry with NEWater, which due to its very high quality is attractive to industry in both product quality and price. At the same time, PUB is educating the community about the concept of purified water by placing a percentage, a small percentage at this stage—around three per cent but proposed to rise to 10 per cent—of NEWater production in domestic water supply reservoirs.
What we saw was impressive—First World technology meeting the needs of a sophisticated First World city state. The delegation in Singapore had a hectic schedule from which I am sure we all gained a great deal of knowledge. I thank all the members of the delegation and the officers of PUB for their hospitality and their
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