Abunayyan, a Riyadh-headquartered power and water business, has entered into a strategic partnership agreement with Pani to implement water treatment plant optimization software in the former’s extensive client’s network of desalination and industrial and wastewater treatment facilities throughout the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.
Wesam Muhammad, digital transformation and innovation director at Abunayyan, commented: “With this partnership, and the innovative machine learning platform from Pani, we will drive fleets of treatment plants forward into a new level of efficiency. This partnership remains true to our ethos of ‘Sustaining Life’ and to our roots of pursuing revolutionary contributions to raising the standard of living.”
The MENA region relies on reverse osmosis (RO) for desalination due to extreme scarcity of freshwater, which leaves few other options. RO is typically regarded as “expensive” and “energy-intensive”, and governments in these regions subsidise water rates to keep prices low.
Khalid Abunayyan, chairman of the board of Abunayyan, added: “We’ve seen water treatment processes and instrumentation make advances over the years. Pani provides a software solution so technologically advanced, that it can create value rivaling upgraded equipment, and for such a minimal cost. We are thrilled to see how efficiencies will improve with Pani’s technology.”
Developments in cloud computing and the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, paired with machine learning (ML) and holistic digital twinning techniques, have allowed for improvements in water treatment performance. Pani integrates with existing systems – such as SCADA and PLC systems – not only to centralise and visualize data, but to analyse, interpret, and prescribe optimal setpoints for optimum energy consumption and product water quality at different levels of demand.
Devesh Bharadwaj, CEO of Pani, concluded: “This partnership means the MENA region will be able to reduce the cost and greenhouse gas associated with water, while privatising and supplying its growing water demands. Our goal is to make water treatment more affordable, more climate resilient and more accessible to people and communities in water stressed regions. Technology is helping us to do that in a way that hasn’t been possible before.”
