From peat water to drinking water: Development of drinking water supply for Dumai City

To improve drinking water services in Dumai, Indonesia, the city government partners the consortium of PT Adhi Karya and PT Adaro for the construction of Water Treatment Plant (WTP) in Dumai City. The pilot plant involves the installation of NX Filtration’s Hollow Fibre Nanofiltration (HFNH) membrane technology, which treats peat water into drinking water.

With an aim to increase drinking water services for the people in Dumai City from 1% to 35% by 2023, the Water Treatment Plant (WTP) in Dumai will be built with a total production capacity of 450L/s, and will be implemented in three stages of development – the first stage with capacity production of 50L/s, continued with capacity production 200L/s in the next two stages of development.

The central government of Indonesia, through the Ministry of Public Work, has also been developing 50L/s WTP for Dumai City under a funding scheme by the World Bank.

Source of raw water
Raw water for WTP Dumai City is sourced from Mesjid River which crosses Dumai City. The permit for the utilisation of surface water from Mesjid River was issued by the Directorate General of Water Resources of the Ministry of Public Works and Settlement in 2018.

The challenge in developing WTP for Dumai City is the quality of raw water, which is peat water, as it has the characteristics of low pH value between three and five, low turbidity level below 10 nephelometric turbidity units (NTU), and high colour content of more than 100 true colour units (TCU).

The colour content in peat water is a true colour formed by Natural Organic Matter (NOM) from humus soil. NOM has a particle size of less than 10nm, and molecular weight cut-off (MWCO) in the range of 800-50,000 Daltons. However, the colour content in peat water is unable to be reduced to the require standard quality by using conventional WTP technology. Drinking-water quality standards, according to Regulation of Indonesia Ministry of Health No. 492/2010, requires that the colour content in drinking water should be less than 15 TCU.

The full article is published on the latest edition of Water & Wastewater Asia May/Jun 2021 issue. To continue reading the article, click here.