Water Treatment


Clear waters for a world of applications


“An annual average rate of 28% characterises the growth of BONO Artes turnover in the past ten years. The whole difference is exported, and most of it comes from new applications” states Alessio Liati, Sales & Marketing Manager of Artes Ingegneria S.p.A. (BONO Artes), the Water Treatment Division of the Cannon Group. We interview him to discover the recipe of their success.


Alessio Liati, 41, works with BONO since 1998. He obtained his degree in Chemical Engineering at Politecnico di Milano in 1994, and grew an experience in chemical plants in his first years of working career. Managing today the Sales and Marketing department of Artes Ingegneria S.p.A., Alessio coordinates a team of ten people based in Peschiera Borromeo headquarters, near Milano, and in the Salerno office, 800 km more south.


Cannon News: Can you tell us how BONO Artes achieved this success? Alessio Liati: The figures first: ten years ago we were selling 3 Million Euro of water treatment plants, all in Italy. Today we sell close to 30 Million Euro worldwide, out of which 90% are exported.


We maintained our domestic market share, in a


country that is facing a serious recession, while we have literally invented our international presence making use of new technologies and applications. We moved first to the Middle East and North Africa, then to the rest of the World: Asia, Pacific, South America and Russia represent today our preferred playgrounds. How we made it? By developing our portfolio of technologies and by consolidating the positive experience grown with our traditional ones. The international presence of Cannon, active with direct branches and agents in more than 40 countries,


ARTES' innovation with KJO


Al-Khafji Joint Operations (KJO) is the product of a joint petroleum production operations agreement between Kuwait Gulf Oil Company and Aramco Gulf Operations, which commenced its activities on April 1st, 2000 at the neutral zone, an area of 5,770 km² between the borders of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait that was left undefined in 1922. Years later, the demarcation was established after the discovery of the oil deposits off- shore of Khafji.


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This Joint Venture owns and operates the crude oil production, processing and loading facilities at Al-Khafji, processing around 300,000 barrels of crude oil per day. It is involved in other businesses like offshore loading, power generation, water treatment and water desalination. Through the years, KJO has achieved consistency of performance and created a big facility that has been updated to expand its production.


KJO awarded the Engineering Procurement and Construction contract to Techint (Italy), one of the major Italian engineering and construction companies, to build a new crude oil treatment and storage facility, whose function is to maintain the oil wells' extraction capacity at 50,000 barrels for the next 20 year.


The EPC project will be delivered on a lump-sum turnkey basis and Artes Ingegneria has been selected, among qualified competitors as supplier of the vacuum deaeration package, which reduces water's dissolved gases concentration to meet the process requirements.


The package, based upon Artes' proprietary ZeroGas Deaeration technology, allows Artes to consolidate its presence in the field of vacuum deaeration, a key issue in the upstream Oil & Gas sector. In fact only oxygen-free water can be used as injection water to keep oil reservoirs pressurized and enhance recovery of oil.


More generally vacuum deaeration is a convenient solution whenever it is mandatory to achieve negligible residual oxygen levels while not heating water.


Furthermore this contract will reconfirm Artes' long term cooperation with Techint and its presence in the Middle East, an aerea that, because of its richness in natural resources, will not cease to be strategic in the years to come.


helped to build even in our Company the right mentality and structure able to face and satisfy demanding customers living twelve time zones away from us. In one sentence, we moved from the domestic sale of commodities to the international market of specialties!


CN: Can you give some examples and references?


AL: Giants like Shell, ExxonMobil, Chevron, EdF and many others have chosen our solutions in the most recent years. When Groups like these are satisfied with our solutions we need a little effort to follow them around the globe for their following projects! They do the promotion for us, in this exclusive and extremely qualified circle of engineering companies. This confirms that we made the right choice and gives us the perspective view for our future.


CN: What are you exactly supplying them?


AL: Until 2010-2011 we mainly concentrated on the treatment of primary waters, those required by the industry for boiler feed or their processing needs. Many deaerators, filtration and demineralisation plants. In the past 18 months we have concentrated our efforts in the treatment of effluent waters produced by chemical plants and refineries during their process and moved “upstream” in the Oil & Gas sector with the treatment of the so-called “Produced and injection waters” for oil and gas wells. We also consolidated and refined our traditional membrane-based technologies for demineralisation.


CN: Are you present in the power generation industry?


AL: Definitely, in at least six main technologies and capitalising on the positive experience made in the oil and gas applications. We offer solutions for Demineralisation, totally based on membrane systems, with Ultra Filtration, Reverse Osmosis and Electrodeionisation. Condensate polishing, with systems based on external regeneration for supercritical cycles and outputs above 1,000 mc/hour. Pre-treatment and desalination, working with all types of water (from sea, marsh, river, recovery of effluents). Treatment of waste water from the Flue Gas Desulphurisation plants, using chemical-physical technologies. Cooling waters filtration with


proprietary systems and outputs up to 3,000 m/hour. 3


treat more than 1,000 m/h of boiler water destined to steam production for turbines.


Deaerators using our ZEROGAS technology able to 3


CN: What is your most significant experience, in terms of size and capacity?


AL: We are currently supplying a large treatment plant for the effluent waters of the on-shore facilities of Chevron's Wheatstone-LNG project in West Australia. A contract worth around 10 Million Euro, wholly designed and pre-fabricated in our Italian premises and to be commissioned by our technical staff. We can make this size of plants for the Power industry too, a sector that is used to handle huge and mission- critical projects in the remotest and harshest conditions.


CN: Any news about your future projects?


AL: We want to extend our presence in the Power generation field outside Europe. We can offer our problem-solving capacity in countries, new for us, where we see a tremendous potential of growth and customers highly interested in our products and technologies. The close synergy with our sister companies, BONO Energia and BONO Sistemi, provides a wide range of solutions and a unique interface for the client. There is a World of application, out there, waiting for the right solutions!


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