Water Mining Demonstration at Pernis, Port of Rotterdam (Industrial Brine Reuse)
Water Mining was a research project led by TU Delft and funded under the EU Horizon 2020 program. It ran from September 2020 to December 2024, with demonstration sites in five countries (European Commission, n.d.).
One demonstration was at Westlake Epoxy's plant in Pernis, in the Port of Rotterdam, with Nobian and the Port of Rotterdam Authority as partners (Port of Rotterdam Authority, n.d.). It is a research demonstration, not a port-wide water program.
The demonstration treats salty wastewater (brine) from the epoxy plant to produce high purity brine for Nobian's nearby chlor-alkali plant. The chlorine produced goes back into epoxy production, closing the loop.
At full scale, the partners expected this to reduce water consumption by one third and to save 25 MWh of heat and 6 kilotons of CO2 (Port of Rotterdam Authority, n.d.). These are expected benefits; no measured results were found.
Transferability
For DMC ports with chemical or process industry clusters, the case shows how a port authority can support water reuse by linking neighboring plants with research partners, so that one plant's wastewater becomes another's input.
Such exchanges need a pilot phase, clear agreements between the companies involved, and monitoring to confirm the expected savings.
Sources
All information used for this case study was based on publicly available resources.