Membrane Efficiencies Ensure 10% Growth of Muncipal Drinking Water Technologies

Implications:

Improved membrane efficiencies and declining pricing will drive a projected 10% AAGR in municipal drinking water technologies.

Membrane filtration represents over 75% of all advanced municipal filtration technology and it will remain the significant technology to guarantee clean water. 

 

Analysis: BCC Research publishes research on market trends much like Frost & Sullivan. This article is more of a teaser than anything else, but it does quantify the current and projected size of the various higher end drinking water technologies and this has value. 

The membrane filtration market, which seems to include equipment, i.e., not just the membranes themselves, is the dominant technology at $1 billion and it should remain the dominant technology. This is because membrane pricing has dropped with increases in volume and because membrane efficiency has steadily improved allowing filtration to occur at higher speeds and lower cost. Energy cost can be a large component of membrane filtration, but as membranes become more efficient, less energy and fewer cleaning agents are required.

The primary suppliers that will benefit from the continued high growth in the municipal drinking water membrane market will be: GE Zenon, Siemens USFilter Memcor, Pall, Koch Membrane, Nitto Denko Hydranautics and Norit X-Flow. 
 
Ozone and Ultraviolet (UV) are also used to disinfect water. For all the media attention they seem to gather they are surprisingly small segments of the higher end drinking water technologies. While both segments should definitely continue to grow, I am somewhat suspicious of the growth rate (38.6%) BCC projects for UV.