Singapore’s Approach to Water Management Increases Sustainability and Resilience

Singapore is an island, a global city and a city-state. It is currently ranked first in Asia for quality of living standards. This ranking is based on many factors, most importantly clean, reliable energy for consumers, businesses and industries; clean air; and abundant clean water. The most essential, however, is a sustainable water supply, and that is Singapore’s singular challenge.

While Singapore is a tropical island in Southeast Asia surrounded by seawater and with considerable rainfall throughout the year, it has no natural aquifers or lakes and has limited land to collect and store rainwater. Singapore makes water conservation and resilience its top priorities, adopting a diversified water supply strategy, known as the “Four National Taps.” These Taps comprise local catchment water, imported water, high-grade reclaimed water known as NEWater, and desalinated water.

Water Reclamation

In the most recent decade, Black & Veatch* has worked with PUB on a range of innovative projects, including surface water treatment and used water reclamation with microfiltration/ultrafiltration membranes and seawater desalination.

One of Black & Veatch’s most recent projects was the Lower Seletar Waterworks (LSWW), with a capacity of 60 million gallons per day. Black & Veatch was commissioned to develop the conceptual design and perform design supervision of construction and commission works for PUB. Raw water from the Lower Seletar Reservoir is pumped to the waterworks and chemically treated, followed by a pressurized membrane filtration system and an on-site hypochlorite generation system for disinfection.

*Black & Veatch has designed a combined membrane capacity of over 600 million gallons per day on five continents.

*A project undertaken in Singapore when Black & Veatch owned that business