Zenon scores another North American water-treatment deal
Zenon Environmental Inc. said today it has received a purchase order for its ZeeWeed membrane filtration technology, which will form the core of a 20-million gallon per day drinking water filtration plant in New York State. It will be the largest membrane-based drinking water filtration system in the state, and Zenon hopes the plant, scheduled to be complete by the end of 2007, will eventually convince New York City to buy in.
While not the largest drinking water plant in North America for Zenon, the New York State project does fall into the Top 10 — the largest is a 96-million gallon per day facility under construction in Mississauga, Ontario. What this latest deal does show is that Zenon continues to build momentum in the market, something that has been reflected in the company’s stock price over the past few months. Shares have soared nearly 35 per cent since late March, cracking past $27 at yesterday’s close on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Among recent announcements, the company has been selected to treat water in China’s Olympic Village in time for the Beijing games in 2008.
It might be difficult for cities such as Toronto to retrofit their systems with membrane technology, but for any city or town building a new facility using this technology is increasingly becoming a no-brainer. “The membrane market has grown so much now that any municipality looking to build a new plant is automatically looking at membranes,” Nazeli Clausen, an investor relations official with Zenon, told me today. “We’ve been able to bring the price down so it’s comparable to, if not cheaper than, non-membrane systems.”
Put another way, the only thing standing in the way of Zenon’s growth is competition in the membrane-technology space or from other water filtration technologies. Market demand appears to have no way to go but up.
Tyler Hamilton is senior energy reporter and columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the cleantech market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper. Tyler can be reached at tyler@cleanbreak.ca