Technologies which can which have even meager greenhouse gas or water efficiency improvements coupled with the ability to deploy into the region can benefit significantly from the available cash to invest into this area.

The real key in these markets are the organisations that are already operating in the middle east through oil relationships, such as large engineering and industrial firms, that can deploy small scale improvements in large volumes.

So lets look at a couple of Australian oil/gas and water technologies that if deployed on a large scale are of significant interest.

The first is a company called Katrix based out of Melbourne, Australia. Katrix was established in 2001 to commercialise a new class of mechanical technology for fluid compression, expansion and internal combustion engines. The Katrix technology is an innovative fluid processing technology able to compress, expand, transfer or internally combust various fluids.” “The technology now is in commercial development with clearly defined products expected to be launched into the market from 2006 onwards.

The functional motor/expander unit as I understand (when talking with their CEO) can be effective at the scale of a small scooter sized engine.

From a middle east perspective this technology has a key application of being able to operate as a micro-power generator when placed at gas expansion points in natural gas lines or other industrial oil systems:

“As a fluid motor or expander, it is expected to revolutionise micro-power generation through its proven high isentropic efficiency (>50%) at the sub-100kW power output range, with clearly identified developments that increase this to 75% or more.“

The Second in the water industry is NSW company IOteq and their ISAN® disinfection technology.

“Ioteq produces innovative, environmentally friendly, fully automated, cost effective disinfection solutions for agriculture, horticulture, waste water, manufacturing, industrial and consumer applications. The Isan system is the Ioteq vehicle used for the control and delivery of the active ingredient, BioMax® Iodine, as well as the collection of all disinfection by-products by the BioRes® resin.

The Isan System, in all its many sizes and configurations, is a sophisticated, highly engineered, fully automated disinfection process. However, whilst very smart in its features and controls it is also extremely simple to use making it a breakthrough technology in some of the target industries.

source: ioteq website

With systems capable of treating water flows from 10,000 litres per hour to millions of litres per day, they all include combinations of electrodes for measuring iodine levels in the target water stream, a control unit which automatically controls the running of the system, iodine canisters to deliver the BioMaxA iodine, and resin canisters containing BioResA resin to collect all iodine by-products after disinfection has been completed.”

This technology has cross industry applications but provides the obvious ability to recycle water in significant volumes. Something which would be of interest in the middle east as desalination is a costly activity hence the more times you can use the water the better.