Municipal Water Leader August 2019 by Water Strategies

Volume 6 Issue 7

Learning From the Millennium Drought: Ana Jackson of SA Water

August 2019

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STAFF: Kris Polly, Editor-in-Chief Joshua Dill, Managing Editor Tyler Young, Writer Nicole E. Venable, Graphic Designer Eliza Moreno, Web Designer

Learning From the Millennium Drought: Ana Jackson of SA Water

Contents

August 2019 Volume 6, Issue 7 5 Australian Innovations By Kris Polly 6 Learning From the Millennium Drought: Ana Jackson of SA Water 14 Taggle: Gathering Water Meter Data From the Most Inhospitable Enviroments

28 SWAN Systems: Delivering Precision Irrigation to Australian Farmers 32 Austrade: How to Do Business in Australia 36 Water Management in Australia and Nebraska

18 Osmoflo: Addressing Desalination Needs Worldwide 24 How RedEye Advances Asset Management

Do you have a story idea for an upcoming issue? Contact our editor-in-chief, Kris Polly, at kris.polly@waterstrategies.com.

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ADVERTISING: Municipal Water Leader accepts one-quarter, half-page, and full-page ads. For more information on rates and placement, please contact Kris Polly at (703) 517-3962 or municipal.water.leader@waterstrategies.com. CIRCULATION: Municipal Water Leader is distributed to irrigation district managers and boards of directors in the 17 western states, Bureau of Reclamation officials, members of congress and committee staff, and advertising sponsors. For address corrections or additions, please contact our managing editor, Joshua Dill, at joshua.dill@waterstrategies.com. Copyright ÂŠ 2019 Water Strategies LLC. Municipal Water Leader relies on the excellent contributions of a variety of natural resources professionals who provide content for the magazine. However, the views and opinions expressed by these contributors are solely those of the original contributor and do not necessarily represent or reflect the policies or positions of Municipal Water Leader magazine, its editors, or Water Strategies LLC. The acceptance and use of advertisements in Municipal Water Leader do not constitute a representation or warranty by Water Strategies LLC or Municipal Water Leader magazine regarding the products, services, claims, or companies advertised. MunicipalWaterLeader.com MuniWaterLeader

COVER PHOTO:

Ana Jackson, General Manager for Customers, Strategy and Innovation, SA Water. Photo courtesy of SA Water.

PHOTO COURTESY OF SA WATER..

Coming soon in Municipal Water Leader: September: Hurricane Recovery October: Water Reuse

SUBMISSIONS: Municipal Water Leader welcomes manuscript, photography, and art submissions. However, the right to edit or deny publishing submissions is reserved. Submissions are returned only upon request. For more information, please contact our office at (202) 698-0690 or municipal.water.leader@waterstrategies.com.

Australian Innovations

ustralia is a huge, flat, dry country with big cities, productive agriculture, and vast empty expanses. These conditions present considerable challenges for water managers, both municipal and agricultural. This issue of Municipal Water Leader focuses on Australia’s impressive municipal water suppliers and entrepreneurs. In our cover story, Ana Jackson tells us about SA Water, based in Adelaide, South Australia. The agency provides water to the 1.2 million residents of Adelaide, but also to a further half million people spread out across the 380,000-square-mile state. With thousands of miles of pipeline and a versatile supply of surface water supplemented by eight desalination plants, SA Water is doing impressive things. We also profile four Australia-based tech companies that are active around the world. Taggle Systems has created rugged low-power radios that can provide water meter readings across miles in the most inhospitable environments. Osmoflo builds large desalination plants for the industrial, resources, and municipal sectors, as well as providing portable emergency water supply plants and remote monitoring and control services. RedEye’s datamanagement platform provides easy access to engineering and as-built data for the operators of complex water and power facilities. And SWAN systems delivers decisionsupport software to Australian farmers that collates

By Kris Polly information from a variety of sources to optimize water and nutrient application rates. All these companies are active internationally, and several are looking to start operations in the United States. We also speak with Chris Knepler of the Australian Trade and Investment Commission about how U.S. companies can do business in Australia. Finally, we hear from three participants in a December 2018 tour sponsored by Water Strategies about their impressions of Australia’s water management and water-related policies. In addition to being a beautiful country with wonderful people, Australia is a hotbed of innovation for water management technology and practices. I hope that this issue of Municipal Water Leader introduces you to something new—and perhaps gives you a few ideas for your agency or business. M Kris Polly is editor-in-chief of Municipal Water Leader magazine and president of Water Strategies LLC, a government relations firm he began in February 2009 for the purpose of representing and guiding water, power, and agricultural entities in their dealings with congress, the Bureau of Reclamation, and other federal government agencies. He may be contacted at kris.polly@waterstrategies.com.

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Learning From the Millennium Drought: Ana Jackson of SA Water

The Mount Bold Reservoir, just southeast of Adelaide.

A Water has been supplying water to the people of the Australian state of South Australia for over 150 years. South Australia’s 1.7 million residents are spread across an area more than twice the size of California, meaning that SA Water’s infrastructure is extremely extensive, reaching into remote zones. The Millennium Drought of the early to mid2000s has pushed SA Water and its customers to become more water efficient and to develop alternate water sources, including desalination plants. In this interview, Ana Jackson, the general manager for customers, strategy, and innovation at SA Water, speaks with Irrigation Leader Editor-in-Chief Kris Polly and with Catrin Moller of SA Water, who completed a brief internship with Water Strategies this year, about SA Water’s current challenges and achievements. Catrin Moller: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.

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Catrin Moller: Please tell us about SA Water. Ana Jackson: SA Water is an interesting organization that is similar to only one other Australian water utility—the one in Western Australia—in terms of governance, remit, and size. It is a publicly owned water corporation, which means that it is designed to be a commercial operation while being owned by the government of South Australia. It has an independent board reporting to the minister for environment and water. We have to look at things in both a commercial and a social light because of this arrangement—it’s really important that we get that balance right all the time. We work closely with the government to make sure that we can provide water and wastewater services for as many South Australians as possible. We have 700,000 residential and business connections in South Australia. There are 1.7 million people in South Australia. Some South Australians receive water through smaller organizations or councils, but SA Water supplies the

PHOTOS COURTESY OF SA WATER.

Ana Jackson: Twenty-five years ago, when I started working for the Australian national broadcaster as a journalist, it never occurred to me that I would end up in the water industry. Growing up in Adelaide, I just turned on the tap and expected water to come out and flushed the toilet and expected everything to go away, as I think most people do. Then I worked in politics, public affairs, and government advocacy for a long time. I transferred into the private sector, working on emerging markets,

and that morphed into international development, which brought me to work in Washington, DC, including with a U.S. company called Tetra Tech International. I ended up at SA Water, attracted by the provision of essential services. Whether you are working in international development or human rights management, water and wastewater management is important for every single thing that you do.

ADVERTISEMENT majority of the state. In 1881, Adelaide was the first city in Australia to use a water-based, deep-drainage sewerage system. We set up one of the first wastewater treatment plants in the Southern Hemisphere as well. We’ve always had innovation and public health at our heart. Kris Polly: What is the population of Adelaide? Ana Jackson: The population of Adelaide is 1.2 million, and the population of South Australia is 1.7 million. That makes it a mediumsized Australian state in terms of population. Our facilities reach remote areas across the state. As a result, we have 27,000 kilometers of water mains, making ours the longest network in Australia. Catrin Moller: Is there anything else you wanted to add about the history of SA Water? Ana Jackson: SA Water has a reputation for being rather conservative, which is appropriate for a provider of essential services, but in actual fact, there’s a lot of innovation in our corporation. If you visit our building here in Adelaide, we have scientists with cutting-edge water quality expertise inventing things all the time. We have people working closely with the community and the agriculture industry to deal with wastewater byproducts. Throughout the organization, from the person digging a trench to fix a water main to the person doing water quality testing in our labs, there’s a sense of integrity and a sense of trying to do the right thing by the public. We all know that the way you manage your water supply and the way you manage your wastewater is of paramount importance to public health. Catrin Moller: Where does SA Water’s water come from?

A view of an above-ground water pipeline in South Australia.

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ADVERTISEMENT Ana Jackson: The main source of Adelaide’s water is a series of reservoirs in Adelaide’s hill zone, which is called the Mount Lofty Ranges. Adelaide is an interesting city in terms of layout: It is sandwiched between a zone of hills and the coast, so it’s a long, thin city, stretching in a band from north to south without spreading out much east to west. We have the ability to pump water from the River Murray under a critical human needs water license, which is really important to us. The river goes through three other states before it gets to South Australia, and there’s a lot of discussion, debate, and argument at the moment around the way it is used upstream of us. We pump River Murray water into our reservoirs and send it through our treatment plants. The third water source we have for Adelaide is the desalination plant we built during the Millennium Drought, which is an extremely important part of our water source mix. Elsewhere across the state, we operate eight additional desalination plants—one seawater plant and seven groundwater plants. We have an excellent mix of water sources. Most states rely on one source or another, but because we’ve got three, we can really mix things around depending on the circumstances and the climatic conditions. Catrin Moller: What effect has the Millennium Drought had on South Australia and SA Water? Ana Jackson: What’s happened as a result of the Millennium Drought from a community point of view is that people value water as a resource a lot more than they used to. I was living in Canberra at the time of the

drought, and at that point Canberra had been under water restrictions for quite a while. I moved back to Adelaide just as the water restrictions hit here. The community was outraged at the beginning, but it quickly came to understand the rationale for the restrictions and became more efficient and careful with water. People became water conscious. During the drought, if someone here saw one of their neighbors washing their car on a brick driveway, they would go over and say, “You can’t do that. You’re wasting water. It’s going straight down the drain.” We have a big gardening community in Adelaide and a lot of pride in our green spaces, and whole gardens changed as a result of the drought. Residents started tapping bores and investing in bore water in their backyards, with notices saying, “Garden watered by bore water,” on the fence. The community pretty much stuck to the restrictions, long after they ceased to be officially enforced. We continue to give out water efficiency messages, and people tell us they appreciate them and work out how to use them. It’s not about water restrictions for us anymore—it’s about how to use water efficiently and in the smartest way possible. We have specific initiatives to make sure that our residential customers and business customers are not unknowingly wasting water, for example, through an automated irrigation system or an unidentified leak in their internal pipework. The flip side of that is that if infrastructure issues result in noticeable leakage from our side of the network, local communities become annoyed and let us know quickly. The conservation mindset has definitely stayed. In terms of the management of drinking water, the Adelaide Desalination Plant is incredibly important. I

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PHOTOS COURTESY OF SA WATER.

A lock on the River Murray.

The interior of the Adelaide Desalination Plant.

remember that when Cape Town, South Africa, was facing Day Zero—the day when its municipal water supplies would run out—there was an Australian Financial Review article that said that there were two cities that would never reach Day Zero. They were Perth and Adelaide, both of which have desalination plants. Adelaideans haven’t experienced a full drought since the building of our desalination plant, and many people still do not realize that we use it almost every day. Aside from a period of time during which it is shut down for maintenance, it is up and running year round. Desalinated water from the plant is pumped along a transfer pipeline to storage tanks at our Happy Valley Water Treatment Plant, where it is blended with treated water from the Happy Valley reservoir and delivered to customers. Happy Valley is one of our major metropolitan reservoirs. If you are drinking Happy Valley water, and 50 percent of Adelaideans are, you’ve probably had a little bit of desalination water in your blend.

Kris Polly: What percent of your water supply comes from the desalination plant? Ana Jackson: The plant can supply around 50 percent of the metropolitan area of Adelaide on an average day, but we do not do that all the time. We run it at 10 percent of its capacity the majority of the year and increase that as necessary. A few weeks ago, the reservoirs were getting low, so we ratcheted it up to around 25 percent of its capacity. Desalination is the most expensive way for us to produce water because it uses so much electricity. Electricity prices in Australia are high at the moment. SA Water is working on another initiative called Zero Cost Energy Future. It’s tied directly to how we manage our water sources. We’re putting 500,000 solar panels on our side of the electricity meter, at our own sites. This enables us to use all the energy that is generated to run our facilities, including treatment plants, before any is exported to the grid. Our electricity

A water pipeline in Adelaide, South Australia.

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ADVERTISEMENT costs are currently around A$60 million (US$41 million) per year. The more we can bring electricity costs down, the cheaper it is for us to supply water in the long term. Catrin Moller: What are the challenges that SA Water has faced during this time? Ana Jackson: The desalination plant was a political discussion point. It was a big financial investment for the state. We were originally going to build a 50-gigaliterper-year (40,536-acre-foot-per-year) plant but ended up going for a 100-gigaliter (81,071-acre-foot) one because it was more cost effective. The plant was not without its controversy, and water prices initially did go up as a result of its construction. Some South Australians do not necessarily yet see the value in it the way the water professionals do, though some do and express the view that we are well prepared for the next drought. We conduct regular community, industry, and school tours, in which we take people through the plant and explain how we use it and how important it is for our security supply, and people will say, “I understand now.” The desalination plant has guaranteed the business community a reliable supply, despite potential drought. This is attractive from an economic-growth and investment perspective in a very dry country.

Sydney just announced water restrictions again, and the east coast of Australia has been heading into drought, and I’m starting to get requests for interviews about whether we are considering restrictions as well. We tell them, “We always want people to use water efficiently and carefully, but we are not considering restrictions because of our desalination plant.” This resource absolutely helps. Kris Polly: Doesn’t Sydney have a desalination plant? Ana Jackson: Sydney does have a desalination plant, which it in fact just turned on as well. Sydney runs its plant differently. It leaves it off, which means that when it wants to run it, it takes time to get it up and running again. It doesn’t switch on overnight. That is one of the reasons we keep our plant running in minimum mode, even if we don’t need it every month. It’s much more cost efficient to increase its output to 20 or 50 percent. We could do that tomorrow if we wanted to. Catrin Moller: Would you comment on the steps that SA Water has taken throughout the community to maintain water security? Ana Jackson: I mentioned that SA Water has a strong focus on innovation. One of the things our team handles

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PHOTO COURTESY OF SA WATER.

The Adelaide Desalination Plant, seen from above.

are some water and sewerage services in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands, which encompass many Aboriginal communities in the far north of the state. It’s remote—1,700 kilometers from Adelaide. There are no pipelines for water from the River Murray or anything like that. You have to think about different ways to find water. Beginning during the drought, we started projects to address the water needs of these communities. In the APY Lands, we have several solar-powered bores. We also need to use durable equipment that can stand the area’s extreme heat and can be operated remotely. Facing these challenges inspires innovations that can then be applied in a variety of ways across the state. In the future, if we have water restrictions or issues, we know we’ve got the technology to do localized solutions.

of our wastewater treatment plants for use in irrigating and growing vegetables and grapevines. We would like to do more and find more cost-effective ways to do that. I think the mindset here is, “Try to use it.” If we are treating the water, we may as well use it to water parks and gardens rather than discharge it into the sea. In fact, we do that right across the city of Adelaide with water from one of our major wastewater treatment plants. We’re always looking at ideas and innovations like that. M

Catrin Moller: What lessons have you learned from the Millennium Drought? Ana Jackson: Resilience is really important. We need to be on top of things like network losses and infrastructure management so that people don’t feel that we are wasting water. We are the second-biggest recycler of wastewater in Australia after Sydney, which we’re really proud of. We do a lot of work with the agricultural community. For example, we supply quality treated wastewater from several

Ana Jackson is the general manager for customers, strategy, and innovation at SA Water. For more about SA Water, visit sawater.com.au.

Catrin Moller interviews Ana Jackson.

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Taggle: Gathering Water Meter Data From the Most Inhospitable Environments

ranular data on the volume and timing of water use is of great value to water providers and companies. Unfortunately, it can be hard to gather. Water meters are often located in difficult-to-reach or inhospitable environments. Taggle Systems is one company working to solve this problem. With its proprietary low-power radio system and its rugged devices, it can gather regular data from water meters in extremely hot, tropical environments—or from the water meters in your municipal or company system. In this interview, John Quinn, the managing director of Taggle Systems, speaks with Municipal Water Leader Managing Editor Joshua Dill about his company’s innovative and rugged technology. Joshua Dill: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.

Joshua Dill: Would you give us an overview of Taggle’s history and what it does?

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John Quinn: The concept that originally gave Taggle its start was to monitor and locate cattle via radioenabled ear tags. Cattle don’t like weight on their ears, so reducing the tags’ weight was paramount. This necessitated using as small a battery as possible, which led the company to develop expertise in low-power solutions. Working with farming communities, however, is a particularly difficult challenge. The first part of that challenge is figuring out how to connect with them. The farming community is diverse and is spread all over the country, so building a sales and marketing plan to reach them and then making that business model commercially viable was difficult. As a result, Taggle looked for other opportunities to use its great low-power radio technology and worked out that water meters presented a good opportunity. Why water meters? First of all, there’s one on every house in Australia. Second, they’re near water, so electric devices are not a good idea. Third, water meters tend to last for a long time, so building a long-lasting, radio-controlled device to sit on the side of a water meter seemed like a really good use of the technology. The company went looking for monitoring facilities that had problems that it could address and came across the Mackay Regional Council in North Queensland. The Mackay Regional Council was particularly interesting to work with because it was a fast-growing community. It had a significant mining industry, and

PHOTOS COURTESY OF TAGGLE.

John Quinn: I started my career in technology, initially as a business analyst in information technology. As my career progressed, I moved into sales and marketing, which gave me the ability to craft solutions for specific customer problems. When the opportunity with Taggle was presented to me, the company’s technical capabilities and the opportunity to provide solutions to the particular problems faced by the water sector was compelling.

A taggle device on a water meter.

ADVERTISEMENT it was located in the tropics, so although there was quite a large available source of water, that water was challenging to treat. The Mackay Regional Council faced what were huge expenditures for a relatively small community to build a water treatment plant. It was an A$100 million (US$69.7 million) water treatment plant, which was on its future capital expenditure requirement. If we were able to use our radios to read its water meters more frequently, we could assist the council with leak detection and to help it better engage with the community and improve water demand management. In Australia, as in most places, most water is used outside, for watering gardens and lawns and for washing driveways. Our aim was to help the community remove leaks from its system, particularly on the customer side, and to improve and reduce the use of outdoor water. Our initial project with Mackay Regional Council was a brilliant success. The council saw significant reductions in water consumption. That was Taggle’s entry into the water business. Joshua Dill: Taggle works in both agricultural and municipal settings. Did it require a lot of work to adapt the technology to those different uses? John Quinn: The water utility set the scene. It was in a very inhospitable environment. Water meters are frequently located outdoors, and Mackay Regional Council in particular is located in the hot tropics, which implies a bunch of issues. It sees outdoor temperatures of about 45° C (113° F). The water meters are brass, and they are located 8 inches above the ground, so they get even hotter. A large amount of our product development was aimed at building robust devices that can withstand that challenging environment. With early versions of the product, we experienced difficulties with plastics and polymers expanding in the heat, so we had to find heat-resistant materials. We had to make them waterproof, because the devices are located outdoors and the area floods. We had to deal with battery failures. The temperatures are terrible for batteries. Many simply aren’t manufactured to withstand the temperatures we subject them to here. Our radio is an extremely low-power device. We work in the license-free spectrum area, so we do have to build products that work cooperatively in environments where other devices play. Because of that, we’ve built our technology to have smart capabilities. We’ve developed strong capabilities in the receiver part of the radio. Although our radios are dumb and simple, the receivers are very smart. We’ve had to build capabilities like interference mitigation into our receivers. We have also made the decision, particularly in the last 3-4 years, to focus on the water sector. That goes beyond just water meters. Increasingly, in the water space, we’ve been asked to monitor and collect data from a vast range of technologies. We’ve been working on wastewater

management, including things like sewerage monitoring devices, pressure sensors (high pressure events are often a precursor to burst water mains), water quality sensors, gas sensors, and hydrogen sulfide sensors. To do this, we needed to make some decisions about how we managed connectivity to those devices. We’ve built into our products the ability to pick up a pretty wide range of standard sensors. We’re able to connect quickly and easily to sensors via technologies like 4-20 milliamp (mA) or serial or pulse counts. We also have a platform that translates data into usable forms. A 4-20 mA device will report to you in mA, but most people need a sensor reading in parts per million, millibars, or kilopascals. We connect our radio to the device using a standard interface, collect the data from the device, and send it to the user in a usable form. We’ve had a great deal of interest in this from the water sector because companies operating in that sector don’t know quite what areas these sensors will provide value in. The future value of collecting this data may be in areas they don’t understand yet. It could be useful for early warning: If you detect an overflow in a sewage network, you can potentially send a maintenance crew out before the sewage ends up damaging the environment. There are many other advances that I think are possible. For example, we collect 24 readings a day from water meters. You don’t need that many from a billing point of view, but it is advantageous for leak detection. It also provides a municipality information about water use at different times of day. That information can offer big advantages. For example, if you are building water main infrastructure for a community, you’ve got to assume that the entire community is using the infrastructure all the time. You have to plan for peak use. But when you know through measurement that the community does not in fact use all the water all the time, you can calculate much more realistic sizing requirements. That can lead to reductions in pipe size throughout a municipality. Around the western world, we’ve got pipe infrastructure that has been underground for 100 years now. If you can take a 300-millimeter (mm) water main, and instead of digging it up to replace it, sleeve it with a 200-mm sleeve, the implications are enormous.

A Taggle device installed at the Mackay Regional Council.

MUNICIPALWATERLEADER.COM

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ADVERTISEMENT Joshua Dill: Is all your hardware and software proprietary? John Quinn: Our radio network is Taggle developed, including everything from the chip to the receiver, the cloud platform, and the delivery. I hesitate to say that our platform is proprietary—it is, but it has open connectivity. On the sensor side, we connect to most of the standard interfaces used by utilities: 4-20 mA, serial, pulse output, Modbus, etc. We don’t build sensors; we connect to sensors built by other people. On the data-delivery side, we deliver data in any format a user wants—for example, commaseparated values files or web services solutions. We have connectivity to the large integration platforms, like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure. We worked hard to make sure that people wouldn’t have to bend themselves out of shape to use our solution. We don’t care what brand of sensor or what sort of water meter you want to use. In the United States, we use the U.S. Sensus radio frequency protocol. We can connect to any water meter. Power is the thing that generates most of the costs in systems like ours. The size of the battery is the issue. The battery accounts for a significant part of the cost, and it determines how long the device lives. We build devices that can last 20 years on battery power in the field, delivering data every hour. You need a very low-power device to be able to do that.

Honeywell, which probably has 70 percent of the Australian water meter market. The biggest companies by far are Honeywell and Itron. Many of the companies present in the United States are not present in Australia. We have also worked with Honeywell on some technical developments. We built an integrated water meter for the Australian market called the V200HT, which was engineered largely in the United Kingdom. It’s a hybrid meter: It’s got a mechanical base, a digital register, and a radio. The radio in this model is built into the meter itself. No add-on radio is required. It is robust. We’ve done well with it. We launched that product only a few months ago, and we’ve got a backlog of about 60,000 orders already.

A 7-year-old Taggle device installed at the Mackay Regional Council.

Joshua Dill: What is your vision for the future?

Taggle's receivers usually pick up signals from radios within a 15-mile radius, but they have read tags from as far as 150 miles away.

Joshua Dill: Where are your products being used today? John Quinn: Most of our clients are in Australia. We’ve done some small trial implementations in Raleigh, North Carolina, with Honeywell. We’ve also worked with Honeywell in Brazil. In Australia, we’ve done a large number of installations. In the 2018 calendar year, we delivered 1.4 billion water meter readings in Australia.

John Quinn: In Australia, we work closely with

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John Quinn is the managing director of Taggle Systems. He can be reached at enquiries@taggle.com.au. For more information about Taggle, visit www.taggle.com.au.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF TAGGLE.

Joshua Dill: Would you tell us about your sales and marketing process?

John Quinn: We’re going to continue to develop a deep understanding of the water sector and our marketplace. We think there’s a lot of scope there. With all the water meter companies and utilities in Australia, there is a very diverse utility marketplace. It includes municipal councils and separate independent water utilities. We think that building a fully supportable environment from sensor to software has real value here. We’re also actively looking at international partnerships. Water security, demand management, and the cost of delivery are global problems. California has significant issues with water supply that mirror the water supply problems we have in vast parts of Australia. Drought is something we’re familiar with. Cape Town, South Africa, is reportedly running out of water. The solutions we offer have great value in those environments. M

Osmoflo: Addressing Desalination Needs Worldwide Osmoflo’s latest facility, commissioned in June 2019, is a 20-MLD brackish water RO treatment facility for Roy Hill Mine in Western Australia, and includes an operating contract for up to 20 years.

ounded in 1991, the Australian desalination company Osmoflo is active all around the world, serving clients in a dizzying variety of municipal, energy, industrial, mining, and food and drink applications. With its flexible, technology-independent approach to solving problems and its rapid-deployment emergency facilities, Osmoflo can solve all sorts of problems wherever on the globe they occur. In this interview, Carmine Ciccocioppo, the chief operating officer (COO) of Osmoflo, speaks with Municipal Water Leader Managing Editor Joshua Dill about how his company’s technology is deployed around the world. Joshua Dill: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.

Joshua Dill: Please tell us about the history of the company.

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Joshua Dill: What are Osmoflo’s main services? Carmine Ciccocioppo: Osmoflo’s main services include the delivery of both customized and preengineered water treatment solutions. We offer flexibility through a range of financing and commercial delivery options, including build-own-operate/transfer, design-build-operate, shortterm rental, engineering and procurement, full turnkey contracting (EPC), or EPC plus O&M. We also provide O&M service agreements to suit the individual needs of

PHOTOS COURTESY OF OSMOFLO.

Carmine Ciccocioppo: I have been involved in the water industry in various project delivery, operational, commercial and leadership roles for around 25 years. It is an industry that really interests me, and one that I am passionate about. Previously, I was director of the Australian Water Association, the peak body for water professionals in Australia, for around 8 years. I joined Osmoflo in 2010 as general manager for operations to look after Osmoflo’s operations and maintenance (O&M) and after-sale-service functions. Since that time, the O&M division of Osmoflo has continued to expand and grow in capacity and capability. I was appointed to the role of COO of Osmoflo’s global business in early 2019, and as part of that role I am responsible for all of the business’s end-to-end operational functions from sales and marketing to engineering and project delivery, as well as our rentals and operations divisions.

Carmine Ciccocioppo: Osmoflo was founded by Marc and Annie Fabig in 1991. From relatively humble beginnings with only two employees, Osmoflo has continued to grow steadily and is now the largest Australian-headquartered designer, builder, and operator of desalination projects. It has offices in the Middle East, South America, and India. From 2011 to 2018, Marubeni Corporation of Japan was a minority shareholder, and in 2016, Hitachi Zosen Corporation of Japan (HITZ) became a majority shareholder. Today, Osmoflo is a wholly owned subsidiary of HITZ, which supports Osmoflo’s pursuit of desalination and advanced water reuse projects across the globe. Since its establishment, Osmoflo has specialized in the design and delivery of almost 500 membrane-based water treatment plants (including microfiltration, ultrafiltration [UF], brackish water reverse osmosis [RO], seawater RO, and electrodeionization plants) ranging in capacity up to 56 million liters per day (MLD), or 14.8 million gallons per day (MGD). In addition, Osmoflo operates and maintains over 80 of those plants and facilities around the world. The company’s employee numbers vary depending on the level of project activity at any particular point in time, but typically range between 220 and 270.

ADVERTISEMENT our clients, and also operate many non-Osmoflo built plants. We can provide 24/7 remote monitoring and control services using our global operations control centers, which assist in the monitoring of plants across the globe with our proprietary software, Plant Connect. We also provide plant rental and emergency water treatment solutions using a global rental fleet of approximately 70 assets. This includes our Desal Now range of large-capacity emergency water treatment solutions, which are ready for immediate deployment and can treat up to 50,000 cubic meters (13.2 million gallons) per day.

enormous industry network and knowledge of the available process technology that can be applied in particular applications. Osmoflo always takes a holistic, whole-of-life view rather than simply focusing on a least-capital-cost approach, which is often suboptimal from a whole-of-life cost perspective. By constantly working with water that is challenging, whether because of physical, organic, or chemical quality, Osmoflo is continuously developing new water treatment methods and technologies.

Joshua Dill: Who are Osmoflo’s clients?

Carmine Ciccocioppo: Many of our larger global competitors have developed their own in-house technologies, and their primary focus is on promoting and selling this equipment to their customers. Osmoflo’s primary capability and core competency, on the other hand, is using all available technological and process innovations across the entire market to deliver water treatment solutions for its clients that provide the best value for the money spent and the highest reliability. It’s not about trying to fit a particular piece of equipment to a problem that it may not be well suited to. It’s about really trying to understand a particular client’s water treatment needs and then using our experience, our trusted suppliers, and our industry partners to identify and use the technology and process equipment that best matches that need. We go to great lengths to ensure that we are aware of the latest technologies in the market, and we look for opportunities to test and pilot them or introduce them into the right applications. That is what it means to say that Osmoflo is technology independent.

Carmine Ciccocioppo: Our target markets include the general industrial, resources, and municipal sectors, with specific focus on water treatment plants of a capacity greater than 100,000 liters (26,400 gallons) per day. These broad industrial and resource market sectors can be further broken down into oil and gas; power, including coal, gas, and renewables; mining, including coal, iron ore, lithium, uranium, copper, lead, and zinc; petrochemicals; water used in heavy industry; and food and beverage. Osmoflo’s clients typically include large blue chip players in the above sectors, such as BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, Glencore, Coca-Cola Amatil, Carlton & United Breweries, Inpex, Santos, Bechtel, Roy Hill, FMG, and Western Australia Water Corporation. Joshua Dill: Where does Osmoflo operate? Carmine Ciccocioppo: Osmoflo has its global headquarters at Burton in Adelaide, Australia, with local domestic offices in Sydney, Brisbane, Perth, and Darwin. The company also has offices in Dubai; Oman; Pune, India; and Santiago, Chile. Osmoflo’s operational plants are scattered across the globe as far afield as northern Chile, the Marshall Islands, Malaysia, Hong Kong, South Africa, and Saudi Arabia. Osmoflo is not currently delivering projects in the United States, but we have delivered to the United States several times and collaborated with various water industry partners there. The United States is a potentially attractive market for Osmoflo—we are interested in some of the focus technology areas in the United States, such as minimal liquid discharge, and in using our Osmoflo Brine Squeezer in applications around produced water and minimalizing discharge for inland applications.

Joshua Dill: What exactly is technology independence?

Joshua Dill: What is an example of difficult-to-treat water, and how did Osmoflo treat it?

Joshua Dill: Tell us about the process of water evaluation and the selection of treatment technology. Carmine Ciccocioppo: Innovation and best-for-project integration of technology has been at the heart of Osmoflo since its inception. One of Osmoflo’s core strengths is its technology independence and the fact that it has an

The interior of Osmoflo's Roy Hill Mine Facility.

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ADVERTISEMENT Carmine Ciccocioppo: One example is a project we did for a client in regional Victoria that is one of the oldest dairy processors in Australia. Our client had recently increased its cheese production by 30 percent, resulting in the production of more wastewater. As the increased volume was above its discharge capacity, it needed to consider treatment options for the additional water. In early 2017, the client contacted Osmoflo to request a 500-cubicmeter-per-day (132,000-gallon-per-day) rental plant to process UF permeate from whey processing. In addition, a 1.2-MLD (317,000-gallon-per-day) rental solution was sought to treat its dairy waste so that it would be suitable for onsite irrigation and reuse. Our personnel conducted benchtop testing to see if they could treat the water, which had high biochemical oxygen demand and contained lactose whey and other particulates. Following this initial testing, we were engaged to undertake site pilot testing with a small microfiltration plant and the Osmoflo Brine Squeezer. Osmoflo was subsequently engaged to provide the full-scale rental plant. Joshua Dill: What are Osmoflo’s emergency water supply services, and what is an example of their deployment? Carmine Ciccocioppo: Osmoflo has one of the largest fleets of emergency water treatment equipment of any company, ranging from seawater and brackish water desalination plants, membrane filtration plants, wastewater plants, chemical dosing plants, and other ancillary plants necessary to complement an emergency full turnkey solution. An example of their deployment is a project Osmoflo completed in Cape Town, South Africa. The City of Cape Town requested the water treatment project to mitigate the shortage of potable water during one of the region’s worst droughts on record. The project involved the supply, installation, and commissioning of a fully containerized 2-MLD (528,000-gallon-per-day) seawater reverse osmosis and multimedia filtration plant. This was delivered under a rental contract for a minimum duration of 24 months. With a tight delivery schedule of just 8 weeks, Osmoflo’s capability for fast deployment of equipment meant the plant was delivered and producing potable water in line with the required schedule. The desalination plant was operational by March 2018, with Osmoflo also providing initial O&M support prior to handing operations over to its local partner. The plant consisted of a 7-by-40-foot containerized plant, which was shipped from Osmoflo’s storage facility in Dubai. The plant travelled a distance of approximately 10,000 kilometers (6,213 miles) to Cape Town in 30 days. Joshua Dill: How do your global markets differ from each other? Carmine Ciccocioppo: In Australia, our major markets

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tend to be in the resources sector, particularly large mining and oil and gas operations, as well as the power generation and food and beverage sectors. In the Middle East, the market tends to be more crowded and competitive. There are a lot of well-established local and international competitors and the dominant markets are municipal, power, and oil and gas opportunities, rather than mining or food and beverage companies. In Southeast Asia, there are also fewer mining-sector opportunities, but there are more opportunities in the municipal and general industrial spaces. In general, markets in the Middle East and Southeast Asia are quite competitive. We need to pick and choose our opportunities strategically and carefully, limiting our involvement to opportunities where Osmoflo can differentiate itself using its technology and intellectual property. Joshua Dill: Please tell us about Osmoflo’s remote monitoring and control services. Carmine Ciccocioppo: Around 20 years ago, Osmoflo recognized the fact that, certainly in the Australian context, with its high price of labor for continuous operational plant attendance, a more cost-effective approach was needed for the competent operation, process monitoring, and control of our plants. Osmoflo’s plants in Australia are hundreds, if not thousands, of kilometers from the nearest populated centers. That drove Osmoflo down the path of developing in-house technology that allowed it not only to monitor the facilities but also to remotely control them. It developed its in-house supervisory control and data acquisition software, Plant Connect, in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Since then, we’ve added more and more plants to that stable of remote monitoring and control. It gives us a potent and cost-effective way to assist our clients in monitoring those plants, no matter where they happen to be on the planet, on a 24/7 basis. We’ve put a lot effort into ensuring that our control center operators have industry-best credentials, experience, and capabilities. We have two control centers that operate in tandem, not independently. One is located here in Adelaide, Australia; the other is located at our Dubai office. That gives us good redundancy and gives us the capability to switch between them as we require. Joshua Dill: What trends do you see in the desalination business today? Carmine Ciccocioppo: The major trend in the last decade has been a strong shift away from thermal desalination technologies to membrane-based desalination, primarily using RO. That’s one of the large trends that drove HITZ, which was a dominant player for decades in the global thermal desalination market, to acquire Osmoflo and use its membrane treatment process knowledge and capabilities within its broader global water business. Another trend we

ADVERTISEMENT see is a growing focus on businesses’ carbon footprints and energy efficiency. Clients, especially in locations with high energy costs, are focused on the energy efficiency, recurrent costs, and carbon footprint of their desalination solutions. Energy efficiency is constantly improving due to advances in membrane and energy recovery technology. The third large trend across the broader desalination market, especially in applications that do not involve seawater, relates to brine management. Regulators around the world are increasing their scrutiny of the way organizations are handling and disposing of their brine and salt. They are generally imposing tighter restrictions and placing more pressure on desalination facilities to minimize the volumes of the high-salinity waste that they are generating. Demand for cost-effective technologies that help companies reduce that brine stream, especially for non-seawater applications, is growing—the growing demand for Osmoflo’s Brine Squeezer technology is a good example of this. Joshua Dill: What other new technologies is Osmoflo developing?

PHOTOS COURTESY OF OSMOFLO AND NORANGERMAN.

Carmine Ciccocioppo: Another exciting technology that we feel has enormous potential is our acid mine drainage (AMD) treatment technology, which we refer to as our AMD Squeezer. At the end of mines’ lifespans, owners are

often left with highly acidic water in their mines and few cost-effective ways of dealing with it. Typically, neutralizing that water has involved the expensive addition of lots of chemicals, such as lime. The levels of sulfate and gypsum in that water can make membrane treatments difficult. We are working at the moment with a couple of our clients in Australia on an adaptation of our Brine Squeezer technology for waters with pH as low as 2 and very high gypsum levels, which involves interstage precipitation of salts with very high scaling potential. It’s a multistage RO process that treats and concentrates that AMD water; between those RO stages, we’re treating the brine through an innovative seeding and mixing process and dropping out gypsum and other salts. Our ultimate aim is to use this technology to concentrate the brine and dramatically lower the residual volume of AMD water. M

Carmine Ciccocioppo is the COO of Osmoflo. He can be contacted at marketing@osmoflo.com.

Adelaide, Australia, the site of Osmoflo's headquarters.

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How RedEye Advances Asset Management

A RedEye user makes notes in the field.

ater and power utilities, as well as companies like mining and oil and gas companies, manage large assets and sophisticated infrastructure networks. When it comes time to repair them, expand them, or build around them, precise knowledge of their construction, condition, size, and location is absolutely necessary. Unfortunately, this is a challenge for many companies. Their engineering data may be scattered in different locations or be otherwise difficult to access. That is the problem that Australian company RedEye was founded to solve. It has built a cloud-native data platform to bring all of a company’s engineering data into one place and allow company employees and third-party contractors to access it. In this interview, RedEye chief executive officer (CEO) Wayne Gerard speaks with Municipal Water Leader Managing Editor Joshua Dill about his company and how it can help municipal water utilities manage their assets. Joshua Dill: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.

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Wayne Gerard: When RedEye started in 2012, it was just me and two software engineers. Today, we have close to 100 staff spread across six offices. Our headquarters are in Brisbane, Australia. About 60 of our staff are there. We have three offices in North America, in Las Vegas, Denver, and Houston. We have an office in Wellington, New Zealand. We have an office in the Philippines with about 7 staff who do data improvement. All our software engineering takes place in our Brisbane City office. Joshua Dill: What problem does your data-management solution solve? Wayne Gerard: I’ll use a practical example. The Southern Nevada Water Authority (SNWA) and Las Vegas Valley Water District have been building water infrastructure in southern Nevada as the region’s population has grown over the last 10 years. As a result, they have hundreds of thousands of engineering files that represent what they’ve built, also known as as-built data. These files were not easily accessible or usable. We had been solving this problem for 6 or 7 years when I met the deputy general manager of the SNWA on a trade mission to Australia led by the governor of Nevada. SNWA was after a solution that would allow it to put all its engineering and as-built data in one place and help it organize it, clean it up, and make it easily accessible to staff and third-party contractors. Joshua Dill: So your product is a platform that can be accessed from a variety of PCs or mobile devices. Wayne Gerard: Yes. RedEye is an engineering datamanagement platform for companies that own and operate large, complex, critical infrastructure, including water and power utilities. We provide native cloud and mobile-based

PHOTOS COURTESY OF REDEYE.

Wayne Gerard: I am the CEO of RedEye, which I cofounded in 2012. Prior to that, I was an army officer for 9 years, then worked for a software company that serviced the industrial sector, including utilities, water, mining, and power, during the first tech bubble. I then set up a consulting company in 2005 servicing that same market and an electrical engineering company in 2011. The engineering company worked with the mining industry, and while working onsite at a mining outfit, I was constantly given the wrong set of engineering data. That led me to search for a solution that we could recommend back to the market. We realized that there was no purpose-built engineering data-management solution for large, complex assets like water or power utilities. In 2012, we started to create the first native cloud and mobile solution purpose built to solve the problems we experienced working onsite.

Joshua Dill: Please tell us about RedEye today.

ADVERTISEMENT solutions. When we designed our platform in 2012, we started building a cloud solution from day 1. By contrast, a lot of software companies are converting their on-premise software products to the cloud, which is a big challenge both from a technological and a commercial perspective. Using RedEye, our clients can access their engineering data using a native iOS app or Android app, or they can log on to RedEye via the web and see their engineering data in all its formats. It is easy and fast to provide access to their staff and to contractors as well. Joshua Dill: Would you tell us about the variety of companies and industries that use your product? Wayne Gerard: Today, our platform is used to manage over $200 billion worth of infrastructure. Some companies that use it own and operate water infrastructure on behalf of municipalities and power utilities. Other clients include mining companies, oil and gas companies in both the United States and Australia, and companies that manage healthcare assets and roads. Hospitals use the engineering data for the hospital precinct and the water and power networks that supply those hospitals. Today, we’ve got clients all over the world. Joshua Dill: Have you incorporated user feedback into your product over the past few years? Wayne Gerard: When I founded RedEye, I wanted to found a company that was absolutely focused on culture and building a great environment. One part of our culture is that we design and build with our clients, not for them. We are a truly customer-centered business. The first document I wrote when I founded RedEye was our brand promise. That promise is easy+fast+relevant+secure=essential. Our goal is to become essential to our clients. Right now, we’re doing three codevelopment projects with our clients to accelerate the development of new technology on roadmap and to make sure that our solution remains relevant in an industry with rapidly changing technology, ideas, and requirements. There’s lots of talk about building-information modeling, 3D models, and moving to a world in which owners have a digital twin of their physical asset. Municipal councils can now see all the operating parameters, engineering information, and planned maintenance displayed in real time, enabling them to make fast and accurate decisions on how they should operate and maintain that asset. We’re doing projects like that right now to help our clients make sure that their assets are the most efficient, safe, and productive they can be, using emerging technologies like 3D models, physical twin technology, and real-time sensor data from Internet of things systems. Joshua Dill: Please tell us about your security features.

Wayne Gerard: Security has always been at the front of my mind as we designed and built our platform. We have constantly added security features to our solution as we brought on more customers. We are always doing security reviews and audits with our clients to make sure that our clients are confident that the security protocols and infrastructure we have in place are robust. I think we have been successful: There’s no way that we would have been authorized to put all the engineering data for Hoover Dam in RedEye if we hadn’t demonstrated such a strong security capability. Joshua Dill: How does your product improve safety for the companies that use it? Wayne Gerard: Having access to current asset management data is critical when you are doing operations and maintenance. For example, if you don’t have the right engineering data, it can be very hard to deenergize part of a pump station so that you can perform maintenance on it. We’ve been approached by numerous organizations after they’ve had a safety incident because outdated engineering information was used to isolate an asset, resulting in damage and injuries. Simple things like not having access to the right engineering drawings and not knowing where the various water and power networks run underground can lead to problems, for example, when someone starts to dig up a sidewalk and unintentionally bursts a water main or cuts a power line. These things are absolutely avoidable if you have a system like RedEye in place. Joshua Dill: Please tell us about how you work with your clients. Wayne Gerard: One of the things that sets us apart from other companies is the way we work with our clients. We’ve delivered projects across the world and across different industries, helping organizations organize their engineering and as-built data and getting it into a system where it can

An employee accesses RedEye’s platform from the field.

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RedEye's platform allows easy access to as-built data.

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can easily start using our mobile application in the field and quickly return assets to service. For water utilities, this can improve the customer experience as well. Joshua Dill: Tell us about your vision for the future. Wayne Gerard: Every large, complex asset manager and every large water utility needs to adopt relevant emerging technology to make its operations more efficient. We want to be the common data environment for all the data that represent their built assets. Our vision is to become a modern asset-management platform that houses all of a company’s engineering or as-built data and makes that data extremely easy for anyone to access. We are in the process of implementing a number of artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms that will allow our clients to perform work on our assets and to get recommendations back out of the system about what to do next and how improve the efficiency of their maintenance schedule and ultimately to help them to run their utilities at a lower cost. Right now, we’re working with an organization to build digital twins of its key assets, and we are developing an intelligent recommendation engine. That’s going to dramatically change the way our assets work. M Wayne Gerard is the CEO of RedEye. He can be contacted at Wayne.gerard@redeye.co.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF REDEYE.

be easily accessed and used. We understand the best practices, and that has driven the way we approach working with new clients. We have two solutions, one for organizing and managing as-built data and the other for planning and doing inspections and work. They integrate well, so users can always see the latest version of their data. Our solutions really are purpose built for large water utilities and municipalities, and we are open to working with any major water utility, wherever it is. Potential clients often say, “We have a problem, but we’re going to have to do a lot of work before we can start using a product like this.” With RedEye, that’s not the case. New clients don’t have to do any work up front. We can just take their data, wherever they are and in whatever format they are in. We have the tools and processes to clean the data up and organize the data for them. That removes a significant barrier to adoption. Another thing that sets us apart is our simple and intuitive user interface. We wanted to build something that is as easy to use as Facebook or LinkedIn. Some people will use a program like this every day, but others will only use it once a week or once a month. Essentially, our goal is to provide enterprise software that requires no training. This reduces the time it takes to find the right information and complete inspection or maintenance. Las Vegas Valley Water District calculated that they save over 450 hours a month using RedEye. One of our new clients, a municipal council in New Zealand, told us that previously it could take up to 2 hours to find engineering drawings; using RedEye, it takes less than 2 minutes. Staff and contractors

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SWAN Systems: Delivering Precision Irrigation to Australian Farmers SWAN Systems platform helps farmers plan and schedule their irrigation.

WAN Systems, based in Perth, Australia, has built an Internet of things (IoT) platform that helps farmers synthesize irrigation data from multiple sources for more precise irrigation. SWAN’s decision-support software allows for better irrigation and nutrient management, the optimized use of scarce resources, and better environmental outcomes. Currently active in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and the Middle East, SWAN is looking for partners for a trial expansion into the United States in 2020. In this interview, Tim Hyde, the chief executive officer (CEO) of SWAN Systems, speaks with Municipal Water Leader Managing Editor Joshua Dill about the benefits SWAN’s platform provides to irrigators in Australia and around the world. Joshua Dill: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position. Tim Hyde: SWAN Systems has three founders—Rod Campbell, Ivor Gaylard, and myself. All of us have significant agricultural experience. I personally was born and raised in the Sunraysia region of Australia’s Riverland, which is geographically and agriculturally similar to California—it is hot and dry and irrigation is required to grow crops. I then completed a degree in horticulture and irrigation at Adelaide University in South Australia. After university, I grew subtropical crops, including table grapes, bananas, vegetables, and citrus fruits, for 15 years, using precision irrigation and nutrient strategies, often called open-field hydroponics. I then consulted for 10 years in this field. SWAN Systems essentially evolved from this consulting business. Joshua Dill: Please tell us about your company, its history, and its operations today.

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Joshua Dill: Tell us about your products. Do you produce software, hardware, or both? Tim Hyde: SWAN Systems is a software-as-a-service platform that provides solutions for the smarter scheduling and monitoring of water and nutrient applications. It uses sophisticated algorithms to process data from a number of different sources, including weather forecasts of rainfall, evapotranspiration, temperature, and wind speed; actual water application volumes taken directly from irrigation controllers; soil moisture data to reconcile the soil moisture balance calculations; and spatial data from satellites and drones to further reconcile plant health via normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) imagery. The intelligence of the system has been derived from many years working in the precision ag space, where it is imperative to determine when and how much to irrigate and fertilize to optimize production. The client base, particularly Rio Tinto in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, demanded reporting and monitoring functionality, and this drove the development of SWAN’s compliance functionality. SWAN has developed this intellectual property into a web-based system that is now largely automated and can be scaled to cover a range of diverse applications. Watering schedules are typically generated from historical data and often implemented with a “set and forget” mindset. Actual within-season variations mean that these historical averages are often inaccurate, leading to suboptimal water consumption, poor crop health, and ineffective fertilization. SWAN’s ability to use location-specific weather forecasts provides the ability to proactively manage weather volatility. The incorporation of the Australian Bureau of Meteorology’s 7-day

PHOTO COURTESY OF SWAN SYSTEMS.

Tim Hyde: SWAN Systems is an IoT platform that helps farmers farm more precisely and increase the quality and yields of their crops. Rod, Ivor, and I knew how precious water is and how technology is the ideal way to optimize water and nutrient application rates and consumption for just about any plant or crop. The more we looked, the more

we saw that the problem of water usage was endemic and global, with no easy solution. Our vision is to be a globally recognized independent software platform for managing water and nutrients and to help lead users to adopt precision agriculture. From its conception, it has taken 3 years to fully build out the platform, mainly due to the complexities of using different types of hardware.

ADVERTISEMENT rolling forecasts, which capture key variables of rainfall, evapotranspiration, maximum and minimum temperatures, and wind speeds, means that SWAN is always looking forward rather than relying solely on historical averages. Through its unique algorithms, SWAN provides a precise calculation of the optimal soil-moisture balance for the specific requirements of each user’s crop or pasture type. SWAN’s incorporation of a nutrient module adds further functionality and uniqueness. As rainfall levels fall, users are relying more heavily on alternate water sources such as groundwater and recycled water. This necessitates an understanding of the nutrient loading of the source water, and issues around increasing levels of nitrates and phosphates need to be calibrated into fertilizer programs. Failure to do this will result in overapplication, which is expensive and can cause environmental damage through leaching and surface runoff. SWAN also permits the detailed calibration of the optimal nutrient-uptake curve for each crop or pasture. This means that end users are given the precise quantities and timings for the scheduling of their fertilizer programs, resulting in both financial and environmental benefits. The aggregation of data from multiple sources and its presentation on a simple dashboard gives users quick and effective insight into their operations. Summary data can then be further analyzed to provide extensive site-specific detail. Users can arrange these data into groups that allow for reporting along specific lines such as crop type, variety type, maturity profile, geographic location, and priority rating for public use (particularly relevant for parks and ovals). These capabilities make it effective for users who manage multiple farms or different enterprises across a single farm. We pride ourselves on not selling hardware. In agriculture, it’s often difficult to get access to precision technologies without replacing farm hardware. We want to work with farmers and the data they have. It’s surprising the amount of data available at a farm level—it’s just usually fragmented and located on many different platforms and thus difficult to use to make sound management decisions.

Joshua Dill: What problems do farmers have that your product steps in to solve? Tim Hyde: We offer the optimization of water and nutrient resources. Often, water savings are possible, but they require taking surplus irrigation and applying it at a more suitable time of year to maximize yields and quality. Nutrient management is complex, so we simplify it and help ensure that the right nutrients are applied at the right time in the right quantities for a specific crop type. Benefits include better-informed decisionmaking, simplified irrigation and nutrient management, the optimized use of resources (including water, nutrients, power, and labor), the maintenance of business intellectual property and knowledge, the facilitation of reporting and compliance, and better environmental outcomes. Joshua Dill: What kinds of irrigation systems do the farmers who use your project use? Tim Hyde: SWAN is highly configurable, so we work with a variety of irrigation types, including turf, golf-course irrigation, irrigation with reuse water and nutrient-rich water, agricultural irrigation using pivots or flood irrigation, and horticultural irrigation using drip and sprinkler systems. The principles of water and nutrients are exactly the same across all sectors, but each specific crop type or irrigation type requires refinement. Joshua Dill: Have you worked directly with large original equipment manufacturers in order to integrate your software with their hardware? Tim Hyde: We work closely with several systems. Valley’s AgSense panel is one example. We access the data directly and give the irrigator some extra information to customize their precision irrigation to a specific crop type. Joshua Dill: Would you explain some of the decisions your decision-support system might help a farmer make? Does

SWAN Systems platform compares budgeted and actual water use.

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ADVERTISEMENT it make positive recommendations about things farmers should do at specific times? Tim Hyde: SWAN acts as a guide. It looks at the soilmoisture balance with a view to applying a budgeted water volume. If the budgeted water volume is going to lead to dry or excessively wet conditions, SWAN helps plan exactly what is required to maintain a specific soil-moisture balance. The nutrients act in the same way. Our dashboard is popular with larger agricultural businesses, as it gives a highly accurate assessment of soil moisture conditions, a farm’s total water usage, budgeted nutrients vs. nutrients actually applied, local climatic conditions, and satellite NDVI data, all in one place. We often have many streams of data, but the dashboard puts it all in one place, allowing for better data-based decisions. Joshua Dill: In what countries are you operating?

functions will be required in the future and what the demand for them is. We currently conduct an annual review with each customer. We intend to build an automatic feedback-solicitation feature in the near future. Joshua Dill: How do you see your product developing over the next few years? Tim Hyde: We intend to be the world’s best independent software for irrigation and nutrient management, so the product will keep evolving over time to meet customer demands and requirements. We are currently focusing on our local markets but intend to be operating in the Americas on a trial basis in 2020. We’re looking for suitable partners to help us commercialize the product and will be starting to look at different strategies toward the end of this year. M

Tim Hyde: We are currently operating in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and in countries in the Middle East. Joshua Dill: Have you incorporated any user feedback interior design? Tim Hyde: Customer feedback helps us ensure that we have the right product fit and that we understand what

Tim Hyde is the CEO of SWAN Systems. He can be reached at tim@swansystems.com.au.

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Austrade: How to Do Business in Australia Sydney, Australia.

he Australian Trade and Investment Commission, or Austrade, is the Australian federal agency tasked with promoting trade and investment between Australia and the rest of the world. In this interview, Chris Knepler, an investment commissioner at Austrade’s Chicago office, speaks with Municipal Water Leader Editor-in-Chief Kris Polly about how U.S. water companies can do business down under. Kris Polly: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.

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Kris Polly: How can Austrade help U.S. companies in the water sector do business in Australia? Chris Knepler: It depends on what the U.S. company is looking to do. At the initial stage, our website, austrade.gov.au, has a wealth of information about the Australian economy, trends, and opportunities. The information on the website includes a number of industry reports and what we call the Benchmark Report, which is our premier guide to all aspects of the Australian economy. It’s a good source for gaining an understanding of the market. There is also some information there about cultural differences in doing business in Australia. Consulting that information would be a good first step for U.S. exporters who want to see if Australia is a good market for them.

PHOTO COURTESY OF HAI LINH TRUONG.

Chris Knepler: I grew up in Milwaukee and studied business at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, then moved to Washington, DC, and worked for an organization called Cambridge Associates, which helped nonprofits invest their endowment funds. I got a master’s of business administration (MBA) at the University of California, Berkeley, studying the management of technology. Then I joined a U.S. State Department–funded program called the MBA Enterprise Corps, which was similar to the Peace Corps. This was the early 1990s, and they were looking at how to teach business skills to Eastern Europeans after the Berlin Wall came down. In 1994, I went to Hungary and worked with a telecom company there as it tried to understand how to do business with the West. That started my telecommunications-focused career. I worked in corporate telecoms in Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and in Indonesia with Motorola. At some point along the way, I realized that a lot of my telecom work dealt with the intersection of both government and business. After a couple years during the dot-com era working in New York with startups, I went to work with the Australian government, helping it craft its strategies for helping Australian technology companies succeed overseas. That was around the time of the United States–Australia Free Trade Agreement of the early 2000s. I’ve been working with the Australian government for more than 15 years now, first in New York, then in Australia, then in Brazil, and now in the Chicago mission. Austrade, or the Australian Trade and Investment Commission, is the Australian federal government’s trade

and investments promotion agency. It helps facilitate business between Australia and the rest of the world. We help Australian companies find opportunities for their business in offshore markets. We work with companies that are looking to source technology from Australia and find suppliers. We also work with offshore companies that are looking for business opportunities in Australia, for example, to export their products to Australia, but hopefully to eventually invest in Australia in the shape of an operational facility, a manufacturing facility, or a research center, thereby creating jobs. We have offices located around the world in over 80 different cities and countries. Austrade’s Americas region includes offices in Chicago; Boston; Houston; New York; San Francisco; Toronto; Vancouver; and Washington, DC. We also have offices all throughout Latin America. Each office focuses on different industries, based on location, and some have more of a trade promotion angle while others work more on the foreign direct investment– attraction side. We have five primary government priorities: resources and energy, agribusiness and food processing, services and technology, international health, and tourism. Those are the main areas in which we’re looking to source investments into Australia.

ADVERTISEMENT Our offices can also provide information to businesspeople who are interested in visiting Australia regarding where they should go and when they should do so, depending on what they are trying to sell. For instance, we could draw up a list of trade shows that would be relevant for the water, irrigation, agriculture, or resources and energy sectors. We also work hand in hand with the U.S. Commercial Service, our equivalent here in the United States, which works to help U.S. companies export abroad. They have specialists on the ground in Australia that can work one on one with a company as it looks for distributors or importers for its product. As a company gets more comfortable and familiar with exporting to Australia with a distributor or representative, it may want to take the next step of establishing a sales office, manufacturing facility, or warehousing facility in Australia. We can help the company understand how to establish itself in Australia, how to find partners and service providers who might work on the legal matrix, and how to find partners for any necessary tests and trials in the marketplace. We can also help companies gather information on the policies and regulations that govern the water marketplace and water rights management in Australia. Kris Polly: What would be the first step for someone who might be interested in doing business in the the water sector in Australia? Chris Knepler: Step 1 would be to visit austrade.gov.au to get a better understanding of our services and how we assist companies. We’ve got the background information about Australian capability and market opportunities. If the opportunity seems compelling, step 2 would be to call us to discuss the issue in more depth. We can provide some secondary information that is not on the website, including market reports and information about the key players and key trade events. We may suggest reaching out to the U.S. Commercial Service for purely export assistance. Step 3 would be thinking about a visit to the marketplace.

PHOTO COURTESY OF AUSTRADE.

Kris Polly: Do U.S. companies have any common misconceptions about what doing business in the Australian marketplace will be like? Chris Knepler: In general, I think one of the biggest surprises for Americans is that Australia is a massive country. It’s the size of the United States. However, the population is only 25 million compared to 325 million here in the United States. While Australia is a small market, it is a wealthy and well-connected one. Second, specific companies are very willing to test and trial technologies. U.S. companies may be pleasantly surprised at this attitude. Companies also need to understand the differences between the United States and Australia when it comes

to water rights, water availability, pricing, regulations, and policy. There is a learning curve. Certainly, when Australian companies come to the U.S. marketplace and learn how we’re draining our aquifers and how we’re not pricing water, they get a big shock. I think U.S. companies would be equally shocked at how sophisticated or ahead of the curve Australia is. That has implications for their technology, their market entry, and their marketing. Kris Polly: What other differences in business between the United States and Australia can you can point to? Chris Knepler: The sales model is a little different. I think Australians coming to the United States are not quite used to Americans’ natural ability to put themselves out there and be aggressive salespeople. As such, it’s important for Americans going down to Australia not to necessarily lead with the typical American hard sell, but to develop relationships first and let the technology speak for itself before trying to make a sale. Americans think they know Australians because they speak the same language, but there are always cultural trip-ups when you assume you understand the culture of another country. Kris Polly: Are there any examples of companies that have successfully made the crossover that might be of interest to our readers in the irrigation or water industries? Chris Knepler: Rubicon is an example of a successful Australian company operating in the United States. As for U.S. companies in Australia, there are many, including Xylem, Valmont, and Lindsay. Kris Polly: Is there anything you would like to add? Chris Knepler: Since Australia is located in the AsiaPacific region, companies that are looking to establish themselves in the Asia-Pacific marketplace may find it easier to do so initially via Australia. Australia has the same language, a similar culture, and similar intellectual property protections to the United States, so it is a good base. Additionally, if you establish a business or entity in Australia, you can take advantage of Australia’s free trade agreements with numerous Asia-Pacific countries, such as Korea and China, as well as research and development tax incentives. M Chris Knepler is an investment commissioner at Austrade. For more information about Austrade, visit austrade.gov.au.

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Water Management in Australia and Nebraska

Dr. Bruce Curtis, Sheryl Curtis, Jan Bostelman, and State Senator Bruce Bostelman in front of the Sydney Opera House.

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Bruce Bostelman, State Senator, Nebraska’s 23rd District Kris Polly: Senator, please tell us about your impressions of the tour. Bruce Bostelman: It was an informative and educational tour. This was the first opportunity that I have had to study surface water irrigation in Australia and the challenges that it has faced over the years, as well as its whole system of canals and gates and the computer system that ties it all together. I was very impressed. Kris Polly: What did you gain from the experience that might be applicable to Nebraska? Bruce Bostelman: I think that we have to see whether some of the technologies used in Australia could be used in our districts with surface water irrigation. Can we apply those technologies here in Nebraska, and will they achieve the same water savings that are being realized in Australia? I think there is great potential for that.

PHOTO COURTESY OFBRUCE CURTIS.

ast December, a group of Nebraskans joined Water Strategies for a tour of Australia that included Australia’s capital, Canberra, as well as the factory of irrigation equipment manufacturer Rubicon and irrigated farmland. In this article, Municipal Water Leader Editor-inChief Kris Polly speaks with Nebraska State Senator Bruce Bostelman, Jeremy Gehle of the Nebraska Department of Water Resources (NeDNR), and Bruce Curtis of the Upper Republican Natural Resources District about their experiences of the tour. Senator Bostelman represents Nebraska’s 23rd district, covering Saunders and Butler Counties and parts of Colfax County. As the lawmaking body for a heavily irrigated agricultural state, the Nebraska Unicameral Legislature has long been concerned with developing new and innovative ways to conserve irrigation water. Mr. Gehle is the division head of water administration for the the NeDNR, which prides itself on preserving and conserving Nebraska’s many types of water. The department has many branches that specialize in various types of water management, including groundwater, surface water, and floodplain management. Bruce Curtis is the assistant manager of the Upper Republican Natural Resources District, based in Imperial, Nebraska. The district has long been a leader in groundwater preservation and in the stewardship of natural resources.

ADVERTISEMENT Kris Polly: Was there anything in particular about the tour that stood out? Were there any surprises? Bruce Bostelman: The thing that stood out the most was the technology that allowed them to move water efficiently and the computer systems that tied together the whole system. Irrigators can call for water or cancel a call for water on very short notice. That would probably be beneficial here in Nebraska because we have rain events. A person could issue a call for water, and if we had a rain event, they might need to cancel it. Right now, in some areas we have administrators managing these gates. An automated system like the ones we saw would definitely save water and money in a situation like that. Another interesting thing was how Australia has separated water from land. It will be interesting to see how that system fares over the years. It was a little surprising to me to see how they portion the water out. It is very different from how things are done in Nebraska. Another difference is that in Nebraska, we do more groundwater irrigation than surface water irrigation—it varies by region—whereas Australia is almost completely dependent on surface water irrigation and runoff. However, the Australian experience with surface water management may be relevant in the western part of Nebraska, especially the Republican River basin, where water flows from one state to another are a big issue. Kris Polly: What were your thoughts, as a member of the Nebraska State Legislature, about our meetings with representatives of the Australian federal government in Canberra? Bruce Bostelman: It was great to have an opportunity to talk with them and to hear why they’ve gone in the direction they have. The Millennium Drought was the driving factor for their taking action, and we spoke with the leadership that had made those decisions. We were able to discuss the implementation of their current water system and the separation of water from land and to hear how they feel it’s functioning for them now. Kris Polly: Overall, what was your impression of the Australians? Bruce Bostelman: Australians are great, friendly people, lots of fun. I enjoyed the opportunity to meet them, to travel across the country, and to see different farming applications. We saw everything from wheat being combined in the field to citrus and almond fields, grapes, and the whole gamut of corn from the two-leaf stage almost to tasseling, all next to each other in the field. It was interesting to see how their growing seasons and crops are different from ours. The reality was that on the agricultural

side, now that they have separated the land from the water, the cost of water and irrigation has gone up. They’ve had to rethink and reshape agriculture. In areas where they were growing rice before, they’ve gone to stone fruits, citrus, almonds, and grapes. They’ve had to change over to high-value crops in order to make irrigated agriculture sustainable. Their soil and climate allowed them to do that. This has had a significant effect on family farms in the regions we toured. In Nebraska, we are not going to be able to grow oranges or almonds, obviously. Kris Polly: Did you find the tour helpful? Bruce Bostelman: Yes. Especially in relation to the Republican River basin, we are dealing with water usage and water conservation issues. There is potential for using some of the technology we saw in Australia there. The tour was helpful in understanding that better. You have to look at what has been proven to work, and try to build off that.

Jeremy Gehle, Division Head of Water Administration, Nebraska Department of Natural Resources Kris Polly: Please tell us about your background and what you do for the state. Jeremy Gehle: I have a degree in water science from the University of Nebraska. My first job out of school was with the Nebraska Department of Water Resources, which merged with the Nebraska Natural Resources Commission to form the NeDNR a month after I started working there. I have been at the NeDNR nearly 19 years. At the department, I work predominantly with surface water and our water administration systems, which are based on the first in time, first in right prior appropriations system. According to state statute, when there are shortages, we need to make sure the water goes to the person with the most senior water rights. I am also responsible for our streamgauging program and our survey section. Kris Polly: What were your impressions of Water Strategies’ tour of Australia last December? Jeremy Gehle: The 16-hour flight was a little long, but everything else was outstanding. It was interesting to talk to the Victoria state government folks and learn how they adapted their water resources policies and laws to reflect the ongoing drought and the water scarcity they face. The tours through the agricultural land and the tour of the Rubicon factory were really enlightening. It was interesting MUNICIPALWATERLEADER.COM

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ADVERTISEMENT to learn about the technology behind Rubicon’s gates and the infrastructure that makes the water markets and the allocation system they set up in Australia possible. Finishing up in Canberra with the federal government, it was really interesting to learn about how they rolled out their new water reform. It was a fascinating look at how another continent deals with some of the same issues that we’re working through here in Nebraska. Kris Polly: What was the biggest surprise of everything you saw and learned? Jeremy Gehle: In terms of the landscape, it was amazing how dry and flat it was. I still think about how the differences between the two climates of southeastern Australia and Nebraska—the timing of precipitation, the availability of groundwater—all those little differences affect the ways that we manage our water here in Nebraska versus how they do in Australia. In terms of water policy, it was most surprising to learn what a huge undertaking it was to roll out Australia’s water marketing policy and program, which took years and required all sorts of research. Kris Polly: What did you learn over there that you think could be helpful for a situation in Nebraska? Jeremy Gehle: It seemed like they had really good working relationships between the federal and state governments and the local irrigation districts. It also seemed to me that even the patrons of the districts had a good understanding of all the issues that faced them, and they responded well to the changes in policy, both dealing with how the water was allocated and with reduced water usage. The neat thing with the water markets that they did have in place is that if they didn’t have enough water allocated toraise the crop that they were intending to raise, they could still sell that water and have some income off their land. Kris Polly: What was the highlight of the tour for you? Jeremy Gehle: One of my favorite things was meeting with Richard McLoughlin and Adam Sincock of the Australian Government in Canberra. The founders of Rubicon were pretty fascinating, too. They took a business idea and ran with it and turned it into an international company. If you’re any kind of an aspiring entrepreneur, it is really interesting to learn about their story. For me personally, it was neat to see the different landscapes and the flora and fauna of Australia. The thing that I appreciated the most was the opportunity to spend 5 days together with the other professionals in the field from Nebraska and to learn from them. I think that was the most valuable takeaway of being on the trip.

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Kris Polly: Did you find the tour helpful? Jeremy Gehle: I did. It opened my eyes and broadened my horizons to see different ways to address issues. It helped me cast a more inquisitive eye on how water is managed here in Nebraska and the interaction between groundwater and surface water management. One day, there might the potential for expanded applications of water markets here. It was also fascinating to learn about the precision and accuracy with which the Rubicon system can measure and distribute water. Here in Nebraska, pivots and electrical wells can be automated and controlled from a mobile device. The Rubicon system allows for something similar with surface water. That might have some applications across the state as well. Kris Polly: Would you encourage other folks to go? Jeremy Gehle: I sure would, particularly if they could go with a group like the one we had. I think folks that are willing to travel the distance are curious about alternative approaches to water management and want to experience new things and learn from the other participants.

Dr. Bruce Curtis, Assistant Manager, Upper Republican Natural Resources District Kris Polly: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position. Bruce Curtis: I grew up in Illinois and got a bachelor’s in civil engineering with a concentration in water resources from the University of Illinois. I then worked for 6 or 7 years for the Illinois Department of Natural Resources. I also got a master of business administration while in Illinois. I then got a master’s degree and a PhD focusing on groundwater from the University of Nebraska– Lincoln. I lived in California for 2 years, working in groundwater, and then I transferred to Denver to work on groundwater and surface water issues. I was in Denver for not quite 25 years, working mainly on surface water, but some groundwater as well. If it is has to do with water, I’ve probably done it at some point in time, whether it is groundwater modeling, surface water modeling, sediment transport, groundwater quality, or water treatment. My wife wanted to move back to Nebraska, and the assistant manager job for the Upper Republican Natural Resources Department looked like a good opportunity. The district was kind enough to offer me the position. Kris Polly: What were your impressions of what you saw during our December trip to Australia?

ADVERTISEMENT Bruce Curtis: The mixture of different things meant the trip was a learning experience with fun mixed in. The zoos, the types of food, and the history were all different from what you get here. It was also interesting to see the federal capital, Canberra, and how it was laid out. We got to visit the Rubicon facility and actually see the equipment being made, not just the gates and the water surface gauges, but also the software. We also got to meet the Australian water users. We met with federal people, state people, an irrigation co-op, and an irrigation district. That gave us a feel for the different types of users, what their challenges are, and how they’re solving the problems. Kris Polly: What did you see over there that was most applicable to what you do now? Bruce Curtis: It made me feel optimistic to see how they managed water rights. They scrapped their whole water right system and invented something new. I don’t know if that solution is really applicable here, but it was inspiring to see that, when faced with a problem, the people there got together and solved it. Everyone has different opinions—we see plenty of fighting back and forth over here too—but in a real crisis, everyone pitched in and sacrificed and came up with a plan to solve the problem. Kris Polly: It is impressive how they faced a tremendous crisis head on and solved it in a way that worked for them. Bruce Curtis: I think that says something about humanity in general. We’ll fight and bicker about the small things, but when it comes to the big stuff, people pitch in and get it done.

PHOTOS COURTESY OF BRUCE BOSTELMAN, JEREMY GEHLE, AND BRUCE CURTIS.

Kris Polly: Was there anything you saw on the tour that you found especially surprising? Bruce Curtis: I learned that Australia has been growing economically for something like 27 years in a row without a recession. One of the things that really shocked me was the Australians’ great interest in and familiarity with American politics. Whenever we turned on the news, it

seemed like the majority of what I was hearing was related to American politics. When it came to water management, I was impressed by how they had reshaped their water rights system. The districts we saw run their systems very efficiently, thanks to Rubicon’s equipment. Whereas they used to have to put in a demand for water days in advance, their new equipment and software allows them to get water with an hour’s advance notice, which is just incredible to me. It is very efficient and user friendly. Kris Polly: What is your message for people who might be considering going on a trip like this? Bruce Curtis: If you have the opportunity, you should go. There is no downside. You get to see a lot of interesting things and you get to see things from other people’s perspectives. You see the challenges they face and their solutions to them. They might not be the exact problems you have at home, but you can take bits and pieces of what you learn and apply them to your particular situation. It is an amazing opportunity. M Bruce Bostelman is the state senator for Nebraska’s 23rd District. He can be reached at bbostelman@leg.ne.gov. Jeremy Gehle is the division head of water administration for the Nebraska Department of Natural Resources. He can be reached at jeremy.gehle@nebraska.gov. Dr. Bruce Curtis is the assistant manager of the Upper Republican Natural Resources District. He can be reached at bcurtis@urnrd.org.

A Rubicon gate system on the main canal of the Murrumbidgee Irrigation District, near Yanco, Australia.

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Upcoming Events August 7–9 Western Water Seminar, NWRA, Portland, OR September 1–7 3rd World Irrigation Forum and 70th IEC Meeting, USCID, Bali, Indonesia September 8–11 34th Annual WaterReuse Symposium, WateReuse, San Diego, CA September 8–12 Dam Safety 2019, Association of State Dam Safety Officials, Orlando, FL September 10–12 Husker Harvest Days 2019, Grand Island, NE September 17 Water Rights in Nevada, Nevada Water Resources Association, Reno, NV September 23–26 Fall Week of Water, Nevada Water Resources Association, Reno, NV September 24 Fall Symposium, Nevada Water Resources Association, Reno, NV September 26 Marlette Lake Water System Tour, Nevada Water Resources Association, Carson, NV September 26 Operational Value of the Well, Nevada Water Resources Association, Reno, NV October 2 Golf Tournament, Oregon Water Resources Association, Sisters, OR October 25 H2OPen Golf Tournament, Arizona BWC, Casa Grande, AZ November 4–8 USCID’s 2019 Conference, USCID, Reno, Nevada November 6–8 88th Annual Conference, NWRA, Houston, TX December 2 Annual Agribusiness Roundtable, Arizona BWC, Tempe, AZ December 4–6 Annual Conference, Washington State Water Resource, Spokane, WA December 11–13 Annual Conference, CRWUA, Las Vegas, NV December 13–14 2019 Winter Meeting, Western Governors Association, Las Vegas NV

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