SIDEM Brand Guidelines: Veolia’s Desalination Specialist, From Gulf Evaporators to the Barrel

A French name for taking salt out of the sea.

SIDEM is the desalination specialist of the French group Veolia. The letters stand for Société Internationale de Dessalement, the international desalination company, according to the supplier directory of the trade database DesalData on desalination.com. It works within Veolia Water Technologies, the group’s water-treatment engineering arm, and the SIDEM website is published by that business, whose legal notice gives its registered office at Saint-Maurice, in France. The website calls itself “SIDEM Smart Desalination.”

The company tells a long story about its origins. Its history page begins with “early evaporators” from 1828 to 1934 and with the first large projects of two predecessors it names only as CEM and SCAM, and it says that after its incorporation as a standalone entity SIDEM “grew rapidly and delivered ever bigger thermal desalination projects.” It gives no founding year on the pages we read; Veolia, in a press release of June 2023, dates SIDEM’s experience in desalination to the 1970s.

The 1970s and 1980s were the years of multi-stage flash, or MSF, distillation. SIDEM lists landmark MSF projects across the Gulf: Ras Abu Aboud in Qatar, in 1970 and 1975; Umm Al Nar in Abu Dhabi, in 1976 and 1980; Al Khobar II in Saudi Arabia, in 1979; and Al Taweelah in Abu Dhabi, in 1982 and 1991. A 2020 report by the analysts Frost & Sullivan describes MSF as the dominant desalination technology of those two decades.

From flash distillation to multiple effects.

SIDEM’s technical signature is multi-effect distillation, or MED. The company says that, learning from older multiple-effect evaporators with submerged tubes, it introduced a modern form of the process with spray-tube bundles and low operating temperatures, and that it set out to promote MED in place of MSF once its advantages were confirmed. Its first large MED unit was commissioned in Sicily in 1992, by its own account, followed by units on the island of Curaçao in 1994, at Umm Al Nar in 1998, at Layyah in 1999 and 2005, and at Fujairah II in 2007.

In 1998 SIDEM became part of the Veolia Environnement group, which, it says, gave it the financial backing to take on larger projects; the Frost & Sullivan report of 2020 also calls it “an entity of Veolia since 1998.” In 2005 SIDEM took full ownership of Entropie, which sells equipment of its own design and is now SIDEM’s subsidiary.

The largest contract in SIDEM’s history, by its own account, came in 2007, when it agreed to engineer, supply, install and commission 27 MED units for the Saudi utility Marafiq. With its sister company OTV it then supplied the plant at Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates, which combines MED distillation with a reverse-osmosis plant and was commissioned in 2010; SIDEM calls it “the first hybrid plant of its kind.”

The next step brought membranes into SIDEM itself. The company says it merged in 2013 with OTV-Major Projects Group, the Veolia unit that had built large seawater reverse-osmosis plants at Sur in Oman, Fujairah, the Gold Coast and Sydney in Australia, and Az-Zour South in Kuwait; the Frost & Sullivan report dates the merger with the sister company, which it calls OTV International, to 2012. Since then, SIDEM says, it has completed reverse-osmosis plants for Sadara in Saudi Arabia and for the extension at Sur, and has worked on a brackish-water project at Basra in Iraq.

Design and documentation.

Desalination and industrial water companies sell things that few people ever see up close. Their customers are utilities, governments, refineries, mines and factories, and what they buy is rarely a boxed product: it is a plant, a process, a long operating contract or a membrane that will sit inside a pressure vessel for years. That shapes how these companies present themselves.

The plant is usually the hero. Company websites and annual reports in this field tend to lead with aerial photographs of coastal desalination works, with intake pipes running out to sea and long halls beside the shore. Inside, the familiar image is a row of white or grey pressure vessels holding reverse-osmosis membranes, stacked rack upon rack, or the polished casings of pumps and pressure exchangers that recover energy from the brine stream. Engineers in hard hats and high-visibility jackets on site, checking a control screen or walking a pipe gallery, give the pictures a human scale.

The vocabulary is technical and often trademarked. Membranes, energy-recovery devices and treatment processes carry their own names, and companies list reference plants, countries and project counts the way consumer brands list stockists. Awards from the water trade press and industry bodies are often displayed prominently.

The industry also meets in person. Trade fairs such as IFAT in Munich and Singapore International Water Week bring utilities, contractors and equipment makers to the same halls, and the stands there, with their models, membrane cut-aways and video walls, are one of the few places where these brands show themselves to each other. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company and marks what rests on its own word.

“Smart Desalination.”

Most of SIDEM’s recent work has been large reverse-osmosis plants in the Gulf. In March 2020 the trade magazine WaterWorld reported that Veolia Water Technologies, through SIDEM, had won three Middle East contracts in a year: Rabigh 3 in Saudi Arabia, Al Dur 2 in Bahrain and the engineering and procurement of a new plant at Umm Al Quwain in the United Arab Emirates, to be built with the Chinese contractor Gezhouba Group International Engineering. In June 2023 Veolia announced that SIDEM would lead the consortium building the Mirfa 2 plant in Abu Dhabi for TAQA and Engie, and in May 2024 that SIDEM would design and supply key technology for the Hassyan plant in Dubai for the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority and ACWA Power, due to begin operating in 2026.

At the other end of the scale is the Barrel, a reverse-osmosis unit that SIDEM says it launched at the IDA World Congress in Dubai. Frost & Sullivan’s 2020 report describes it as a vessel two metres in diameter and ten metres long that needs no building to house it, with digital monitoring of its membranes, and the report gave Veolia its 2020 Global Company of the Year award in the desalination plant industry. The DesalData directory lists Barrel installations from the French West Indies to Glenties, in County Donegal, Ireland.

As a brand, SIDEM sits inside Veolia’s system: its website carries a Veolia copyright line, and the name appears in Veolia’s announcements as “its subsidiary SIDEM.” No separate colour or typeface standard is published.

For a design guide, SIDEM shows how an engineering name can keep its own identity inside a large group. Compare Veolia, its parent, and IDE Technologies, another specialist in large desalination plants. For this guide we use a Gulf blue, a salt white and a sand with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep SIDEM’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.