ATLAS Technical Commentary
The real story here isn’t the study trip, it’s the admission behind it: the UK has never built large-scale seawater RO, and Anglian Water knows it doesn’t have that expertise sitting in-house. That’s why the £29 million technical contract for the two planned plants in Norfolk and Lincolnshire went to a TYPSA-Stantec pairing rather than a UK-only team — TYPSA has been working Spanish desalination projects for years, and Anglian is now leaning on Acciona through its Desalination Technology Partnership for design-build-operate know-how it simply can’t source domestically yet. For equipment and technology suppliers, that matters because it means this is a genuinely open field. There’s no incumbent UK seawater RO vendor base to displace, no entrenched framework relationships from a prior generation of plants — whoever gets specified into these first two projects has a real shot at setting the template for whatever comes after.
Worth flagging too: the plants that impressed the UK delegation at Alicante and Torrevieja were engineered for Mediterranean intake water, warm, high in dissolved solids, running through isobaric energy recovery devices tuned to that chemistry. The North Sea is a different animal — colder, different turbidity and biofouling behaviour, and a UK marine discharge regime that isn’t the same as Spain’s. None of the Spanish plant data transfers over cleanly. Suppliers who can show cold-water membrane performance and North Sea-relevant pretreatment references will have a real argument to make with Anglian’s engineering team; suppliers whose only case studies are Mediterranean or Gulf projects will need to do some translating.
The demand numbers behind this are also worth sitting with. Anglian’s own 2024 Water Resources Management Plan puts the East of England on track for a 593 megalitre-a-day shortfall by 2050 without intervention — call it roughly half of what currently flows through the network. Anglian is currently the only English water company committing to new-build desalination under AMP8, but RAPID’s managing director is already talking about a 5 billion litre daily shortfall for England by 2055. If Anglian’s two plants land on time and on budget, expect other water companies serving dry, fast-growing regions to start asking the same questions in AMP9 — which is where the bigger, second-wave opportunity for this supply chain probably sits.
News Summary
A delegation from the UK water sector has returned from a trip to Spain organised by the Water Research Centre (WRc, part of RSK Group), bringing together representatives from Anglian Water, Cranfield University, and the Regulators’ Alliance for Progressing Infrastructure Development (RAPID) with counterparts from Spain’s Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge, ACUAMED, ICEX, the University of Alicante, the Spanish Association of Desalination and Reuse (AEDyR), and the British Embassy in Spain.
Spain is Europe’s largest producer of desalinated water and the fourth largest in the world, drawing on more than 20 years of experience across hundreds of plants that together produce roughly 5 billion litres a day. The delegation toured the Alicante seawater desalination plant, which supplies 122.5 million litres a day to the region’s residents, tourists, and businesses, and the Torrevieja plant — Europe’s largest — which produces up to 240 million litres a day for around 1.6 million people in the Vega Baja area and uses high-efficiency isobaric energy recovery devices to cut energy use. The group also held roundtable discussions on regulatory and environmental questions at the University of Alicante and with the Ministry for Ecological Transition in Madrid.
The visit comes as Anglian Water prepares to build the UK’s first large-scale seawater desalination plants, in Norfolk and Lincolnshire, to close a supply gap its 2024 Water Resources Management Plan attributes to falling available supply and rising demand across the East of England — a shortfall projected at 593 megalitres a day by 2050 without action. The plants will draw seawater from the North Sea, treat it through pre-treatment, reverse osmosis, and remineralisation, and disperse brine through a long sea outfall with diffusers. Anglian is currently the only English water company building new desalination capacity under its AMP8 investment programme.
Sian Thomas, Anglian Water’s Director of Strategic Asset Management, said seeing the technology working at scale in Alicante was valuable precisely because desalination is new to both the UK and to Anglian Water, and that regulator engagement on the visit was an important part of building support for the plants. Paul Hickey, RAPID’s Managing Director, pointed to a projected shortfall of 5 billion litres a day for England by 2055 as the reason the sector needs to diversify supply options, including desalination and water recycling, and called the Spain visit a chance to learn directly from Europe’s largest desalinated-water producer.
In January, Anglian Water awarded a £29 million technical contract for the two plants to a TYPSA-Stantec partnership; TYPSA has been active in the European desalination market, including supporting Spain’s own plants, while Stantec is a leading design and engineering consultant to the UK water sector. Anglian is also working with Acciona, a major global desalination design-build-operate firm, through its Desalination Technology Partnership, which will support design and engineering, site selection, planning and consenting, land acquisition, and regulatory engagement across the programme.
Media & Source Attributions: This report is based on reporting originally published by Water Magazine on July 28, 2026, sourced from Anglian Water: “UK water sector turns the tide on desalination with visit to Spain”.