Beyond Desalination: Deployment, Recovery, and Infrastructure

Tiabzu brings the tools, technology, and methods to change the environment for desalination. We leverage natural processes – deep Ocean, hydrostatic pressure for reverse osmosis, relative density between fresh water and seawater for buoyancy control – and a symbiosis with existing offshore infrastructure – to make subsea desalination competitive.

While Tiabzu can deploy using an A-Frame or deck crane, it can also launch from commonly accessible harbor facilities and be towed to the installation location. Reducing the size of the handling vessel promises to shorten implementation time and avoid costly scheduling delays for heavy-lift vessels and cranes with their limited availability and high demand. Not to mention removing their high cost, estimated to start at $200,000 per day, from capital expense budgets.

Tiabzu addresses these challenges with its unique approach to deployment and recovery from depth to surface for maintenance or at end of life, and a patented system for buoyancy control.

The Tiabzu system includes an integrated buoyancy control system analogous to a hot air balloon. Instead of using difference in density between hot, internal air and cool, external air for lift, its balloon, or bladder, provides lift using the approximate 3% difference in relative density between the RO water and seawater.

RO water buoyancy allows safe vertical movement of subsea objects without change in lifting force with depth associated with gas-based methods where buoyant force varies with changes in pressure. 

This buoyancy system integration is used to facilitate deployment, recovery for maintenance or at end of life, or to position and maintain it at operational depth during Mobile operations. For scaled water harvesting fields, the module keel will mate with subsea infrastructure.