In September 2012, Water. Desalination + reuse (Faversham House) presented, in a feature from its August/September 2012 magazine issue, two Chilean seawater reverse osmosis plants which the headline linked to mining. The feature used them as examples of ultrafiltration as a pretreatment step ahead of reverse osmosis. The Gas Atacama plant had started operation in June 2011 and, according to the feature, had run successfully since then; the second plant was still being built.
The feature showed that, by 2012, ultrafiltration ahead of seawater reverse osmosis had operating experience in Chile and was being used for further plants.