In October 2015, Water. Desalination + reuse (Faversham House) reported that Aquatech had secured a zero liquid discharge (ZLD) contract in China. The client was Shenhua Ningxia Coal Industry, part of Shenhua Group, which was building a coal-to-liquids plant rated at 4 million tonnes a year. The system was to recover more than 55,000 m³/day (55 Ml/d) of wastewater as high-purity process water. Aquatech handled design, supply and site supervision; its process joined ultrafiltration and two reverse osmosis stages, one of them high-efficiency, with falling film evaporators and crystallizers.
The report showed that reverse osmosis and thermal brine concentration were being applied at large scale in China's coal chemical sector at the time to recover process water completely.