In Brief - America

* Peter S. Silva will take over from Ben Grumbles as assistant administrator for water programmes at the US EPA.

Silva is a trained civil engineer with over 30 years of water and wastewater experience. He specializes in water resource policy.

* GE Water has named Frederick Liberatore as its global director of process separations. Liberatore has more than 20 years of experience in the process membranes business with Desalination Systems, Inc., and then with Osmonics, which was taken over by GE in 2003.

* Ashbrook Simon-Hartley has purchased UK-based decanter centrifuge manufacturer Centriquip Ltd. Centriquip supplies the water and wastewater markrts with liquid-solid separation technologies and odour control equipment.

* Pennsylvania American Water has closed an $80 million 30-year tax-exempt water facility revenue bond through the Pennsylvania Economic Development Financing Authority (PEDFA). The A3/A rated note pays a coupon of 6.2%, and was underwritten by Morgan Stanley. American Water completed a $75 million 8.25% 30-year bond as recently as February, and plans to issue additional long-term tax-exempt bonds to finance capital expenditure at several of its state subsidiaries.

* Energy Recovery, Inc. has been awarded a contract to supply its PX-260 energy recovery technology to the 75,000m3/d Paraguaná (SWRO) desalination plant in Venezuela. The project is currently under construction through EPC contractor Acciona Agua, and will be the largest RO desalination plant in South America upon completion in early 2010. ERI’s technology will save the plant an estimated 52MW of energy per year.

* H2O Innovation Inc. has been awarded four new drinking water and wastewater treatment contracts in the US and Canada totalling Can$5.1 million (US$4.2 million). The contracts include the expansion of an existing reverse osmosis desalination facility, the supply of water filtration process equipment, and two wastewater treatment systems contracts. The company has extended its wastewater treatment offering since its acquisition of Wastewater Technologies, Inc. in April 2008.