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The Nemmeli Desalination Plant is a water desalination plant at Nemmeli, Chennai, Tamil Nadu on the coast of the Bay of Bengal that supplies water to the city of Chennai.

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The plant was inaugurated by the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu M. Karunanidhi on 22 February 2010 and opened by J.Jayalalithaa, was built to provide piped water to residents of south Chennai and the newly merged areas.

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The desalination plant experienced problems in the beginning and was shut down most of the time as contractor proposed the design without dissolved air floatation leading to regular choking of filters.

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The plant has a capacity to treat 100 million litres of seawater a day.

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The production cost of treated water at the plant has been calculated approximately as ₹36 per kilolitre of water.

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The process technology involves marine sea water intake system consisting of disc filters followed by ultra-filtration. A 1,050-metre-long pipeline with a diameter of 1,600 mm has been sunk at a depth of about 14.1 m in the sea side and 5.5 m in the shore side, capable of drawing nearly 265 million litres per day of seawater.

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Another 750-metre-long pipeline with a diameter of 1,200 mm discharges waste water from the plant.

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Then the water is sent to the final stage of the treatment process through reverse osmosis membranes before distribution, which reduces the total dissolved solids in seawater from about 40,000 parts per million to 300 parts per million, thus making it potable.

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Disc filters and ultra-filtration membranes were imported from Israel, while additional reverse osmosis membranes were imported from Japan.