A letter of intent signed last month has positioned Canadian mining company World Copper as a potential anchor offtaker for a 172,800m~3/d seawa-ter desalination plant which is planned to serve multiple clients in Chile's O'Higgins region (Ⅵ). The LOI was signed with Desaladora Rosario SpA (Desala), an early-stage project developer which specialises in de-risking multi-client desalination projects by identifying offtakers, securing land and environmental permits, negotiating social buy-in from local communities, and then selling the conceptual package to a full-scale developer when the facility is ready to build. The company is run by Ignacio Rodriguez, who oversees corporate affairs and legal, Rodrigo Turra - IDE Technologies' former Chilean boss - and sociologist Felipe Risopatron, who leads stakeholder relations. "The social and environmental legitimacy of projects is really important, and that task is something that foreign companies often do not focus on," Rodriguez explained. "That is part of the value that we bring to the table." Desala's concept consists in identifying offtakers from the mining and agricultural sectors, as well as from rural communities in central Chile, and using tiered subsidisation to structure desalination projects with sufficient economies of scale so as to make them bankable propositions.
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