Comandante Ferraz Scientific Station - Antarctica

Problem

Ensuring access to safe drinking water in one of the most inhospitable places on Earth seemed like an almost impossible challenge. The Comandante Ferraz Scientific Station, located on King George Island in the Antarctic Ocean, faces extreme temperatures below -25 °C, cyclonic winds reaching 200 km/h, and a remote location over 800 km from the South American coast. After a devastating fire in 2012 that destroyed 70% of the facilities, the urgency to rebuild made it even more critical to create a reliable system for water intake, treatment, and continuous supply. In this context, access to safe water was not merely a technical requirement — it was a matter of survival.

Proposed Solution

Bondalti Water was selected to develop, install, and commission a complete water treatment system capable of ensuring a continuous and reliable water supply to the station. The project included:

- Water intake from nearby lakes (during the summer) and from the sea (year-round), with minimum temperatures of 5 °C;

- Use of advanced technologies including desalination, reverse osmosis, multimedia filtration, and UV disinfection;

- Adaptation of equipment to contraction caused by extreme cold, with resizing of membranes;

- Implementation of redundant systems to ensure uninterrupted operation in the event of equipment failure;

- Assembly and testing performed in Portugal, followed by a complex international logistics operation to Antarctica.

Results

Bondalti Water’s system can produce up to 20 m³/day of potable water, essential for the station’s needs, which accommodates up to 100 people during the summer. The system was successfully validated under real conditions, ensuring continuous operation despite severe environmental constraints.

Critical equipment redundancy, remote monitoring, and ease of local maintenance ensure long-term reliability. The Portuguese technical team’s mission, with stays of over a month in Antarctica, culminated in the inauguration of the new station in January 2020, attended by high-level representatives of the Brazilian government.

This project not only demonstrated Bondalti Water’s technical capability to face extreme conditions, but also reinforced its commitment to sustainability. The continuous supply of safe drinking water contributes directly to scientific research on climate change and its global impacts, in one of the planet’s most fragile and symbolic ecosystems.

For Bondalti Water, this project is a true showcase of its technological excellence and ability to respond to the most demanding challenges anywhere in the world - but it also represents a renewed commitment to the sustainability of the planet.

Scope
Water Collection and Treatment

Project
Antarctica

Theme/challenge
Supplying drinking water to the Comandante Ferraz Station

Location
King George Island, Antarctica

Duration
2013-2020