Creating fresh water in the middle of the sea isn’t magic; it’s science. And that science arrives through cutting-edge technology, including the patent held by Redondelana Peter Taboada, a company founded in 1979 by Jesús Manuel Taboada Presedo, a merchant navy captain known as Peter. The firm, based in Pontevedra, prides itself on the desalination plant that was designed and installed on a vessel, a milestone it helped achieve. But that achievement is far from the only one. Peter Taboada has grown with time, and so has its order book, which now includes projects across defense, fishing, and luxury maritime tourism.
According to the company’s commercial director, Carlos Manzano, cited by Faro de Vigo, one of the clearest signs of their growth is revenue. They moved from around seven million euros in 2022 to eleven million in 2023, and they expect to reach thirteen million in 2024 thanks to contracts the team is handling. The workforce has expanded from three founders to forty professionals who currently deliver services.
Their machinery consists of desalination plants, units with various capacities depending on size but sharing the same goal: to bring fresh water to the sea. The company, responsible for the equipment that powers the desalination on the submarine Isaac Peral, capable of producing up to 6,000 liters of potable water daily, is tackling a project aimed at the minehunter vessels of the Navy.
These six ships range from M-31 to M-36, measuring about fifty-four to fifty-five meters in length, and are named after rivers Segura, Sella, Tambre, Turia, Duero, and Tajo. Peter Taboada, historically collaborating with the shipyard Navantia, has already developed three of the devices to be installed aboard these vessels, specialized in keeping mine-threatened areas such as anchorages, access channels to ports, and navigation routes free of danger.
The systems will be able to produce up to 12,000 liters of potable water per day, drawing seawater and enabling crews to secure the water supply necessary for drinking, washing, and cooking. In parallel, the Redondelana firm is involved in other projects serving several MSC and Ritz-Carlton cruise lines.
Beyond these sectors, Peter Taboada has manufactured numerous plants for fishing vessels from Norway and Chile that focus on salmon. The equipment serves a different function: it reduces salmon mortality. “What they do is aspirate the salmon from the farm and bathe it. They bathe it in desalinated, osmotically treated potable water, and then return it. Thanks to the freshwater bath, the parasite releases,” Manzano explains about these circuits. The largest plant they have installed, also the world’s largest of its kind, can produce up to 15,000 cubic meters per day.
“There is no issue for us, and we could build desalination plants that exceed this one,” the company’s commercial director notes, making clear that the limit is determined by the available space on each vessel. “From a human consumption perspective, our installations could supply drinking water for a city of between 100,000 and 120,000 residents,” he adds, roughly four times the population of Redondela.