Minister of the Interior Sándor Pintér, who oversees water affairs, dismisses the director of water affairs, whose signature was used to publish a critical expert opinion on the water aspects of the battery factory planned for Debrecen, reports 24.hu.
Dániel Kincses, head of the Tiszántúl Water Directorate (TIVIZIG), confirmed the news to the newspaper. He said that he also found out that he was being released a few days ago, and that the news came to him unexpectedly, but since he had not yet received an official, written notification, he did not comment on the details.
In February, TIVIZIG completed the official expert opinion necessary for the environmental use permit procedure for the future action factory of the Chinese CATL, which it sent to the relevant government agency. The most important finding of the seven-page document was that the factory needs to be redesigned in several places in terms of water management and that due to its enormous water demand, Debrecen will have to transform the entire urban drinking water, wastewater and precipitation network, because the current system would no longer be able to handle the load.
Other interesting findings of the TIVIZIG team led by Kincses are highlighted:
CATL applied for the environmental use permit without specifying the expected annual water consumption in its application;
even more water is needed to cool the production line. “The technology planned for operation in the factory operates with an evaporation loss of 85 percent, i.e. it is planned to evaporate between 2,871 and 13,175 cubic meters of drinking water purchased from the public utility network, primarily from aquifers.”
although the use of gray water is often mentioned in vain, according to TIVIZIG, in the industrial park they actually experienced “a planning process in this direction in the case of none of the factories”, even though according to the board of directors, due to water conservation considerations, the company must rethink the cooling technology involving a huge loss of water;
impact analyzes of possible accidents were omitted from the CATL documentation;
The accelerated industrialization of Debrecen may overload the city’s drinking water base within a year or two.
The Ministry of the Interior has not yet responded to the newspaper’s questions, so it is not possible to know for sure whether the critical expert opinion and the exemption are related.
debreceninap.hu
