A High Pressure Job with Miya's Booky Oren

by Carlos David Mogollón

• Competition for scarce water resources in arid areas makes pressure management losses crucial to easing industrial water needs – as well as potentially lowering the cost of water

Major beverage companies worldwide, such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi, are among industrial users realizing by helping to ease local water quality infrastructure needs they relieve pressure on their own use of water resources. Improved water infrastructure can also cut the cost of water for industry, acknowledges Baruch “Booky” Oren, president and CEO of Miya, an Arison company.

After all, water lost due to aging and/or leaky piping is water wasted. And, when it's gone through an expensive treatment process, the value of that loss increases incrementally with the energy and infrastructure investment to treat and deliver it – compounding the waste. Even before the recent financial crisis engulfed the globe making every dollar spent on infrastructure more critical, said Oren. His previous water industry experience was as chairman of Mekorot, the Israeli national water utility, from 2003-06, and vice president of Netafim, the largest micro-irrigation company in the world.

While an entity since 2006 when Carnival Cruise Line and Arison Group fortune heiress Shari Arison picked Oren as the point man to invest $100 million in water equipment and related technologies, Miya itself was formed only last fall. In the interim, it acquired several companies and technologies and enlisted various experts all pointing it toward a specific goal – reducing water losses in urban distribution systems. Those include: Israel's Dorot – a control valve maker operating in over 70 countries; Switzerland's Gutermann – a company operating in over 30 countries that's a leading provider of data acquisition and leak locating equipment; Croatia's IMGD Ltd. – a regional water loss management pioneer; Romanias' Romiya – a joint venture of Miya and Grup Romet, which specializes in turnkey projects for non-revenue water loss reduction; Canada's Veritec Consulting Inc. – designer of some of the largest water loss reduction programs there, focusing on water efficiency, pressure management, metered zone flow optimization, and leak analysis software; and WRP – a South African international engineering firm, active as well mainly in Australia.

Click here to read the full interview, "More with Miya's Booky Oren", in Q&A format.