Keahole, Hawai'i — A new bottling plant is ready to ramp up to full production at the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawai'i Authority, becoming the second bottling operation there to tap consumer demand for desalinated deep seawater.

The $5 million Deep SeaWater International Inc. plant marked its grand opening this week. The 7,500-square-foot plant will produce bottled water it will market under a Kona Deep label, and will employ 25 people when it is at full production, said Jeff L. Smith, chief operating officer.

It will produce 40,000 bottles of water per shift, and the company has plans to put up a much larger 80,000-square-foot plant with far more capacity next year, Smith said.

Deep SeaWater's plan is to open major new markets for desalinated deep seawater on the U.S. Mainland. The market today is in Japan, but Smith said he has "strong demonstrated interest" from the Mainland.

The plant is initially using water pumped from a depth of 2,000 feet, and will shift to water from 3,000 feet when the energy lab begins supplying the deeper water later this year, Smith said.

The desalinated water is marketed in Japan as a pure and nutrient-rich bottled water. Deep SeaWater is in negotiations to sell Kona Deep through Ito-Yokado Co., Ltd., which operates 181 supermarket stores in Japan, the company said.

Nearly all the water bottled locally is sent to Japan, where it sells for $3 to $4 a bottle. Coming from deep below the ocean's surface, the water is touted as being thousands of years old and free of modern impurities. The desalinated Hawai'i deep seawater also is marketed as a dietary supplement that helps with weight loss, stress reduction, improved skin tone and digestion, and other benefits that have yet to be proven via scientific study.

Koyo USA Corp. is already producing 300,000 bottles of water a day for export at NELHA, and three other companies are planning or preparing to open bottling facilities there, but Deep SeaWater chief executive Behzad Kianmahd said he isn't worried about the competition.

"I welcome the competition, actually, because I think there's a lot of marketing potential for this particular product," he said.

Drinking water is only part of the project. Deep SeaWater also plans to expand on the 20-acre Kona site into nutraceuticals and aquaculture, he said.

"I love a clean, safe operation that has a good product, and it doesn't get much better than this," Smith said.

The three other energy lab tenants that are planning bottling facilities are Hawaii Deep Marine Inc., Enzamin USA Inc. and Savers Holdings Ltd.

Ron Baird, chief executive officer of NELHA, said he expects that altogether the plants there will be producing more than a million bottles of water a day by this time next year.

Hawai'i's deep-seawater industry, which sprang up about two years ago, appears to be a boon for the state, creating more than 100 jobs, and drawing millions of dollars in capital investments and hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties from a previously untapped natural resource.