Solar panels are absorbing blinding midday rays and helping power a water desalination plant in eastern Saudi Arabia – a move to make the notoriously emissions-intensive process less polluting.
The Jazlah plant in the city of Jubail takes advantage of the latest technological advances in a country that first turned to desalination more than a century ago, when Ottoman-era administrations deployed filter machines for hajj pilgrims threatened by drought and cholera.
Lacking lakes, rivers and regular rainfall, Saudi Arabia now relies instead on dozens of plants that convert water from the Gulf and Red Sea into drinking water, supplying cities and communities that would otherwise not survive.
But the kingdom’s growing desalination needs – fueled by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s dreams of leading a global economic and tourism hub – risks running afoul of its sustainability goals, including achieving net-zero emissions by 2060.
Projects like Jazlah, the first plant to combine desalination on a large scale with solar energy, aim to defuse this conflict: Officials say the panels will help save around 60,000 tons of CO2 emissions annually.
It’s the kind of innovation that needs to be scaled up quickly, with Prince Mohammed targeting a population of 100 million people by 2040, up from 32.2 million today.
“Usually as the population grows, so does the quality of life of the population,” which requires more and more water, said CEO Marco Arcelli of ACWA Power, Jazlah’s operator.
Using desalination to keep up is a survival challenge, said historian Michael Christopher Low of the University of Utah, who has studied the kingdom’s fight against water shortages.
“This is existential for the Gulf states. So if anyone is critical of what they’re doing because of the ecological consequences, I shake my head a little bit,” he said.
At the same time, he added, “There are limits to how environmentally friendly desalination can be.”
– Drink the sea –
The search for drinking water preoccupied Saudi Arabia in the first decades after its founding in 1932, leading to geological surveys that helped map its vast oil reserves.
Prince Mohammed al-Faisal, a son of King Faisal whom Low called the “Water Prince,” once even explored the possibility of towing icebergs from Antarctica to quench the kingdom’s growing thirst, drawing widespread ridicule.
But Prince Mohammed also oversaw the emergence of the kingdom’s modern desalination infrastructure starting in 1970.
The national Saline Water Conversion Corporation (SWCC) now reports a production capacity of 11.5 million cubic meters per day in 30 plants.
This growth comes at a price, especially for thermal power plants that run on fossil fuels.
In 2010, Saudi desalination plants consumed 1.5 million barrels of oil per day, more than 15 percent of today’s production.
The Ministry of Environment, Water and Agriculture did not respond to AFP’s request for comment on the current energy consumption of desalination plants.
There is little doubt that Saudi Arabia will be able to build the infrastructure needed to produce the water it needs in the future.
“They have already done this in some of the most challenging environments, such as massively desalinating the Red Sea and delivering desalinated water to the plateaus of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina,” said Laurent Lambert of the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies.
– Go green? –
The question is how much environmental pollution will continue to increase.
The SWCC wants to reduce CO2 emissions by 37 million tons by 2025.
This will largely be achieved by transitioning from thermal power plants to plants like Jazlah that use electrically powered reverse osmosis.
Solar power, meanwhile, will grow from 120 megawatts today to 770 megawatts, according to the SWCC’s latest sustainability report, although the timeline is unclear.
“It will still be energy intensive, unfortunately, but energy intensive compared to what?” said Lambert.
“Compared to countries where water flows naturally from large rivers or falls free from the sky? Yes, of course, there will always be more.”
At desalination plants across the Kingdom, Saudi workers know how important their work is to the survival of the population.
The Ras al-Khair plant produces 1.1 million cubic meters of water daily – 740,000 of it through thermal technology, the rest through reverse osmosis – and is struggling to keep reserve tanks full due to high demand.
Much of the water goes to Riyadh, which needs 1.6 million cubic meters per day and could need up to six million cubic meters by the end of the decade, said an official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to brief the media .
He looked at pipes that bring seawater from the Gulf into the facility and described the work as one that is at stake and has clear national security implications.
If the facility didn’t exist, Riyadh would die, he said.
rcb/th/srm