Sea Water Desalination: Giving New Lease of Life to Middle East

The arid climatic condition and the limited groundwater resource necessitated many middle east countries to look for alternate source of water. Moreover the increasing population has spurt the demand of clean drinking water. Due to this Gulf countries like Saudi Arabia' Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman have adopted other alternatives like wastewater reclamation and desalination since the 1960s.

Though ground water resource is available in countries like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, and Bahrain but the use of large quantity of this valuable resources is causing depletion and affecting the quality of water. It is therefore necessary that all the available conventional water resources like renewable groundwater and surface runoff are properly developed in an integrated water-resources planning context.

However in some of the countries where the climate is even more arid and where the good quality of water is very limited, desalination of seawater is used commonly for solving the problems of water supply for municipal and industrial uses.

The first country to adopt seawater desalination was Kuwait in 1957. In the beginning the plant produced 3.1 million m³ whereas by 1987 this figure had risen to 184 million m³ per year. It adopted seawater desalination and linked it with electricity generation. The facility make the use of low pressure steam from the generator for providing energy for the desalination process. This helped in reducing the cost of desalination.

Desalination plant in Qatar was producing 150 million m³ of water per year by the year 2000 that is around three-fourth of the domestic demand is met by water desalination plant. Rest 25% is catered by ground water source.

Desalination plant in Saudi Arabia came late. The first desalination facility started in 1970. The desalination plant was constructed on both the Red Sea and Gulf coasts. The Saline Water Conversion Corporation, a nodal agency responsible for commissioning the desalination projects, has by the end of 1980, installed 30 desalination plants. The total production of desalinated plant in Arabia is over 2.16 million m³. Al-Jubail producing 1 million m³ per day, which is currently the world's largest distillation plant.

Nearly 1500 desalination plant is operated in Arabian Gulf countries. Taking world as a whole, the gulf countries account for nearly 60% of world's desalinated unit. The popular type of plant capacity installed here is multi-stage flash (MSF) type. Nearly 87% of the total desalinated plant in Arabian country is MSF type. Whereas, reverse osmosis accounts for only 10.7% of total installed units. The desalination unit in Saudi Arabia produces 5.76 million m³ per day in total, including 2.98 million m³ in Saudi Arabia.

Installed capacity of desalting plants and share by process type in the Arabian Gulf countries:

Countries	No. of units	Capacity (1,000 m³/day)	Share by process type (%)
			MSF	RO	ED	VC	MED
Saudi Arabia	874	2,980	80.7	16.2	2.6	0.5
Kuwait	279	1,090	95.5	1.8	0.55	1.6	0.25
U.A.E.	99	1,020	98.3	0.9	0.5	-	-
Qatar	47	310	9 7.9	-	-	0.7	0.9
Bahrain	143	260	56.7	37.2	4.9	0.8	0.4
Oman	41	100	91.1	1.9	0.9	1.7
TOTAL	1,483	5,760	86.7	10.7	1.8	0.65	0.15

Source: Akkad 1990	ED = Electrodialysis.
MSF = Multi-stage flash.	MED = Multi-effect distillation.
RO = Reverse osmosis.	VC = Vapour compression.