Saudi desalination plant holds hope for cheaper fresh water
The cost of producing drinking water from the salty waters of the Gulf could be significantly reduced by a solar-powered desalination plant to be built in Saudi Arabia.
The UAE and other GCC states receive nearly all of their fresh water from huge fossil-fuel-powered desalination plants, which are costly to run and deplete natural gas and oil reserves that could instead be sold on the international market. The plants also contribute to the region’s per-capita carbon emissions, which are the highest in the world.
IBM and the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology (KACST) will build the desalination plant at Al Khafji on the Gulf coast near the Kuwaiti border.
The plant’s 30,000 cubic metre capacity of water per day would be enough for 100,000 people, according to IBM and KACST. If IBM’s projections for the plant hold true, the experiment could pave the way for a shift to solar-powered desalination across the region, experts say.
“The culmination of our joint research initiatives has enabled us to radically reduce the cost of water through the development of nanotechnologies that revolutionise traditional desalination methods and renewable energy sources,” said Takreem el Tohamy, IBM general manager in the MENA region.
It costs between 2.5 Saudi riyals (Dh2.44) and 5.5 riyals to produce a cubic metre of water at the Saudi plants that are powered by fossil fuels, IBM and KACST said in a statement yesterday. That range is higher than the cost of desalination at the newest plants in Singapore and the US, which can produce water for as little as 46 US cents (Dh1.69) per cubic metre.
The plant at Al Khafji will produce water at “significantly less” than the current cost range in the kingdom, thanks to the efficiency gain from using membranes rather than boiling processes to remove the salt from seawater, the statement said.
IBM announced last year it had developed a new type of membrane that is more energy-efficient and has a longer lifespan than previous materials.
The plant at Al Khafji will generate fresh water by pushing seawater through membranes to remove the salt. The solar component of the plant will produce the electricity needed to drive the machinery.
The solar panels and membrane technology are IBM innovations modified in partnership with KACST researchers.
The project’s scale will overshadow pilot solar desalination plants that have been built in a number of Gulf countries, including a plant that opened in Abu Dhabi’s Al Gharbia region last year with a daily capacity of 68.2 cubic metres.
Gulf countries have been trying to build cost-effective solar desalination plants for decades. Abu Dhabi built a plant at Umm al Nar in the 1980s, but it proved to be economically infeasible.
The cost prediction for water production Al Khafji is surprising, since the plant will use electricity from concentrated solar technology that produces power at a cost many times higher than power stations fired by natural gas or oil.
Electricity will come from concentrated photovoltaics, a technology that blends traditional photovoltaic cells with mirrors, lenses and motors to concentrate the rays of sun, thereby more than doubling the efficiency of the panels.
The technology is significantly more expensive than traditional photovoltaic cells alone but takes up less space and operates better in hot climates. But the increased cost of using electricity from solar panels at Al Khafji will be offset by the vast efficiency gains of using the new membranes rather than heat to take the salt out of seawater.
IBM and KACST did not offer a time frame or estimate for the cost of the project yesterday. Spokesmen from the two entities were not available for comment.
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