2023-09-17 03:02:34
Blinding rays of sunlight fall on solar panels that power a desalination plant in eastern Saudi Arabia, the wealthy oil monarchy seeking to reconcile its enormous water needs with pressing ecological imperatives.
Lacking lakes, rivers and regular rain, the country relies on dozens of installations that make water from the Gulf and the Red Sea drinkable.
The Jazlah plant, in the town of Jubail, is the first to massively use solar energy for desalination in a country which began using this technique more than a century ago, with filtration machines. introduced by Ottoman administrators for Muslim pilgrims to Mecca.
Today, projects like Jazlah are supposed to allow the kingdom to reconcile its growing needs for desalination, a very energy-intensive industry, with its promises to reduce CO2 emissions to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060.
According to the authorities, clean energy will allow Jazlah to save around 60,000 tonnes of CO2, for a country which expects to see its population increase to 100 million inhabitants by 2040, compared to 32.2 million Currently.
“The population is increasing and its quality of life is improving, which requires more and more water,” notes Marco Arcelli, CEO of ACWA Power, which manages Jazlah.
Desalination is, for Saudi Arabia, a “life and death” matter, says historian Michael Christopher Low of the American University of Utah, who has studied the kingdom’s struggle against the shortage of water.
“This is an existential question for the Gulf States,” insists the researcher, who underlines the “limits” of completely green desalination.
– “The most difficult contexts” –
The quest for clean water began in Saudi Arabia in the early decades of the kingdom’s founding in 1932, with geological studies that helped map its enormous oil reserves. The first modern desalination infrastructures were created in the 1970s.
The national Saline Water Conversion Corporation (SWCC) today has a production capacity of 11.5 million cubic meters per day across 30 facilities.
This development comes at a cost: in 2010, Saudi desalination facilities consumed 1.5 million barrels of oil per day, or more than 15% of current production.
The Ministry of Environment, Water and Agriculture did not respond to AFP’s questions about the current energy consumption of desalination plants.
The largest Arab economy and the world’s largest exporter of crude oil, Saudi Arabia will be able to build all the infrastructure necessary to produce the water it needs.
“It has already done this in some of the most difficult contexts, such as the massive desalination of the Red Sea and the supply of desalinated water to the highlands of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina,” notes Laurent Lambert, from the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies.
The company SWCC says it wants to reduce carbon emissions by 37 million metric tons by 2025.
– “Ryad would die” –
This objective will be achieved largely thanks to the abandonment of thermal power plants in favor of factories like Jazlah, which uses reverse osmosis (membrane filtration), powered by electricity.
Solar energy, for its part, will increase from 120 megawatts today to 770 megawatts, SWCC indicates in a report, without a specific date.
“Unfortunately, energy consumption will remain high but compared to whom? Compared to countries where water flows naturally from large rivers or falls from the sky for free? Yes, of course, it will always be more”, underlines Laurent Lambert .
The Ras al-Khaïr plant, north of Jubail, produces 1.1 million cubic meters of water per day – 740,000 using thermal technology, the rest via reverse osmosis – and struggles to maintain the reserve tanks full due to high demand.
Much of the water goes to the capital Riyadh, which needs 1.6 million cubic meters per day, a figure that could rise to six million by the end of the decade, according to one of the factory officials who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the media.
If the plant did not exist, “Riyadh would die,” he said, observing the pipes that carry seawater from the Gulf to the factory.
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