In January 2021, Saudi Crown Prince
Mohammed Bin Salman released a video announcing
bold plans for the future. It was a keynote speech
that looked all too familiar, a lot like the late Steve Jobs
announcing a new smartphone era. Yet instead of big tech, it's all about futuristic
urban development and utopian nation building. The plans are ambitious. A linear city stretching 170km with no roads, no cars and no pollution. This so-called civilization revolution
will house over a million people. But there's one major point that wasn't
addressed in the speech. A city of this size needs water, a lot of it. And we're talking about
one of the driest places on earth. Water scarcity is ubiquitous
in the Middle East. In fact, while a global water crisis
is looming over many countries, it's affecting this region
more than most. Exponential population increases and environmental impacts have led to the tricky situation of growing
demand for an ever scarcer resource. To mitigate the problematic
consequences, countries in the region have
predominantly relied on an expensive and highly controversial measure: desalination. The principle of the manmade
desalination process is simple. You suck water out of the ocean,
separated from its salt and deliver the fresh water
wherever it's needed, mostly for human consumption
or irrigation. Until now, there have been two main
ways of doing this: Thermal desalination is
the more traditional method involving heating up salt water and then
cooling the vapor to make fresh water. The other, more sophisticated
and dominant technology on the market is called reverse osmosis. Using high pressure, salt water is pushed
through a semi-permeable membrane to separate the salt. RO membrane systems typically use
less energy than thermal desalination. However, both methods still
come at a huge cost, both economical and environmental. The economic costs stem from
the high energy demands of desalination, which were linked in turn
to a global environmental cost, dependent on how the energy
was produced. In the Middle East,
this mainly means fossil fuels. Desalination plants are responsible for a combined output of 76 million tons
of CO2 per year. A number that's expected to be
almost three times higher by 2040. On a local scale, the main issue
is the byproduct of desalination: hypersaline brine. After extracting fresh water, the brain
is usually pumped back into the ocean. As it's much denser than seawater, it sinks to the bottom
where it can damage ecosystems by spiking salt content
and causing oxygen levels to plummet. All this means that countries
traditionally only resort to desalination if there are simply
no alternatives available or they need to become independent
from a regionally disputed water source. Egypt, for example, is betting heavily
on expanding its desalination industry due to rapid population growth
and growing fears of Nile droughts. Desalination is meant to ease
tensions with upstream Ethiopia over the massive GERD dam project
and to fill the already existing gap. Across the border, in Israel, drought and overpumping have brought
the biblical Sea of Galilee to an extreme low. The inland sea is Israel's
biggest freshwater reservoir, and its low level is now starving
the downstream River Jordan and the Dead Sea. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's
government sees the solution in desalination. The intention is to pump
desalinated water from the Mediterranean
to the Sea of Galilee and simply refill it. Desalination is booming. The number of seawater desalination
plants in operation worldwide has more than doubled
since the early 2000s. Today, more than 300 million people globally
get their water from this technology. A total of 173 countries run
desalination plants, but the leader of the pack is
without doubt Saudi Arabia, by far the largest of the few countries
in the world without a single river. Its coasts are densely stocked
with desalination plants. Together, they produce more fresh water
than any nation. A fifth of the world's total. At al-Jubail,
the world's largest desalination plant produces more than 1.4 million
cubic meters of water a day and provides the country's capital
with fresh water. With very little fresh water
at its disposal, yet awash in oil money, Saudi Arabia uses fossil fuels to generate
the vast amount of electricity needed. The country also has to cope
with huge amounts of waste from this energy intensive industry. Under current RO technology standards, it takes two gallons of seawater
to make a gallon of fresh water. The gallon left behind is brine
pumped back into the ocean. But all this is supposed to change. NEOM is Saudi Arabia's ambitious
flagship giga-project, a 500 billion dollar investment
in a country within a country located in the sparsely
populated northwest along the shores of the Red Sea. Among its key concepts are
sustainability and environmental responsibility. But what's the substance behind
these fancy catch phrases when it comes to supplying
the huge demand for a scarce resource like fresh water in the desert? The solution is supposed to be
an innovative technology that looks like this: a sphere formed by a
glass and steel dome rising 25 metres into the air, which covers a cauldron
of roughly the same size. The so-called "solar dome" was developed
by the UK based company Solar Water in association with Cranfield University. The theory behind it is
actually quite simple. Sea water is piped through
a glass enclosed aqueduct system, which feeds the water with sunlight
as it travels into the dome. An array of parabolic mirrors concentrates
the solar radiation onto the dome. This superheated the seawater
in the cauldron where it evaporates. As a result, highly pressurized steam is
released and condenses as fresh water, which is then piped to reservoirs
and irrigation channels. The solar dome is meant to produce
30,000 cubic meters per hour at an extremely low cost
of 34 cents per cubic meter. All of it 100 percent carbon neutral. But there's still the issue
of the hypersaline brain. Supposedly,
the desalination process in NEOM reduces the total amount of brine
created during water extraction, helping to prevent damage
caused to marine life by not discharging any brine
into the sea. Yet so far, the question of what really
happens to the concentrated brine is still unanswered. Solar Water alleges that it can be
extracted and sold commercially. The brine contains substances
that can be put to good use in other industrial processes. It still remains to be seen
whether this actually works and whether the plan to create a commercially
viable extraction of resources for other industries will succeed. The first solar dome is
currently under construction to be trialed on an industrial scale. NEOM solar desalination project
will serve as a test case for other water scarce countries that are struggling to
generate environmentally safe and sustainable sources of fresh water. Solar Water's vision is bold: carbon-neutral agriculture and reforestation
in the middle of the desert. It's hard to predict how much
of this vision will turn out to be true. NEOM will certainly put it to the test with the first solar dome desalination plant
planned for completion in 2021. Desalination, despite all its issues,
isn't going anywhere. As it gets cheaper and water scarcity
becomes ever more threatening, the industry will continue to grow. And countries in the Middle East
will rely on it totally. It's up to all of us to handle
the valuable resource of fresh water in a saving and sustainable manner and to science and innovation to find the most ecological
and least harmful way to provide it.
