The industrialization of water security in the Gulf

The Gulf region’s acute freshwater scarcity has long shaped its economic structure and state planning priorities. For decades, desalination was treated as a technical necessity, background infrastructure, quietly sustaining urban populations and industrial activity. That framing is changing. Water security is being repositioned as a pillar of strategic industrial policy, its implications stretching well beyond resource management. Desalination capacity is becoming foundational to the region’s broader ambitions in technological development and economic diversification.

This transformation has manifested itself in the scale of expansion. Saudi Arabia, the largest producer of desalinated water in the world, has developed desalination development based on a long-term procurement pipeline, with plans to increase desalinated supply to about 6.06 million cubic meters per day by 2028, compared to about 4.16 million in 2024.

In the UAE, the Taweelah reverse osmosis plant can produce 909,200 cubic meters of desalinated water per day. And TAQA has reported that its desalination portfolio is more than 40 percent based on reverse osmosis technology. Kuwait’s Az-Zour North Phase 2 and 3 projects will provide up to 454,000 cubic meters per day. In Qatar and Oman, long-term concession models reinforce desalination as investable infrastructure.

But the greater development is not the magnitude of capacity, it is the technological reorientation. Thermal systems have been replaced by reverse osmosis as the model of choice in new plants. Plants are also controlled by software that gives real-time information on efficiency, energy usage and performance. The desalination process is no longer about water production alone. It concerns the control of complicated technological systems.

Desalination is being integrated into national energy reforms and industrial zones instead of being isolated under them

Zaid M. Belbagi

This change is moving desalination into the wider energy transition. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt and Morocco together account for nearly three-quarters of the Middle East and North Africa region’s new desalination capacity and new projects are increasingly co-located with solar generation to cut both operating costs and carbon intensity.

Saudi Arabia’s Jubail 3A plant integrates 45.4 megawatts of solar photovoltaic capacity, covering about 20 percent of the plant’s energy needs and reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 60,000 tonnes annually. Within this arrangement, desalination is incorporated into a nexus of power-water-industry. It is integrated into national energy reforms and industrial zones instead of being isolated under them.

The industrial implications extend well beyond plant construction. Long-term procurement pipelines — for membranes, pumps, valves, digital control systems and treatment chemicals — are building domestic supply chain depth across the Gulf. The independent water producer model has been central to this. Saudi Arabia’s Yanbu 4, which began commercial operations in 2024, embedded local content requirements (the proportion of goods, services and labor sourced locally) of 40 percent during construction, rising to 70 percent from year six of operation — a deliberate mechanism to anchor industrial capability at home.

Across the MENA region, $39.3 billion is currently being invested in desalination projects, with Saudi Arabia committing $14.5 billion and the UAE $10.2 billion. Sovereign-backed offtake agreements have converted these projects into bankable assets, attracting institutional capital as water security has become an anchor around which broader industrial ecosystems are being constructed.

A further dimension of this industrialization lies in resource recovery. Brine, the hypersaline byproduct of desalination, is increasingly viewed as a feedstock rather than waste. Pilot projects across the region are already recovering table salt and industrial minerals, including sodium, magnesium, potassium, bromine and lithium. The commercial logic is significant: global lithium demand is forecast to exceed 2.3 million tonnes by 2030, meaning the market will be worth more than $13 billion, while potassium demand is expected to surpass 83 million tonnes.

Initiatives such as NEOM’s resource recovery strategy aim to extract such inputs commercially from desalination byproducts. In this framing, the plant becomes a materials processing facility as much as a water utility, deepening desalination’s role within a broader industrial strategy.

The economic logic is clear, as industrial areas, petrochemical complexes, data centers and new cities are based on reliable water supply. With the Gulf economies diversifying to include sectors other than hydrocarbons, high-reliability water infrastructure has become a requirement in manufacturing and technology investment. Desalination, as such, ceases to be a defensive reaction to scarcity and becomes a transformative facilitator of economic change.

High-reliability water infrastructure has become a requirement in manufacturing and technology investment

Zaid M. Belbagi

However, this growth has structural limits. The Gulf accounts for about 50 percent of the world’s annual brine production, discharged into a body of water that is, by nature, ill-suited to absorb it. The Arabian Gulf is a shallow, semi-enclosed sea with an average depth of just 35 meters, severely limiting its capacity to dilute and flush outflows. As a result of brine discharge and water produced from the oil and gas industry, the Gulf is now about 25 percent saltier than typical seawater, with localized hotspots reaching double or triple normal salinity levels.

Projections to 2050 suggest that desalinated freshwater production could reach 8 percent of net annual evaporation from the Gulf, raising the possibility that, later in the century, this figure could exceed 10 percent, which is comparable to the natural annual fluctuations in evaporation itself.

The environmental costs of the region’s desalination dependence compound this challenge in ways that are difficult to untangle. The process is energy-intensive by nature, generating significant carbon dioxide emissions. Those emissions contribute to rising temperatures, which in turn drive greater cooling demands and, consequently, higher water consumption. More desalination is thus required to meet that demand, producing yet more emissions.

The cycle is self-reinforcing and, under current energy mixes, structurally difficult to break. There are also direct ecological consequences. Brine discharge and thermal pollution from desalination plants place measurable stress on Gulf marine ecosystems, which are already among the most environmentally pressured in the world. The region is not simply consuming water to survive, it is caught in an escalating feedback loop between energy use, climate stress and water scarcity.

What is unfolding in the Gulf is a fundamental reconceptualization of water’s role in economic development. Desalination is no longer background infrastructure, it is becoming an integrated industrial platform, drawing together advanced engineering, project finance, digital systems and resource recovery into what is increasingly recognizable as a water technology sector. The scale of capital committed suggests this transition is already well underway.

The region’s structural water scarcity, long regarded as a liability, is being recast as a driver of industrial capability. Whether that capability translates into durable competitive advantage will depend on whether governance frameworks, environmental discipline and operational capacity can keep pace with the ambition.

• Zaid M. Belbagi is a political commentator and an adviser to private clients between London and the Gulf Cooperation Council. X: @Moulay_Zaid