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Saudi Arabia adds to desal strategy
October 7, 2008
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reprintSaudi Arabia's commercial capital Jeddah is scheduled to gain a desalination plant with a daily capacity of 50,000 cubic meters (13.2 million U.S. gallons).
Saudi Arabia is the world's largest producer of desalinated water, which makes up half the country's drinking supply.
The project will be funded by the private sector, though no construction start date has been set. The announcement came on the heels of the Kingdom's privatization of the Saline Water Conversion Corporation (SWCC), which runs 30 desalination plants located on the Red Sea and Arab Gulf coasts, which produced more than 1 billion cubic meters of water last year.
The Kingdom's minister of water and electricity said the privatization plan was part of Saudi Arabia's strategy to meet water demand due to population increases and the growing economy. The government has said Saudi Arabia expects to require $200 billion in investment in desalination and power generation during the next 15 years because of growth.
As of 2007, the government had spent SR62 million ($16.5 million USD) on SWCC projects. The Saudi government has estimated that investments in building additional desalination plants throughout the kingdom will total another SR70 billion.
The Water and Electricity Ministry has allocated SR 800 million to stop water leakage, which accounts for about 300,000 cubic meters of lost water a day in Saudi Arabia.
Jeddah, on the country's western coast, has long battled water shortages. But in the late 1970s, the city installed four desalination plants on a coastal lagoon with the capacity to desalinate 80 million gallons of seawater a day, according to the CWC Group.
Still, the new Jeddah plant's capacity is expected to be a fraction of the mamoth desalination plant being built by Veolia Water Solutions & Technologies (Paris: VIE) for Jubail Industrial City and the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia (see Veolia awarded huge desalination contract in Saudi Arabia).
With start-up scheduled for July 2009, the Jubail plant is expected to produce 800,000 cubic meters of water daily.
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Desalination
Submitted on October 7th, 2008 by WATERUSER (not verified)The world is facing a growing shortage of fresh water. In fact, dwindling supplies of this most natural of resources are making water nearly as hard to find as oil. That means companies involved in purifying, selling or enable the transport of water should be good investments as the world wrestle with reduced flows of water. The world’s freshwater resources are not sufficient to keep up with demand.
As the world population grows and water tables decline, a solution has to be developed. Right now, that solution is desalination and Water Desalination International, Inc. will unveil a desalination process the Passarell V.E.S. to solve that problem. This process separates potable water from the elements in seawater. The extraction of drinking water leaves a wet crystallized salt eliminating waste brine from being returned to the sea and thus preserving the environment. Crucial environmental enforcement is necessary to preserve the environment. There are Extra benefits obtained from the crystallized salt through the sale to commercial markets, lowering the cost of drinking water. To preserve the environment WDI has developed a multiple pod system a technique of subsurface ( below the seafloor) seawater retrieval. For this environmental practice and the reduction in costs, the Passarell V.E.S. seawater desalination process will reduce the cost of drinking water. WDI has broken the high price of drinking water from the sea, and lowered the cost of desalination by two third the costs of conventional process such as Reverse Osmosis. Soon-to-be operating in Saudi Arabia.
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