Desalination & Non-Conventional Water

Nowhere else on earth does drinking water depend so directly on machines. The European Commission’s own sector review puts at least 42% of the world’s operational desalination capacity in the Middle East and North Africa, and the standard global census puts 48% of production here.¹² In Qatar desalinated seawater is 99% of drinking water, in Bahrain more than 90%, in Kuwait 90%, Oman 86%, Saudi Arabia 70% and the UAE 42%.⁴ What began as an emergency measure for oil towns became the backbone of Gulf urban life, and as costs collapsed it became a mainstream option from Casablanca to Aqaba as well.

For companies this is the region’s deepest water market. It offers multi-billion-dollar independent water projects procured on repeatable templates, a large installed base needing operation, retrofit and membrane replacement, and a new wave of plants tied to renewable power.

Two generations of technology coexist. The Gulf’s legacy fleet is thermal: multi-stage flash and multi-effect distillation, co-located with power stations. Nearly everything new is seawater reverse osmosis, which uses a fraction of the energy. Globally, reverse osmosis is now about 70% of capacity against roughly 65% in 2019, and thermal about 25%.¹

The clearest measured transition anywhere is Abu Dhabi’s. Its offtaker’s own statistics put the generation split at 94% thermal and 6% reverse osmosis in 2014, 73 to 27 in 2022 and 59 to 41 in 2024, with thermal output falling from 1,247 to 696 million cubic metres a year while reverse osmosis rose from 75 to 476 million. Two plants show how it happens: Umm Al Nar East and West both went to zero output from 2020, while the Taweelah reverse-osmosis plant went from 7.17 million cubic metres in 2021 to 297.16 million in 2024.⁶

Scale is the other story. Global installed capacity reached about 91.5 million cubic metres a day in 2024, with contracted projects taking committed capacity to roughly 105 million; the same source also reports about 135 million cubic metres a day across more than 22,000 operational plants on a wider definition, which is a caution against quoting any single global number without it.¹

The fleet, market by market

Saudi Arabia: the largest fleet, mid-restructure

Two figures circulate and they measure different things. The National Transformation Programme reports national capacity above 16 million cubic metres a day at the end of 2025, up 247.8% on 2016, on a path of 4.6 million in 2016 and 5.9 million in 2020. The procurement company’s own planning figure, capacity serving urban demand, is 11.41 million cubic metres a day in 2025 rising to 16.25 million by 2031.⁸⁷ Desalinated water is 78.4% of urban supply, ground and surface water the remaining 21.6%.⁷

The institutions moved under it. The Saline Water Conversion Corporation became the Saudi Water Authority in 2024 and holds the regulator’s mandate while still operating most of the production fleet, pending a transfer ordered in 2022. Procurement sits with Sharakat, whose seven-year statement covers 53 projects plus 123 small treatment plants and is the most auditable programme document in the region.⁷ That is covered in full in the governance case study.

United Arab Emirates: the biggest reverse-osmosis plants ever built

Taweelah runs at 909,218 cubic metres a day on its offtaker’s register, the largest reverse-osmosis plant in operation, with commercial operation in the first quarter of 2024 under a 30-year water purchase agreement; ACWA Power holds 40% alongside TAQA and Mubadala and the project cost about US$907 million.⁶⁹ The wider Abu Dhabi fleet shows the same shift: Mirfa 2 at 545,531 cubic metres a day from 2026, Umm Al Quwain at 318,226, and the Shuweihat and Sas Al Nakhl units carrying what thermal output is left.⁶

Dubai is where the market’s most quoted number came from, and where it broke. See the economics section below.

North Africa: the growth market

Algeria inaugurated five 300,000 cubic metre a day plants in 2025, at Cap Blanc near Oran, Fouka 2 in Tipasa, Cap Djinet 2 in Boumerdès, Koudiet Eddraouche in El Tarf and Tighremt-Toudja in Béjaïa. Together they add 1.5 million cubic metres a day, taking national capacity to 3.7 million and serving about 15 million people at a cost of some US$2.4 billion, overseen by the Algerian Energy Company. Desalinated seawater is planned to rise from 18% to 42% of drinking water.¹⁵ A second phase is planned for 2025 to 2030, though published accounts differ on its size, which is a reason to treat any announced plant count for Algeria as provisional.

Morocco is building Africa’s largest plant at Casablanca, 548,000 cubic metres a day for ONEE, financed on 8 May 2025 at MAD 6.5 billion with Acciona holding 50%, Green of Africa 45% and AfriquiaGaz 5%. It is powered by wind rather than solar, taking about 47% of the 360 MW Bir Anzarane farm. Agadir is expanding from 275,000 to 400,000 cubic metres a day for the end of 2026, with more than 150 MW of wind following in 2027. The programme is the subject of our water and climate case study.

Israel: municipal demand largely covered, and a warning about concentration

Six Mediterranean plants operate, with the Western Galilee scheme awarded to IDE Technologies in November 2022 as the seventh and the first in the north. Sorek 2 is the largest addition, at 672,000 cubic metres a day on its builder’s figure, due in early 2024 but delayed partly by the war,²² and it reached full operation on 25 January 2026 at 200 million cubic metres a year,¹⁷ under a 25-year build-operate-transfer contract with the state as offtaker.²⁰

On Saturday 29 August 2026, five of the six shut down when microalgae were swept north from the Nile Delta; by the following Wednesday two were back on line and Ashkelon and Ashdod were still closed.¹⁸ In June 2026 the government approved a plan to reach 2.3 billion cubic metres a year by 2050 and 2.75 billion by 2075, and for the first time allowed private entities to plan and develop plants of at least 100 million cubic metres a year.¹⁹ The Water Authority’s February 2025 planning deck had aimed for 1,400 million cubic metres by 2031 and 1,750 million by 2050, with Western Galilee due in 2026 and Emek Hefer to follow.²¹

Iraq, Bahrain and the newest entrants

Basra is building a one million cubic metre a day plant with its own 300 MW power station, ground broken in July 2025 for operation in 2028; its value is reported at about US$4 billion overall and US$1.32 billion for the PowerChina scope.¹³ Bahrain, which has taken 100% of its supply from desalination since 2016 on 213.4 million gallons a day of capacity, put its first independent water project out to tender, with bids returned in July 2026.¹⁴

Libya is the counter-example, and the reason capacity statistics need auditing. At a meeting convened by the prime minister in November 2024, the national desalination company reported Tobruk running at 20% of capacity, Derna at 50%, Susah and Zawiya at 25% each, and the Zliten plants not operating at all.¹⁶

One scheme in this sector, examined in full: what was built, what it cost, what worked and what did not.

The hub's headline metric for all twenty countries. Hover, tap or focus a country; the ranked table sits alongside.

Major tracked desalination facilities and programmes: the large plants, not every package unit. Hover a marker for the project and its status; click through to the database.

The tracked projects in this sector and the structured procurements coming next, straight from our databases.

Projects

In procurement

The region invented the procurement template the rest of the world now copies: the independent water project. A state offtaker tenders a long-term water purchase agreement, developer consortia compete on the levelised tariff, and financing is limited-recourse project debt. Tenors have lengthened rather than held steady: the Abu Dhabi offtaker’s register shows 20-year agreements on 2005 to 2011 vintages and 30-year agreements on 2024 to 2026 ones, while Saudi planning assumes 25 years for privately procured plants and 35 for public ones.⁶⁷ Winning tariffs are published, which keeps the market unusually transparent. Egypt, Morocco and Jordan adapt the same structure with sovereign or development-finance cover. Three schemes show the range:

Sources: the Abu Dhabi offtaker’s statistical report and ACWA Power on Taweelah⁶⁹; Al Jazeera on the Ras Al Khair suspension¹⁰; Moroccan financing and shareholding as reported at signature.

The cost collapse, from well above US$1 per cubic metre a decade ago to US$0.4 to 0.6 in Gulf auctions, came from a stack of incremental gains rather than a breakthrough. Each one is worth understanding separately, because they are exhausting at different rates.

In this region, water and energy are the same industry. The Gulf’s legacy fleet is literally co-generation, with gas turbines making electricity while their waste heat boils seawater in the same complex. That is why water and power are procured together, by the same offtakers, under the same kind of contract. Even the modern reverse-osmosis plants that replaced them are large industrial electricity consumers.

That coupling cuts both ways. It ties drinking water to fuel supply and to the carbon intensity of the grid, and it means a power problem becomes a water problem within hours. It also makes desalination one of the most attractive places to put cheap renewable electricity, since plants run continuously, tolerate some flexibility, and sit next to the best solar resource on earth. The engineering-cost literature behind every bid model is narrower than the sector’s public profile suggests; Voutchkov (2018) is still the reference text.³

• Energy intensity: modern reverse osmosis runs at roughly 2.3 to 3 kWh/m³ on measured large plants, against thermal processes in the range of 10 to 15 kWh/m³ equivalent electrical
• Renewable-linked plants: 281 MWp on Jordan's carrier at 27% of project energy, 45.5 MW at Jubail 3A at about 20%, and wind rather than solar in Morocco
• Flexible operation: plants that ramp with solar output, using product-water storage as the buffer
• Green hydrogen: electrolysis needs ultrapure water, putting desalination into the hydrogen supply chain
• Waste-heat reuse and hybrid thermal and reverse-osmosis configurations at existing co-generation sites

Energy intensities are published on different conventions, and thermal figures in particular vary with whether heat is counted as electrical equivalent. Industrial and process water, meaning cooling water and oil-and-gas produced water, is covered in the Utilities & Urban Water hub.

The reference points a developer prices against:

Indicative reference list; each procurement defines its own binding schedules.

This sector produces the cleanest price signal in water: a single number, competitively set and published at award. It fell by nearly half between 2018 and 2020, and it has been rising since. Both halves of that story are in the series below.

One number on that chart needs a warning. Dubai took a bid of US$0.277 per m³ at Hassyan in September 2020, still the lowest ever recorded anywhere.¹¹ The winner never reached financial close, the contract did not survive, and the same site was re-let in 2023 at US$0.365, on an alternative proposal for a plant half as large again as the one that set the record. No water has ever been produced at the record price. Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat award letter followed in February 2025 at about 73 US cents, and Bahrain’s first independent water project drew a lowest bid of about US$0.73 in July 2026.¹² The market is priced at roughly two and a half times its own record.²⁷

39 further awards in this sector carry no published value and are not in the chart.

What moved the price was never mainly membranes. Scale, cheap debt and cheap solar did most of it, and by 2022 all three had stopped helping at once. Where finance is about half the levelised cost, the tariff reprices with the bond market rather than with technology. The other structural shift is who bids: the Public Investment Fund became ACWA Power’s largest shareholder at 44% in 2020 and held 44.16% in early 2025, while Abu Dhabi Power Corporation passed 98% of TAQA and began delisting it in August 2026. A competitive tender is increasingly a contest between sovereign balance sheets.²⁶

Offtaker credit still decides everything outside the Gulf, which is why deals in Egypt, Jordan and Morocco carry development-finance cover. Bahrain is the clearest boundary case: general government debt at 134% of GDP in 2024 on the IMF’s figure, and a first independent water project bid at about 2.6 times Dubai’s record for a plant half its size.

Full series, with the source for every award, on the tariffs and cost benchmarks page. Two entries are bids rather than awards and are labelled as such. The economics are examined in full in the finance case study.

The bodies that commission, regulate or deliver in this sector, and the names that recur across its tenders.

• Sharakat (Saudi Water Partnership Company)PPP procurer · Saudi Arabia
• Saudi Water Authority (SWA)Regulator · Saudi Arabia
• Saudi Water Authority (production arm)Bulk producer · Saudi Arabia
• Emirates Water & Electricity Company (EWEC)PPP procurer · United Arab Emirates
• Dubai Electricity & Water Authority (DEWA)Utility · United Arab Emirates
• Oman Power & Water Procurement Co. (OPWP)PPP procurer · Oman
• Kuwait Authority for Partnership Projects (KAPP)PPP procurer · Kuwait
• ONEE – Water BranchUtility · Morocco
• ACWA PowerDeveloper / operator · Saudi Arabia
• AccionaEPC & technology · Regional

Mandates, procurement routes and the rest of the region’s institutions are in the decision-maker directory.

Where the near-term money is:

Follow the capital and you can read the future of Middle East water. Desalination, long the Gulf's answer to scarcity, is in an investment phase defined by two forces: the cost of the water and the scrutiny of the carbon.

Costs fell hard because of scale, cheap debt and cheap solar rather than membranes alone. The record-low tariffs of 2018 to 2020 in the UAE and Saudi Arabia reset expectations for what desalinated water should cost and pulled in new developers and lenders. They have since risen again with the cost of capital, and the bid-price series shows both halves of that story.

The capital stack has broadened. Sovereign wealth funds anchor the giga-projects; development banks and climate funds back the schemes that cut carbon or serve adaptation goals; and public-private partnerships spread construction and operating risk to private operators under long-term offtake.

The direction of travel is solar-linked reverse osmosis at ever-larger scale, brine management and efficiency technology, and markets beyond the Gulf. Algeria and Morocco are already building at scale, Iraq broke ground at Basra in 2025, and Egypt is the one large programme still stuck between announcement and award.

Expect capacity to keep compounding through Gulf replacement cycles, the North African build-out and, later this decade, Jordan’s carrier. Saudi Arabia alone plans to move from 11.41 to 16.25 million cubic metres a day of capacity serving urban demand between 2025 and 2031, with Ras Al Khair 2 and 3 in planning.⁷ Egypt’s programme is the open question: 21 plants totalling about 3.3 million cubic metres a day were announced for a first phase in December 2022 and the procurement was still being relaunched in late 2025, so treat it as an expectation rather than a record.

Three questions will shape the market. How fast renewable-coupled plants become the default, and on whose balance sheet the renewables sit. Whether brine regulation tightens: the basin-scale modelling is reassuring, the near-field evidence is not, and lender standards are already stricter than national ones.²³²⁴ And whether record-low tariffs survive higher interest rates, which on the evidence of the last three years they have not. Desalination is no longer the expensive last resort; it is the region’s marginal source of new water, and it is priced on that basis.

One risk is newly concrete. In early 2026, strikes and debris damaged desalination facilities at Fujairah F1 in the UAE and Doha West in Kuwait, both of which kept operating, and a plant on Iran’s Qeshm Island was reported out of service a month after the attack it suffered.⁴⁵ For systems that hold days of storage, that is a supply question rather than a security one.

Standing references for this sector. Every one is a real work and every link was checked.

• Jones, E. et al. (2019), “The state of desalination and brine production: a global outlook”, Science of the Total Environment 657. The standard global census of plants and brine volumes. doi.org
• Voutchkov, N. (2018), Desalination Project Cost Estimating and Management, CRC Press. The engineering-cost reference the bid models are built on. routledge.com
• Sharakat, 7 Year Statement 2025–2031 (March 2026). A quarter-level procurement plan for 53 Saudi projects, and the only document of its kind published in the region. sharakat.com.sa
• Government of Dubai Media Office, the Hassyan tariff announcement, 3 September 2020. The primary source for the record that was never financed. mediaoffice.ae
• Water Desalination Report and Smart Water Magazine, the two trade titles that carry Gulf award prices as they are published. desalination.com