Media Update, page-3139

https://www.globalwaterintel.com/news/2022/30/meeting-desalination-s-1-5-billion-challenge?CC=GWI%20BRIEFING%20280722&utm_source=https%3a%2f%2fmy.globalwaterintel.com%2fglobalwaterintellz%2f&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=GWI+Briefing+28%2f07&utm_term=GWI+Briefing+-+28th+July&utm_content=20369&gator_td=o0IPgtBcLj9743qquQyeeLKgwnnVHtRHXpbanYKoS3s1jA81zhzyXC8g8cid%2fUiHXNa4a6KgMzM0uBFoC5%2bsXe%2bLb61A4w0N52EbcuiOKpw5h8WSt0mW8yliqpomDA00WCnKUtI9FXALShhPxxIR9JfJaaOZNhhM5599KZ07aSo%3d

By 2030 there will be 1.5 billion people around the world who won’t be able to rely on their traditional sources of freshwater. It is a huge number, but one which can easily be explained by climate change and urbanisation. It is also a huge challenge for the desalination industry. Those 1.5 billion people are the potential market for desalination technologies. They will need to turn to impaired water sources: seawater, brackish groundwater, and wastewater to meet their daily water needs. It is a huge opportunity for desalters, but is the industry ready for it?

The answer has to be no.

Desal is still just a cottage industry. It serves around 300 million people around the world, and it is still too complicated, expensive, and risky to reach a market of more than 1 billion.

So what has to change?I think that technology is probably no more than 20% of the challenge. Technical innovation can improve the energy efficiency of the process and reduce the problem of biofouling. It can also create new revenue streams from hydrogen and minerals recovery. Altogether, this might take a few cents of the price of a cubic metre of water, but on its own it won’t open up a 1.5 billion-strong market.

If desal is to reach its full potential, we don’t just need to accelerate the rate at which innovation happens in the industry. We need to look at the other obstacles to low-priced, simple, and dependable desalination. These, by and large, have nothing to do with technology. They are all to do with policy and finance.

Most governments have no idea how to integrate desalination into a water resources portfolio, especially when demand for additional resources is only seasonal. They don’t know how to make the trade-offs between desal’s marine impacts and its costs. They don’t know how to build desalination into their renewable energy strategy. They don’t know how to manage the financing risks which augment the cost of the plants they want to build. They don’t create the conditions (e.g. low non-revenue water and cost recovery tariffs) that will make desalination a success.

I have to admit that no one has the answers to some of these questions, but it seems to me that until we have dependable answers to all of them, desalination is not going to reach its full potential.Finding those answers is a big part of the agenda for the Future of Desalination International Conference we are staging with Saudi Arabia’s SWCC in Riyadh on 11-13 September. It is not going to be like any desalination conference you have been to before. As the Governor of SWCC Abdullah Al-Abdulkarim remarked when we were setting it up: “we are only going to talk about the future. Not the past”. That means the future of policy and finance, as well as technology. We will be bringing in policymakers from all over the world to take part. It is your opportunity to shape our future in desalination, and you can register here.

More than 1 billion people are counting on us making a difference.