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Saudi Arabia has become the global benchmark for desalination, transforming a severe natural limitation into a strategic national strength.
In a country where freshwater resources are scarce and rainfall is limited, desalination is not a side project but a vital pillar of everyday life.
In a country where freshwater resources are scarce and rainfall is limited, desalination is not a side project but a vital pillar of everyday life.
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00:00Saudi Arabia leads global desalination by far. By the end of 2025, daily capacity exceeded 16
00:06million cubic meters, with some estimates near 17.3 million. Its dominance comes from 50 years
00:11of state funding for plants, pipelines and research, plus new mineral extraction from
00:15desalination brine. But what happens when the water runs out? The Gap
00:20By the end of 2025, Saudi daily capacity exceeded 16 million cubic meters. China sits near 14 million.
00:26The United States is around 11 million. The United Arab Emirates is around 9.1 million.
00:32Spain is around 5 million. The kingdom accounts for 15 to 20 percent of all desalinated water
00:37produced on Earth. The Middle East and North Africa region holds nearly half of global online capacity,
00:43and the Gulf states dominate that half. The growth curve explains the margin.
00:46National Transformation Program data show daily capacity at 4.6 million cubic meters in 2016,
00:526.2 million in 2022, 11.5 million in 2023, and 16 million by the end of 2024 to 2025,
01:00a rise of nearly 248 percent. Global capacity stood near 69 to 70 million cubic meters a day
01:07around 2023, and Saudi Arabia held about 15.6 percent of it alone. The origin predates the oil
01:13economy. In 1907, condenser units known as Kandasa operated on the Jeddah coast to supply pilgrims and
01:19residents. King Abdulaziz ordered larger distillation units in the 1920s and 1930s. A general directorate
01:25for desalination was formed in 1965, and a royal decree established the Saline Water Conversion
01:31Corporation in 1974. The first purpose-built plants opened in the late 1960s at Al-Wajj and Duba,
01:37then Jeddah and Al-Kobar. SWCC was renamed the Saudi Water Authority in 2024. Production is one half of the
01:44system. Transmission is the other. The pipeline network exceeds 14,000 kilometers with daily
01:49carrying capacity above 19 million cubic meters, and it is described as the largest of its kind.
01:54The kingdom holds Guinness records for the largest potable water storage network,
01:57the longest transmission network, the largest mobile desalination unit, and record low plant
02:02energy consumption. Desalination now supplies 60 to 70 percent of Saudi drinking water, with
02:07projections aiming at 90 percent of demand by 2030. And the engineers inside the industry say the field
02:13has barely started. I think we're just scratching the surface of desalination.
02:17The engineer and the membrane. Numbers that large need people who can build at that size,
02:23and the kingdom spent decades importing them. Nikolay Vuchkov took his engineering masters at UCLA,
02:28served as chief technology officer at Poseidon, sat on the board of the International Desalination
02:33and Reuse Association, co-authored the American Water Works Association Manual on Reverse Osmosis,
02:38and the WHO's desalination guidance, and has put his name to more than 10 books and 100 technical
02:43papers on brine management. Then he went to work for SWCC. I started my work in the membrane
02:50concentration and crystallization processes when I worked for SWCC, the Saline Water Conversion
02:57Corporation. That work ran through the Desalination Technology and Research Institute in Jubil,
03:03now the Water Technologies Innovation Institute and Research Advancement, the same body that would later
03:08patent the kingdom's brine mining process. The machine he was refining had already been rebuilt
03:12once. Early Saudi plants ran thermally, consuming 10 to 15 kilowatt hours per cubic meter or more in
03:18thermal equivalent, which made sense when gas was free and plants bolted onto power stations.
03:22Reverse osmosis rewrote it. Modern Saudi RO runs at 2.3 to 3 kilowatt hours, with optimized systems as low
03:29as 2.27, a cut of 80 percent or more. The monuments are records. Raz Alkar runs multi-stage flash
03:35and
03:35reverse osmosis side by side, exceeding a million cubic meters a day and feeding Riyadh through long
03:40pipelines. Alcobar Faye's II took a Guinness World Record in 2025 as the largest RO plant on earth
03:46at 670,852.4 cubic meters per day. But the membrane itself has barely changed since the founding UCLA
03:54paper in 1959. For 65 years, it has done one job, separate water from salt. And Vuchkov's argument is
04:01that the model was wrong from the start. If you look at nature, nature doesn't have membranes that
04:06do only one thing. Cells run dozens of separations across a single membrane at almost no energy cost.
04:12Industry splits water from salt and discards the rest. Vuchkov calls this a breakthrough point where
04:16that finally changes, and he points to the multifunctional membranes being developed at
04:20NEOM, engineered to separate particular salts out of all the other salts in seawater, as the working
04:25example. The question asked in Muscat. The idea driving all of it was handed to the industry,
04:3225 years ago in a government office in Oman, then abandoned. Eric Jenkel helped found the Middle East
04:37Desalination Research Center in Muscat, built to put Arab and Israeli researchers at one table with a
04:43shared goal, lower the cost of seawater desalination. On arrival he was summoned to the foreign minister,
04:47his honor Yusuf bin Alawi, who did not ask for cheaper membranes. He asked the center to recover the
04:52minerals and salts inside the brine stream, sell them, and let that revenue eat the cost of the
04:56water. It went nowhere. Nobody could recover the minerals cheaply, and no market was hungry enough
05:09to pay for them. Both walls have now fallen, and the country sitting on the world's largest brine
05:14stream built the process. Zwa and WTIRA lead it, with KAUSD and NEOM alongside. The core train is dual
05:20brine concentration, nanofiltration, reverse osmosis and membrane brine concentration, patented and
05:26piloted at Jubil. Nanofiltration rejects magnesium and calcium while letting sodium, chloride and
05:30bromide pass, splitting seawater into a magnesium-rich stream, and a sodium chloride stream at 96 to 98%
05:37purity. Reverse osmosis concentrates further and makes more freshwater. Membrane brine concentration
05:42then drives salinity from around 70 to 80 grams per liter, past 150 to 250. In one pilot reaching
05:49100,000 milligrams per liter, at roughly 4 kilowatt hours per cubic meter. The Jubil results are
05:54specific. Monovalent concentrate between 168,000 and 176,600 milligrams per liter, a multivalent stream
06:02near 83,000 with calcium, enriched 3.4 times, and magnesium 5.2 times over seawater, and vacuum
06:09crystallization producing salt at 99.6% purity. Crystallization is where the design is lifted from
06:15marine biology. Sea creatures handle salinity swings by growing magnesium chloride crystals
06:20inside their cells and dissolving them again, and the change of state takes almost no temperature,
06:25by Vuchkov's account. Half a degree is enough to concentrate the solution twice over. NEOM's
06:30crystallizers use magnesium chloride as the draw solution for exactly that reason, running at roughly
06:357 to 7.5 kilowatt hours per cubic meter of brine. That number only means something next to the method
06:42it replaces. The salt mountain is running out. Cheap extraction only matters if something is
06:53desperate to buy, and the prize mineral is the dullest one on the list. Sodium chloride,
06:57not for food, for chlororalkali, the industry Vuchkov describes as the Gulf's other use for oil.
07:02Petroleum plus salt makes liquid PVC, the feedstock beneath essentially every plastic on earth. Salt is
07:08half the recipe, and for decades it was lying on the shoreline in natural deposits along the Arabian
07:13Gulf. Now those natural deposits of salt along the shores of Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates,
07:20and others, Kuwait, they're running out. The fallback was Indian solar salt, ponds, sun, gravity,
07:27nothing else. Then the climate turned on it. Heavier rains and higher humidity over the past five years
07:32have cut solar pond production in India by nearly half, according to Vuchkov, leaving two supply lines
07:37strangled at once. The pricing follows. He puts production of that low-purity solar salt at $25
07:42to $30 a ton and $35 to $40 delivered into the Gulf, against $18 to $20 for salt crystallized on
07:50site
07:50from brine. The research arrives at the same conclusion independently. Modeling for a million
07:55ton a year system puts freshwater at about $0.57 per cubic meter and salt brine at $28.87 per
08:02dry ton,
08:03produced next door to the plant that consumes it. Out of a stream the operator was
08:07paying to dump. So the target list reads like industrial policy, high-purity salt for chloroalkali
08:12and bromine for well-completion fluids and flame retardants, plus magnesium, potassium and calcium
08:17products. With concepts running to 2 million tons of salt and 3,500 to 3,800 tons of bromine a
08:23year,
08:23SWA has said mineral sales could offset up to half the cost of the water itself, which turns water
08:29policy into resource politics. As we see wars being fought, as we see presidents like ours
08:37making statements. He does not name a president. He finishes the thought. That showed the significance
08:43of access to minerals and metals. And unlike an ore body, this supply is not fenced inside anyone's
08:49borders. Seawater, as he puts it, reaches over 80% of the world's population.
08:54What is built and what isn't? Capital is moving. Two Chinese-partnered extraction
09:00plants at Ra's Alcar were contracted at around $65 million for the pair, targeting commercial
09:05operation in the first quarter of 2026 for magnesium, potassium and sodium chloride. SWA
09:11is aiming at roughly $2.1 billion of brine mining investment by 2030, with 25-40% local market coverage
09:18for products like sodium and bromine. At NEOM, ENOWA's selective membranes pass over 99% of a
09:25targeted mineral into the permeate, with under 1% loss to brine, feeding a 1,200 cubic meter per day
09:31demonstration plant at Duba, commissioned around mid-2024. There is a carbon pathway to brine,
09:36cement kiln dust, and captured CO2 producing high-purity vatterite calcium carbonate, piloted
09:41at 50 tons a year in Jubil, mineralizing roughly 440 kilograms of CO2 per ton. The kingdom has
09:47already pulled lithium from oilfield runoff, though seawater lithium stays too dilute to chase.
09:51The caveats are real. Full commissioning confirmation for the Ra's Alcar units was
09:55still pending in early to mid-2026. The ANOWA-Itachu-Violia agreement for Oxagon was not
10:01renewed in 2024, and NEOM moved back toward conventional seawater RO. Pilots hit scaling
10:06events requiring antiscalant and pH provisions. Global salt markets are competitive, and absorbing
10:11millions of tons is not guaranteed. Power is the other open question. Al-Kafji proved solar RO
10:17at scale around 2018, and Vision 2030 targets 50% renewable electricity. But the engineer who built
10:23one of those plants will not sell it. I have designed and built one of the biggest plants
10:28in Saudi Arabia using renewable solar power, and it has not been very successful.
10:34Panels themselves cost around 4 cents a kilowatt hour. Delivering the sag-free, round-the-clock
10:38alternating current and RO train needs pushes the all-in figure to 38 cents by his numbers.
10:43Wind is worse. He found in Qatar that shifting currents now reshuffle wind patterns every five
10:48to seven years, where they once held for 70 or 80, which is no basis for financing a 25-year
10:53plan. 16 million cubic meters a day, 14,000 kilometers of pipeline, a mineral platform growing
10:59out of the waste stream. And by the assessment of one of the field's most published engineers,
11:03the technology is still in its mainframe era. I would say we are at the time of computers that
11:08were like the 360, 370 IBMs, before the time of semiconductors. Whoever owns the mainframe era,
11:15owns the head start. Whoever owns the mainframe era, owns the head start.
11:20Thanks for watching. Check out other cards on the screen.