Dubai’s precious water world
For a desert city, Dubai seems like a water wonderland. Visitors can dive into the world’s deepest pool or ski in a mega-mall where penguins play in freshly made snow. a fountain – billed as the world’s largest – sprays more than 22,000 liters of water into the air, synchronized to music from surrounding speakers.
But to maintain its opulence, the city depends on fresh water, which it does not have. So it’s turning to the sea, using energy-intensive desalination technologies to help hydrate a fast-growing metropolis.
All this comes at a cost. Experts say Dubai’s reliance on desalination is damaging the Persian Gulf and producing a brackish waste known as brine that, along with the chemicals used during desalination, increases salinity in the Gulf. It also increases coastal water temperatures and harms biodiversity, fisheries and coastal communities.
The Gulf is also under pressure from climate change and efforts to build Dubai multi-billion dollar islands using land reclamation. The beachfront property offered includes a $34 million private island in the shape of a seahorse, located in the artificial archipelago.
If immediate action is not taken to stem the damage, desalination, combined with climate change, will raise the temperature of Gulf coastal waters by at least five degrees Fahrenheit over more than 50 percent of the area by 2050, according to the researchers. a 2021 study published in the Marine Pollution Bulletin on ScienceDirect, a site for peer-reviewed articles.
Dubai, the most populous city in the United Arab Emirates, has taken steps to tackle the damage through environmental initiatives and new technology, but pressure is mounting to do more. Later this month, the city will host the United Nations global climate summit known as COP28, an idea that has already sparked tensions over fossil fuel investments by the UAE and other participating countries.
In addition to fueling Dubai’s flashy recreational facilities, water is essential to sustaining life, and desalination provides drinking water to a thirsty city. The Dubai Electricity and Water Authority supplies water more than 3.6 million inhabitants along with the city’s active daytime population of more than 4.7 million visitors, according to a 2022 study sustainability report. The utility expects these numbers to grow by 2040, increasing demand for clean water.
The city desalinated about 163.6 billion gallons of water last year, according to the city sustainability report. For every gallon of desalinated water produced in the Gulf, on average one and a half liters of brine is released into the ocean.
In Dubai the Jebel Ali power and desalination complex – the largest facility of its kind in the world – diverts water from the sea, puts it through a series of treatment stages and then into the city as drinkable water. But Jebel Ali’s 43 desalination plants are powered by fossil fuels. The UAE produced more than 200 million tons of carbon in 2022below the highest emissions per capita worldwide.
Seawater desalination has been a lifeline in the United Arab Emirates for nearly fifty years, but other coastal areas, such as Carlsbad, California, have recently adopted the technology in the face of severe drought. Florida is a national leader in… desalinationand further inland, Arizona is considering bringing in desalinated water from Mexico.
Desalination efforts have long been used other Gulf states also, including Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Unlike its oil-rich neighbors, Dubai has an economy based primarily on tourism, real estate and aviation, although the short-lived oil boom of the 1960s and 1970s provided the financial basis for the city’s infrastructure of architectural grandeur.
“It’s a brand,” says Khaled Alawadi, an associate professor of sustainable urban planning at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi. “Any tourist destination, especially if you have potential competition from the region, likes to dominate.”
Bee Deep dive DubaiThe equivalent of six Olympic-sized swimming pools fills an underwater city in the shape of a giant oyster, inspired by the emirate’s pearl diving heritage.
The Burj KhalifaThe world’s tallest building, developed by Emaar and designed by Adrian Smit, uses an average of 250,000 liters of water daily and requires a peak cooling capacity equivalent to approximately 10,000 tons of melted ice. At the foot of the building, the 30-acre Burj Lake and its five dancing fountains utilize a wastewater recovery system by Hitachi that reuses sewage from the Burj Khalifa to replace fountain water lost daily.
The construction of Dubai’s artificial islands is also putting pressure on the Gulf’s water resources. A study found that the average water temperature around the Palm Jumeirah Island, designed by HHCP Architectsincreased by about 13 degrees in 19 years. Another study cited land reclamation, along with brine and industrial waste, as the cause of the excessive growth of microscopic algae in the Persian Gulf, known as algal blooms or red tides. Some of these harmful blooms result in desalination factories to limit or stop operations.
“Developing near the water is much more preferable than developing in the desert landscape, and you increase the coastline,” said Dr. Alawadi.
The state-owned firm, Mr Smith and HHCP Architects declined to comment for this article.
Dubai has announced environmental initiatives to tackle its massive resource consumption an effort to reduce energy and water demand by 30 percent by 2030 and achieve 100 percent of energy generation from renewable energy sources by 2050. The country has even turned to the sky as an alternative water source, hiring scientists to chemically stimulate clouds to produce rainfall (although there is little agreement that this process actually works) and encouraging hotels in Dubai to produce their own water atmospheric harvest.
Faisal al-Marzooqi, an associate professor at Khalifa University who researches water desalination in the United Arab Emirates, said he had pushed government officials to ban facilities from using drinking water for functions that don’t involve drinking, such as metal production facilities and water parks. .
“At a time when water is really valuable, there may be better ways to do things like recreational activities,” he said.
He added that rising salinity in the Gulf was dangerous because the water was already hyper-salty and adding more salt threatened the Gulf’s biodiversity.
Global seawater salinity is typically 3.5 to 4.5 percent; the Persian Gulf enters at the latter end, making it more vulnerable to brine. About 70 percent of the Gulf’s coral reefs have disappeared, with 21 species of coral-dependent fish at increased risk of extinction. These shifts have resulted in a regional loss of $94 billion per year to tourism, aquaculture and fisheries. A study published in 2021 in the Marine Pollution Bulletin, a scientific journal.
“This is a very big problem,” said Dr. al-Marzooqi.
Seagrass meadows and mangroves in the area are also struggling. Such ecosystems are important nurseries for commercially valuable species such as pearl oysters; they also help stabilize wave rhythms and erosion forces and can absorb large amounts of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. Their decline has contributed to an oceanic desert devoid of the usual biodiversity found in the Arabian Sea and Persian Gulf – the largest so-called dead zone in the world.
Since the 1970s, dead zones have emerged around the world, including one in the Baltic Sea three times the area of Maryland.
“We have our own water supply in the Gulf of Mexico, where all the water that flows through the Mississippi loses oxygen and everything dies,” said Bruce Logan, director of the Institute of Energy and the Environment at Pennsylvania State University.
But Dubai is making progress. In 2021, the city required that all new desalination projects be built using what is widely considered the most efficient and environmentally friendly desalination technology available: reverse osmosis. However, most of the country’s desalination plants still use an older technology called multi-stage flash distillation.
Unlike reverse osmosis, which removes salt and other contaminants by pushing water through a semi-permeable membrane, multi-stage flash distillation relies on heat. Decades ago, when the UAE began exploring desalination, the technology could better handle the Gulf’s high salinity, although reverse osmosis can now do the same. And while both technologies create brine, the byproduct of multi-stage flash distillation is much hotter, further disrupting the ecosystem.
The utility is new Hassyan power plant in Dubai will use reverse osmosis desalination and has been running on natural gas instead of coal for over a year. The $3.4 billion project is expected to generate more than €3.4 billion 140 million liters of water per day.
The utility has begun exploring sustainable options for managing and recycling brine No liquid drainage And membrane distillationtechnologies that experts hope will treat saltwater and wastewater. However, techniques that address the problem on a large scale have yet to be adopted solutions are being investigated worldwide.
Despite its efforts, Dubai faces criticism. “To be honest, I don’t see many initiatives,” said Dr. al-Marzooqi. “I feel like the focus is more on renewable energy powering the systems, but there’s almost no mention of brine.”