Dubai’s Costly Water
World
The city has spent billions of
dollars to provide fresh water to its residents and tourist attractions, but
experts say the efforts are straining the Persian Gulf’s natural resources.
For
a desert city, Dubai appears like a water wonderland. Visitors can scuba dive
in the world’s deepest pool or ski inside a mega mall where penguins play in
freshly made snow. A fountain — billed as the world’s largest — sprays more
than 22,000 gallons of water into the air, synchronized to music from surrounding
speakers.
But
to maintain its opulence, the city relies on fresh water it doesn’t have. So it turns to the sea, using energy-intensive desalination
technologies to help hydrate a rapidly growing metropolis.
All
of this comes at a cost. Experts say Dubai’s reliance on desalination is
damaging the Persian Gulf, producing a brackish waste known as brine which,
along with chemicals used during desalination processing, increases salinity in
the Gulf. It also raises coastal water temperatures and harms biodiversity,
fisheries and coastal communities.
The
Gulf is also being stressed by climate change and efforts to construct Dubai’s
multibillion-dollar islands using land reclamation. The beachfront real estate
on offer includes a $34 million private island shaped like a sea horse,
situated in the artificial archipelago.
If
no immediate action is taken to counter the harm, desalination, in combination
with climate change, will increase the Gulf’s coastal waters temperature by at
least five degrees Fahrenheit across more than 50 percent of the area by 2050,
according to a 2021 study published in the Marine Pollution Bulletin on
ScienceDirect, a site for peer-reviewed papers.
Dubai,
the most populous city in the United Arab Emirates, has taken steps to address
the damage through environmental initiatives and new technology, but pressure
is building to do more. Later this month, the city will host the United Nations
global climate summit, known as COP28, a notion that has already riled tension
because of fossil fuel investments by the U.A.E. and other participating
countries.
Beyond
powering Dubai’s flashy recreational features, water is essential to sustaining
life, and desalination provides drinking water to a thirsty city. The Dubai
Electricity and Water Authority supplies water to more than 3.6 million
residents along with the city’s active daytime population of more than 4.7
million visitors, according to a 2022 sustainability report. By 2040, the
utility expects these numbers to grow, increasing the demand for clean water.
The
city desalinated approximately 163.6 billion gallons of water last year,
according to the sustainability report. For each gallon of desalinated water
produced in the Gulf, an average of a gallon and a half of brine is released
into the ocean.
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In
Dubai, the Jebel Ali Power and Desalination Complex — the largest facility of
its kind in the world — pipes water from the sea, sending it through a series
of treatment phases, then to the city as drinkable water. But Jebel Ali’s 43 desalination
plants are powered by fossil fuels. The U.A.E. produced more than 200 million
tons of carbon in 2022, among the highest emissions per capita worldwide.
Seawater
desalination has been a lifeline in the United Arab Emirates for almost 50
years, but other coastal regions, like Carlsbad, Calif., have recently adopted
the technology in the face of severe drought. Florida is a national leader in
desalination, and farther inland, Arizona is considering piping desalinated
water from Mexico.
Desalination
efforts have long been used in other Gulf countries as well, including Bahrain,
Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Unlike its oil-rich neighbors,
Dubai has an economy based primarily on tourism, real estate and aviation,
though its short-lived oil boom of the 1960s and ’70s provided the financial
foundation for the city’s infrastructure of architectural grandness.
“It’s
a brand,” said Khaled Alawadi, associate professor of
sustainable urbanism at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi. “Any tourist
destination, especially if you have potential competition from the region,
likes to dominate.”
At
Deep Dive Dubai, the equivalent of six Olympic-size swimming pools of water
fills an underwater city shaped like a giant oyster, inspired by the emirate’s
pearl-diving heritage.
The
Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building, developed by Emaar and designed by
Adrian Smith, uses an average of 250,000 gallons of water daily and requires a
peak cooling capacity equivalent to roughly 10,000 tons of melted ice. At the
foot of the building, the 30-acre Burj Lake and its five dancing fountains use
a wastewater reclamation system by Hitachi that reuses the Burj Khalifa’s
sewage water to replace fountain water lost each day.
The
construction of Dubai’s artificial islands also strains the Gulf’s water
resources. One study found that the average water temperature around Palm Jumeirah island, designed by HHCP Architects, increased
by roughly 13 degrees over 19 years. Another study cited land reclamation,
along with brine and industrial waste, as a cause of the excessive growth of
microscopic algae in the Persian Gulf, known as algae blooms or red tides. Some
of these harmful blooms have forced desalination plants to reduce or shut down
operations.
“Developing
close to the water is much more preferred than developing in the desert
landscape, and you are increasing the coastline,” Dr.
Alawadi said.
The
state-run utility, Mr. Smith and HHCP Architects declined to comment for this
article.
Dubai
has announced environmental initiatives to address its enormous consumption of
resources, including an effort to reduce energy and water demand by 30 percent
by 2030 and obtain 100 percent of its power 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
(though there’s little agreement this process actually works) and encouraging
hotels in Dubai to make their own water through atmospheric harvesting.
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 stop facilities from using potable water
for functions that do not involve drinking, such as metal manufacturing
facilities and water parks.
“During
a time when water is really valuable, there could be better ways to do things
like recreational activities,” he said.
He
added that rising salinity levels in the Gulf were dangerous because the water
was already hypersaline, and adding more salt threatened the Gulf’s
biodiversity.
Global
seawater salinity is typically 3.5 to 4.5 percent; the Persian Gulf comes in 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
elevated risk of extinction. These shifts have resulted in a regional loss of
$94 billion a year for tourism, aquaculture and fisheries, according to a study
published in 2021 in the Marine Pollution Bulletin, a scholarly journal.
“This
is a really big problem,” Dr. al-Marzooqi
said.
Sea
grass meadows and mangroves in the area are also struggling. Such ecosystems
are important nursing grounds for commercially valuable species like pearl
oysters; they also help stabilize wave rhythms and erosional forces and can
absorb large quantities of greenhouse gas from the atmosphere. Their decline
has contributed to an oceanic desert devoid of the usual biodiversity that is
found in the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf — the largest so-called dead zone
in the world.
Since
the 1970s, dead zones have proliferated across the globe, and include one in
the Baltic Sea three times the area of Maryland.
“We
have our own in the Gulf of Mexico, where all the water going down the
Mississippi deoxygenates and everything dies,” said Bruce Logan, director of
Pennsylvania State University’s Institute of Energy and the Environment.
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
eco-friendly desalination technology available: reverse osmosis. Most of the
country’s desalination plants, however, still use an older technology called
multistage flash distillation.
Unlike
reverse osmosis, which removes salt and other contaminants by pushing water
through a semipermeable membrane, multistage flash distillation relies on heat.
Decades ago, when the U.A.E. began exploring desalination, the technology could
better handle the Gulf’s high salinity, though reverse osmosis can now do the
same. And although both technologies create brine, the byproduct
of multistage flash distillation is far hotter, further disrupting the
ecosystem.
The
utility’s new Hassyan Power Plant in Dubai will use reverse
osmosis desalination and has operated for more than a year on natural gas
instead of coal. The $3.4 billion project is expected to generate more than 140
million gallons of water a day.
The
utility has begun researching sustainable options to manage and recycle brine
using Zero Liquid Discharge and membrane distillation, technologies that
experts hope will treat saline water and wastewater. Techniques that address
the problem at scale, however, have yet to be applied, though solutions are
being researched worldwide.
Despite
the efforts, Dubai faces criticism. “I don’t see a lot of initiatives, to be
honest,” Dr. al-Marzooqi
said. “I feel the focus is more on renewable energy powering the systems, but
there’s almost zero talk about brine.”