RIYADH, 10 August — In a move to provide access to potable water for the growing population of the Kingdom, the Saline Water Conversion Corporation (SWCC) has stepped up efforts to complete some desalination projects by the end of this year.
The plan is to take the total number of plants to 30 with a capacity of 2.9 million cubic meters of water daily. The plants will also produce more than 3,400 megawatt electricity.
"These desalination projects on completion will cater for the water and power requirements of several cities and villages across the country," said SWCC Governor Abdullah Ibn Abdulrahman Al-Hussein in a statement here.
Al-Hussein said that SWCC will have a pipeline network of over 4,000 km in length after completion of the ongoing desalination projects. This network will connect 29 pumping stations and 10 mixing stations with over 108 storage tanks. The new projects have been launched following a study conducted by SWCC, which runs its desalination plants with oil as fuel.
Saudi Arabia is the largest producer of desalinated water with a number of high-tech desalination and power plants producing potable water and electricity for its 22 million people including expatriates. Currently, desalinated water constitutes more than 70 percent of supply in the Kingdom. Its desalinated water output amounts to 30 percent of the total world’s production.
Desalination has been proving to be a costly option with billions of dollars being spent on these plants.
This prompted the Kingdom to review its water management strategies. This concern gave birth to a comprehensive national plan for water security, which has already been prepared and launched by the Ministry of Agriculture & Water. The plan aims at realizing the ideal use of water resources, implementing programs for rationalizing consumption at the local level and finding a solution to the problems of dwindling water resources.
The annual rainfall in Saudi Arabia is also being utilized to serve the purpose under the national plan. The average rainfall is estimated at 100 mm with the exception of southwestern mountains where rainfall reaches around 800 mm.
In yet another move to maximize the benefits of rainwater, Saudi Arabia has also constructed 184 dams with a storage capacity of 482 cubic meters.
