Water is a small and dwindling resource and it behooves us to make great efforts to use it wisely and conserve it wherever possible. Growing population numbers that increase the need for the greatest water user agriculture, variations in climatic conditions and industrialization of developing countries all put increasing pressure on a decreasing finite resource.
The simplicity of having water out of a tap for almost no charge in Saudi Arabia seduces the user into thinking it is freely available. Sixty percent plus of domestic water that arrives in homes and business for human consumption has been manufactured in energy intensive resource-guzzling desalination plants. Built at huge cost, run and maintained at further expense, the water manufacture infrastructure has obvious costs. Less obvious are the hidden expenses of the gap between water produced and water received by end consumers through loss and tanker delivery charges.
Apart from financial cost, environmental cost in terms of carbon, nitrous oxide and sulphur emissions from desalination plants add to the mix. Soon these will be real financial costs that can be built into the price of water production as unclaimable carbon-credits.
As Carbon Emission Reduction (CER) trading reaches the Kingdom, which it did on May 31, the failure to reduce emissions will result in the inability to claim carbon credits for trading on to polluting industries. The loss of potential savings on the production side of the equation equates to an actual cost that could be retrieved and goes into the production price.
Little if any of this worries the general consumer who washes his car daily, uses several gallons of water by leaving the tap running as he brushes his teeth or waters grass and flowers never designed by nature to prosper in the desert. At the end-consumer level, he simply turns the tap on and water — most of the time — emerges.
Conservation of the most precious of liquids is essential; awareness of this among the Saudi public seems, to judge by the use of water in private and public spaces and in domestic situations, appears to be low.
Raising awareness involves action in three areas: Price, public education and pressure.
In reverse order, the pressure on the public has and will come again when water stops flowing. The traditional, and thankfully largely historical, agitated queues of consumers outside water distribution centers in Jeddah were an annual demonstration of needs over supply.
Worse was a break in the 300km Jubail-Riyadh water pipeline some years ago that brought scenes of panic to the streets and saw the price of tanked water rise by a factor of 10 in a matter of hours. Add that situation to the fact revealed at the Water Electricity and Power Conference (WEPC) in Dammam last year that Riyadh had just 36 hours of reserve water and the pressure to conserve takes on a new dimension.
Pressure to keep water flowing and potable applies to the authorities too. Extension, maintenance and repair of the system are priorities that need constantly to be addressed if the specter of urban drought is to be avoided.
The National Water Company (NWC), the executive arm of the Ministry of Water, aims to reduce the volume of water and revenues that are lost to leakage to a more reasonable 20 percent in Riyadh. It needs to; leakage is at very high levels. Riyadh sprawls over 536 square km, an area more than five times the size of Paris. About 60 percent (in some areas 75 percent according to the NWC at the WEPC last year), of Riyadh’s valuable water supply according to the Swiss based ABB company on March 4, 2010, is lost through leakage in the 10,000 km of pipes that transport water to the city’s 4.5 million population. Their water metering system is part of the modernization of the city’s ageing water network.
Public education, the second prong of the attack on wasteful use, has been tried before but is currently under way again in the Kingdom. The Saudi Ministry of Water and Electricity (MOWE) started the latest iteration on May 12 when it teamed up with Ariel washing powder and LG to announce the launch of its ‘Saudi Water Savers’ campaign. It is a commendable Kingdomwide campaign to address the water challenge in the country and make the Saudi population aware of how it consumes its daily water.
According to MOWE, research showed that “on average each person in Saudi Arabia consumes 286 liters of water per day, the third highest consumption in the world after the US (No. 1) and Canada (No. 2).”
The campaign is aimed at the adult Saudi consumer and focuses in particular on ‘intelligent’ front-loading washing machines and the Saudi housewife. It claims that, “if only 10 percent of Saudi housewives switched from a top loading washing machine to a front loading automatic washing machine, it would save the kingdom 4 billion liters of water every month.”
However, while the campaign is laudable, awareness through education really has to be integrated into the public education system at the earliest opportunity and from primary stage upwards. Targeting adults only addresses those who have developed bad water habits; better to target those whose habits have yet to develop with good water-use habits through science education that produces an understanding of the issue.
The third prong, price, is probably the most effective in changing public behavior and attitude to water. There is little evidence that the general public in the Kingdom regards water as a scarce diminishing resource except when it stops flowing. Panic buying begins and the flower of understanding begins to grow, rooted solidly in the wallet and blossoming with the realization that as a member of the public you have no right to water; it is a good and has economic value that has to be paid for. But how much should it cost?
In effect, the Saudi water producers are making a product for a dollar and selling it for a cent to consumers who use more per than anyone bar the US and Canada. Selling water for one percent of what it really costs is a consumer’s dream because they can use as much water as they wish, and still receive a low monthly bill.
Desalination plants supply 60 percent of this urban water use. According to a multiple government sources, the basic cost to desalinate one cubic meter of water ranges from four to six riyals. Plus, most of this desalination occurs along the cost line, hundreds of km from Riyadh and other major cities.
The National Water Company estimates it costs another two to three riyals to transport and distribute the water to the consumer’s house. Water is relatively dense — one ton a cubic meter — and needs a great deal of pumping. Hidden in this equation is the real cost of transporting water. Government subsidized oil is used in the desalination process, but if factored in at commercial rates, the price jumps another few riyals per cubic meter.
All things considered, the government is paying anywhere from SR9-12 per cubic meter of water that comes out of your tap, but they only charge the consumer 10 halalas per cubic meter. It is evident that this consumer dream is a governmental nightmare.
When crunched, the numbers indicate that the government spends about SR650 per person, per year, on desalinated water use alone. With a national population of 27 million, the government water bill is currently SR17.5 billion per year.
Subsidy is a double edged sword; one side a blessing to the consumer from a state that has a generous approach to its citizens in providing the necessities of life. The other edge is that this self-same generosity engenders a culture of waste. If water is so inexpensive to the consumer, it has no perceived value.
Until it runs out, that is.
The answer to the Kingdom’s use of water lies in the three Ps: Public education, Pressure, and most of all Pricing. There are five more Ps, used by military and logistical organizations across the world, that might be worth noting when it comes to addressing the inevitable water issues that lie somewhere in the Kingdom’s future: Proper Preparation Prevents Poor Performance.
