Why planning Saudi water strategy just got a lot more complicated

Does Saudi Arabia need to revamp its water strategy? The Kingdom is shifting toward a high-tech circular water economy and exploring innovative desalination methods amid soaring demand and geopolitical pressures.

Some SAR 100 bn were invested over the past seven years to improve the efficiency of Saudi Arabia’s water strategy. The country utilized seawater reverse osmosis as a core desalination technology to reduce energy consumption. It also shifted from simply expanding desalination capacity toward a focus on reducing water losses and improving network efficiency through smart infrastructure and digital monitoring.

That’s great, but is it enough? “Saudi Arabia has become one of the largest markets for water desalination and water distribution projects in the world,” Alexander Sarac, partner for infrastructure projects and energy at Addleshaw Goddard, tells EnterpriseAM. The build-out is less a defensive water-security play and more of a precondition for growth, as Vision 2030 “cannot be achieved without a significant increase in water desalination capacity spread across the country,” Goddard adds.

Demand has been climbing fast since 2015 on the back of new housing, tourism, real estate, and agricultural projects, as well as industrial cooling loads, MENA Economist Hamzeh Al Gaood tells EnterpriseAM. Add in Vision 2030's mandate to cut reliance on non-renewable water sources and push treated wastewater reuse.

Then came the geopolitics. The Iran conflict has “significantly heightened the urgency around water security,” Al Gaood says. Mega-plants are central to GCC water supply but are “highly exposed targets.” If hit or taken offline, the disruption would be widespread, “given the region's heavy reliance on desalination to sustain urban growth and economic activity,” he adds.

BUT- Can we plan everything around war? Critical infrastructure does become a target when conflicts escalate, but “a country such as Saudi Arabia cannot plan its infrastructure purely for war times. It must be able to plan for ‘normal’ periods while planning for backup solutions and contingencies,” Sarac says.

Enter the decentralization thesis

The pitch for smaller, localized systems is to spread production across multiple sites, reduce single-point-of-failure exposure, and score some environmental points along the way. Large desalination plants raise salinity in surrounding waters, which decentralized systems can ease, Al Gaood notes.

The economics, though, aren't quite there yet. Smaller localized systems are “more expensive” today, Sarac says, and make commercial sense mainly in remote areas where transmission is costly, or where they're built for a specific offtaker. “Decentralized solutions can be part of the mix; it is not an either-or.”

Energy is the binding constraint. Desalination is power-hungry, which is exactly why the industry has historically clustered into large plants with reliable grid access, Al Gaood notes. For decentralized systems to scale economically, the underlying technology’s energy efficiency has to improve. That ties into the Kingdom’s broader grid build-out, already being stretched by emerging loads like AI data centers, which will need to absorb a more geographically dispersed pattern of water-related demand.

For new cities, industrial zones, and green urban projects, the end user “only needs water,” Sarac argues. Cost and availability tend to weigh more heavily than technology type, but whether this will change following the conflict remains to be seen, he adds.

The technology side is where the investment story sharpens. Mohamed Askar, Middle East and Africa sales director at Veolia Water Technologies, points to advanced reverse osmosis (RO) as a near-term enabler. But even advanced RO systems “rely on remote monitoring and control for predictive maintenance and performance assurance.” That means distributed plants still need stable energy, specialized maintenance, digital infrastructure, and steady access to membranes and spare parts to run, Askar says.

Sarac is blunter: “It is just not feasible to move from large scale to decentralized overnight. Building isolated systems for specific regions requires a different planning approach and will come at a cost,” he says.

Beyond desalination, the Kingdom is also widening its water-source mix, tapping underground reserves, exploring water access further north including from Syria and Iraq, and investing in less energy-intensive desalination technology, Al Gaood says.