The shortage of water is one of the world’s greatest current and future challenges. Even more so for the Arabian Gulf region, with GCC countries consuming considerably more water than the world average, despite the fact that the Arabian Gulf gets little rain and has low levels of groundwater.
Currently, demand for potable water in the region is about 3,300 million imperial gallons per day (MIGD), and is expected to grow to about 5,200 MIGD by 2020.
GCC countries depend mainly on groundwater resources, desalinated water plants and recycled wastewater to meet the requirements of the population, agriculture and industries. The increasing population and the fast growing economies of the GCC have affected the quality of the already scares groundwater, leading to poorer quality of water for daily use and negative environmental impacts.
To meet this challenge, governments have turned to large-scale desalination and wastewater treatment.
Over the past decade, GCC countries have become the world’s biggest consumers of desalinated water, with the Arabian Gulf accounting for around 41% of desalinated water produced globally. By 2020, total seawater desalination capacity is expected to further increase by nearly 40 per cent by 2020 — from approximately 4,000 MIGD to more than 5,500 MIGD — to meet increasing demand for potable water in the region.
To generate these additional millions of gallons of potable water of seawater requires a high amount of energy – which in turn contributes to CO2 emissions and puts a severe stain on the economies of the GCC.
Water is also a key requirement for enterprises in the chemical industry. The industry uses two types of water: process water, which is purified water, and cooling water, which is sea water used to cool the production plants.
The continued growth in GCC chemical output over the past decades, means that the industry needs increasingly more water for production and cooling purposes.
GCC chemical producers have been encouraged to take preventive and corrective actions to maximise water use and reuse as the outlook for water demand becomes an even more important issue. As reported in the GPCA Sustainability and Responsible Care report for 2015-16, process water consumption shows an encouraging reduction from 2013 and 2014.
The report also shows a downward trend in terms of waste water discharges. It is important to note the growing awareness that sea water used for cooling should not be high in temperature when discharged back into the sea, to ensure no harm is done to the marine habitat.
If the GCC’s chemical industry, the second largest manufacturing industry in the region, can achieve greater water conservation, then the benefits will not be just environmental but also economical. Making better use of our natural resources will help our industry’s competitiveness and ensure compliance with ever more stringent rules to protect the environment.
With this, we should not forget that we are in the driver seat when it comes to finding sustainable solutions for resource efficiency, being on the one hand, a water consuming industry, but also on the other hand an industry that provides water treatments and technologies of which the benefits flow into other sectors of our economies.
We can improve water management through good business practices and improved processes, but also through the technological innovation and by reinforcing the role of the chemical industry as one of the biggest providers of water treatment materials and technologies.
Current desalination technologies, for example, involve either thermal or membrane-driven separation processes. For membrane processes, the most common approach is reverse osmosis (RO), which is less energy intensive.
The reserve osmosis membranes used in this process, will be produced in the region by Sadara Chemical Company in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
As we will discuss during the upcoming 3rd GPCA Sustainability Conference, taking place from 11-13 October 2016 in Dubai, we need to collaborate and leverage our R&D capabilities to introduce processes with lower water consumption, but also to increase the reuse of water.
Our joint industry experience will allow us to develop new approaches to improve not only our own, but also other sectors and public sector water requirements.
Water is essential to life and the products that we produce are essential to securing clean water for our populations.
Sustainable water solutions are within our reach — the GCC chemical industry is well positioned to play a leading role in providing innovative solutions and make a significant contribution towards sustainable water management, not only in our own industry, but in others too.
