Saudi Arabia has continuously made significant investments in water quality
Given the variability of water, dams play a key role in intra and inter year storage. In 2006 there were 230 dams in 2014, there were 482 dams, and in 2018, there were 509 dams as shown in the attached interactive chart. Currently, the storage is 2018 is 2.25 billion cubic meters. Dams are operated for flood control, irrigation, aquifer recharge, or drinking water. Currently, 61 dams are considered large per the International Commission of Large Dams (ICOLD) since dam heights exceed 15 meters.
Groundwater is a readily available declining water storage bank that provides water for any purposes. The number of groundwater wells has been increasing from the adjacent interactive chart and in 2018 there were 149,957 wells where water is obtained from the fossil aquifer. Groundwater is used for agriculture, government, domestic and other purposes.
With the increasing demand for water, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has made significant investments in conveyance systems of transmission lines for desalination plants with the use of public private partnership. In 2019, Saudi Water Partnership Program plans to procure 3,300 km of water transmission which doesn’t include the 2,168 KM of transmission line that is under construction for SWCC. The total pipe length for water distribution in 2019 was 43,729 KM. Water loss for rehabilitated pipes is approximately 10 percent but was 31 percent in Taif. To meet water demand where service is not available, there is a large fleet of water tankers to transport water. For example, in Jeddah, one million cubic meters of water is delivered daily by truck.
Although there is a large water tanker fleet that reaches hard to reach areas, the is little information on the volume of water that is transported.
Irrigation uses a significant amount of water for farming since is neither well developed nor extensive. Farmers and commercial farmers using sprinkler or surface irrigation is approximately 64 percent of the land while irrigation by type of tree, a significant area of land uses surface irrigation. Excess water is used since the Crop water requirements shown in the adjacent table is significantly higher than the average rainfall of 103 mm/year. The additional water required to grow crops will be obtained from the fossil aquifer.
Select Crop Water Requirements in mm/year:
Alfalfa: 1922.5 | Barley: 311.6 | Dates: 2356.3 | Maize: 615.9 | Wheat:730.8
The high cost of desalination plants has contributed to a public private partnership where Saline Water Conversion Corporation (SWCC) accounts for 58 percent of desalination water and private parties account for the remaining 42 percent. Locations of the plants from SWCC and private entities are shown in the embed map. In 2016, 59 percent of all desalination treatment was multistage flash distillation, but from 2016-2030, it is planned that 93 percent (28/30) of all plants will rely on reverse osmosis as their intention is to double the supply.
Desalination has an adverse impact on the environment through the discharge of reject brine that that will create dead zones in marine ecosystems from higher water temperatures, byproducts of the desalination, and higher salinity It has been estimated that the daily brine discharge for Saudi Arabia is 31.53 million m3/day which represents 22.2 percent of the global output. KSA discharge plus other brine discharge from gulf state has made the gulf 25 percent saltier than average seawater.
Desalination has a high energy intensive since it has been estimated that it requires five percent of the electrical energy. To reduce electrical demand, Saudi Arabia plans to make all their desalination plants 100 percent solar energy. Solar desalination prices range from $0.5 USD/m3 - $USD 1.5/m3, where price of water for Shuqaiq and Rabigh are $0.52USD/m3 and $0.55/m3 respectively.
Saudi Arabia has made significant investment in water treatment plant to meet the growing demand for water along with improving access and availability. In 2019, there were 353 water treatment plants that had a design capacity of 3,137,800 m3/day while the production capacity was 2,067,570 m3/day. Part of the water purification was performed at dams which had a design capacity of 599,500 m3/day, while the production capacity was 294,102 m3/day.
From the 2018 Biennial update report, Saudi Arabia generated 1,460 MCM of wastewater where 671 MCM was collected and treated. Approximately 240 MCM of treated wastewater was reclaimed for other uses. From a cultural perspective, reclaimed wastewater is only used for urban landscaping, municipal park agriculture, or agriculture usage.