How much drinking water comes from desalination, by country, ranges from 90% in Kuwait to a projected 35% in Singapore by 2060

How much drinking water comes from desalination, by country

Desalination, the process of removing salt from seawater or brackish water to make it safe to drink, has become national water policy rather than a backup supply in a small group of countries with almost no rivers, lakes or reliable rain. How much drinking water comes from desalination, by country, depends less on how rich a country is than on how little fresh water it started with. Kuwait, Oman and Saudi Arabia draw 90%, 86% and 70% of their own drinking water from the sea, the French Institute of International Relations found in 2022, as reported by Arab News. Israel meets 70% to 80% of its drinking and municipal water the same way, the Israeli Water Authority states, and Singapore currently draws about half its own supply from desalination too. Qatar also depends on desalination heavily, though its own utility publishes volumes rather than a clean percentage. That is 6 countries with a sourced national figure in this comparison.

Why the share varies so much between countries that all rely on the sea

Kahramaa, the utility that supplies Qatar, states that groundwater is the only other water source the country has, so it has built desalination capacity of 538 million imperial gallons a day, about 2,446,000 cubic meters, against current demand of 420 million imperial gallons a day, about 1,909,000 cubic meters. That means Qatar has built more desalination capacity than it actually uses in a day, though Kahramaa does not publish a single clean percentage for how much of demand desalination itself supplies. Israel shows the same gap from a different angle. Desalination meets 70% to 80% of drinking and municipal water there, the Water Authority states, but only about 35% of everything the country uses across a full year once farming is counted, a calculation from the same Water Authority figures for combined output and total need, because most irrigation in Israel runs on recycled sewage water rather than desalinated seawater.

Desalination became affordable enough to run as national policy once the energy it takes fell sharply, according to Veolia, a water and environmental services company that builds desalination plants across the Gulf.

Over the past 10 years, we have managed to divide by three the energy consumption required to produce one cubic meter of desalinated water.

Estelle Brachlianoff, chief executive of Veolia, a water and environmental services company. Source 1.

Singapore is cutting its own reliance on desalination, not growing it

Singapore runs the opposite policy from the Gulf states. Desalination supplied 50% of the water in Singapore in 2017, the World Bank states, and the country runs 5 named desalination plants right now, SingSpring, Tuas South, Tuas, Keppel Marina East and Jurong Island, its national water agency, PUB, states. The World Bank projects that share will fall to 35% by 2060, a projection rather than a measured current figure, as recycled wastewater, branded NEWater, grows from 30% of supply in 2017 to a projected 55% over the same period.

This comparison covers 6 countries with a sourced national desalination share, Kuwait, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Qatar and Singapore. None of the 5 sources used here states a single national share figure for Spain, Australia or the United States, so none of the 3 appears in this comparison, even though each already uses desalination somewhere within its own borders. Separate MAOWCE coverage follows the rising cost of building new desalination plants, the wider water security response across the Middle East, the costs and supply figures specific to Israel, and the desalination share specific to Saudi Arabia, in more depth.