How much of Saudi Arabia water is desalinated, 60% in cities and 16,000,000 cubic meters a day nationwide

How much of Saudi Arabia water is desalinated

Desalination, the process of removing salt from seawater so people can drink it, supplies 60% of the water delivered to cities and towns in Saudi Arabia, the Ministry of Environment, Water and Agriculture states. That is the direct answer to how much of Saudi Arabia water is desalinated for most households. Agriculture alone consumes 84% of national water requirements in Saudi Arabia, mostly drawn from groundwater that does not refill itself, the same pressure driving desalination growth in other countries, a wider regional picture already covered in a separate account of water scarcity across the Middle East on this site. The national desalinated water production capacity in Saudi Arabia, the total amount every desalination plant in the country can produce in a day, reached 16,000,000 cubic meters a day by the end of 2025, up 247.8% from 4,600,000 cubic meters a day in 2016, Arab News reports, citing the National Transformation Program 2025 annual report.

More than 27,000,000 people were reached by national water supply services by the end of 2025, the same government report states.

The national total is bigger than what the state operator alone produces

That national total is larger than what any single company reports, because private companies now build and run some plants alongside the government owned operator, the Saline Water Conversion Corporation, known as SWCC. SWCC alone produced 11,500,000 cubic meters of water a day as of mid 2023, across 30 desalination plants and 139 purification stations, Arab News reported that year, alongside a carbon emissions reduction goal the company set for itself of 37,000,000 tons by the end of 2025.

Abdullah Ibrahim Al Abdulkarim, governor of SWCC, described the balance the company aims for.

We are proud of our contribution to the Saudi Green Initiative as we achieved high performance levels, while managing our costs, energy consumption and carbon emissions appropriately.

Abdullah Ibrahim Al Abdulkarim, governor of the Saline Water Conversion Corporation. Source 4.

No source read for this article states exactly how much of the national total the private sector now supplies, so that share is left out here rather than guessed from 2 figures counted 2 years apart. No source read for this research states what any Saudi desalination plant costs to build, unlike the general construction cost trend already tracked in a separate account of rising desalination plant construction costs on this site.

The newest plant uses less than half the energy of an older one

Shuaiba 5, the newest and most efficient plant named in Saudi government reporting, uses 2.34 kilowatt hours of energy for every cubic meter of water it makes, against 4 to 5 kilowatt hours at a conventional desalination plant, the Saudi Water Authority states, citing a World Bank report that praises the efficiency of desalination in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia targets a 30% cut in water sector energy intensity, the amount of energy used to produce each cubic meter of water, by 2030, against a 2019 baseline, the same report states. The Saudi Water Authority ties part of the efficiency record at Shuaiba 5 to integrating renewable energy sources, particularly solar power, into the plant, but no source read for this article states what share of national desalination capacity now runs on solar power rather than oil or gas, so this remains an efficiency story about 1 named plant, not a finished national shift away from oil. A separate account of a solar powered storage microgrid on the Red Sea coast, a different Saudi energy project, is covered elsewhere on this site. Israel, a different country covered separately on this site, runs its own desalination program in a similar way, along its own coastline.