As we have explored in previous months’ updates this year, upping desalination capacity is not without its own problems – chiefly the high associated energy requirements and the damage to marine environments caused by the brine that the process produces. This means that the Middle East can’t rely on desalination alone to balance its water debt, despite continuous sustainability improvements being enabled by technological innovation.
Accordingly, mid-2021 has seen a widening range of more novel water-producing methods being introduced as part of larger pilot schemes and experimental projects.
In the UAE, this month saw Masdar City launch its year-long pilot project to test a large-format Atmospheric Water Generation (AWG) technology that runs wholly on renewable energy. The AWG has been installed at Khalifa University’s Masdar Institute Solar Platform, and if successful it will be capable of extracting clean drinking water from the atmosphere in commercial quantities, paving the way for similar or even larger scale AWG deployments.
Also in the UAE this month, a different water-from-air pilot scheme has ended successfully. Abu Dhabi placed 15 medium-sized machines from Israeli-based technological company Watergen in key public locations (typically parks and beaches) across cities in the Abu Dhabi emirate. The trial concluded that the quality of drinking water was ‘excellent’, prompting another 700 machines to be ordered from Watergen. This shows how AWG is stepping up as a water capacity approach in the UAE, which is keen to make this highly sustainable technology scalable too.
Perhaps even more dramatically, Dubai has been experimenting with deploying specialised drones to ‘zap’ clouds with electricity to force water droplets to clump together and fall as heavier rain. This is necessary because the clouds across the UAE are generally high, and the hot temperatures the country experiences means that smaller rain droplets can evaporate mid-air before hitting the ground.
