Security incidents have targeted desalination facilities, highlighting the vulnerabilities of critical infrastructure. Shuqaiq 3 produces 450,000 m³/day and includes at least one storage facility corresponding to a day’s production along with dedicated electrical infrastructure. The Gulf has built one of the world’s densest desalination infrastructures, but it built it as though there were only one risk: drought.
The essentials
- Adaptation to water scarcity in the Gulf faces water-energy vulnerabilities and storage challenges: demand is growing, the energy requirements of desalination remain significant, and desalination plants are vulnerable critical infrastructure, though some countries like Qatar have strategic reservoirs and inter-plant connections.
- The Saudi Shuqaiq 3 plant produces 450,000 m³/day and has dedicated reservoirs and infrastructure; an incident in June 2019 targeted an older facility with no documented damage.
- Kuwait has 106 MW of installed renewable energy capacity, facing a significant deficit for powering national-scale solar desalination.
- EWA had announced before 2026 water-energy projects coupled with projected foreign investment of roughly 2 billion dollars. Investment alone is not necessarily sufficient, but can finance structural solutions with demand reforms and energy system changes.
- Structural risks linked to the energy transition must be assessed despite the existence of the regional interconnected network via the Gulf Cooperation Council Interconnection Authority and the insufficiency of its extension to the water sector.
Shuqaiq, portrait of infrastructure without backup
During this period, attacks targeted regional civilian infrastructure. The plant alone produces enough to supply hundreds of thousands of households. For a few hours, total shutdown was conceivable. But the point was made: a major facility whose failure would concentrate supply risks.
The Gulf has built its water survival model on desalination. It had no choice. Kuwait, Bahrain, the Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia have almost no renewable aquifers. What they still pump from fossil aquifers disappears at a rate that no rain compensates for. Desalination covers most daily water needs in several Gulf countries.
The problem lies in the geography of these plants. They are large, rare, and expensive to duplicate. Building a 450,000 m³/day plant represents several years of construction and investment of several hundred million dollars. You don’t build two for safety. Result: some countries have redundancy, notably Qatar with its strategic reservoirs and inter-plant connections, but this redundancy is not widespread.
Shuqaiq operates because it must, not because a backup exists.
This model holds in a stable context. It fractures when a variable changes: an attack, a prolonged breakdown, a disruption in energy supply. The 2019 episode showed that the security variable was real, not theoretical.
The gap between available energy and energy needed
Desalting water takes energy. A lot of energy. A modern plant uses between 3 and 4 kWh to produce a cubic meter of drinking water by reverse osmosis. At the scale of a country like Kuwait, which must cover most of its needs through desalination, the numbers become staggering.
Kuwait’s total renewable capacity was 114 MW at the end of 2023 according to IRENA. Developing solar desalination in Kuwait requires a substantial increase in installed renewable capacities. The gap is significant. Currently, desalination runs on natural gas and oil. Which means the Gulf’s drinking water is a disguised petroleum product.
This dependency creates a double lock-in. Gulf states have an interest in maintaining the fossil rent to finance their water infrastructure, while knowing that rent is limited in time. The global energy transition reduces oil revenues eventually. If fossil energy becomes scarce or more expensive, desalination costs rise.
The budgetary cost of water can increase as oil revenues become more uncertain, without this coincidence being established as systematic.
Saudi Arabia and the Emirates are investing heavily in solar. Neom and the Al-Khafji solar desalination project point toward a credible direction. But the pace of solar capacity deployment shows a notable gap with the scale of identified energy needs. Solar capacity deployment schedules depend on the project; SWPC cites 36 months for a large desalination plant. Demand, meanwhile, grows each year with population.
Bahrain bets on investment, but money is not enough
EWA had announced before 2026 water-energy projects coupled with projected foreign investment of roughly 2 billion dollars. That is significant for a country of 1.5 million inhabitants. Per capita, the effort exceeds what most Arab nations devote to water.
But this financial investment runs up against a constraint that money alone cannot solve: energy. Bahrain faces energy constraints for desalination. Its area is modest, its solar resources exist but it has limited surface area, and its regional interconnections remain limited.
Agnès Verdier-Molinié, in On va dans le mur (On the Brink), argues that a state can only reform effectively if it first has a solid functional foundation. Applied to the Gulf, this thesis holds: hydraulic investments only produce their effects if the state guarantees operational continuity of existing infrastructure. Spending 2 billion on new capacity without securing the old, without interconnecting them, without building energy redundancy, is building on sand.
Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, in their work on institutions and the distribution of technological gains, shift the analysis to governance: who decides plant location, who oversees redundancy, who integrates water management into a coherent regional strategy. Gulf states have the financial means and water governance strategies, but their capacities vary in securing facilities and integrating the energy transition.
The Tigris-Euphrates, early signal of regional collapse
The Gulf monitors another threat, less spectacular than Houthi drones but deeper. The flows of the Tigris and Euphrates have declined since the 1970s due to the combined effect of climate change, the proliferation of upstream dams, and agricultural overexploitation. The flows of the Tigris and Euphrates are in decline according to several sources, with projections of reduction for the years ahead.
This decline first affects Iraq, and its effects ripple regionally. Documented Iraqi climate migrations are primarily internal displacements from rural areas to Iraqi cities. The decline of surface water resources in the Fertile Crescent arc could increase pressure on countries with desalination capacity. And the more the Gulf becomes, by default, a pole of relative water stability, with all that implies for migratory attractiveness.
This is a dynamic that Gulf water planning models integrate unevenly. National projections of water demand rest on internal demographic estimates. They give variable place to migration scenarios linked to water difficulties in neighboring countries. A significant increase in migration demand would accentuate pressure on current infrastructure.
This vulnerability recalls a similar dynamic observed in other regions where concentrated infrastructure creates bottlenecks. The question of dependence on externalized resources arises in other sectors: when a country bets on a single infrastructure without local alternatives, the slightest disruption in the chain becomes a systemic crisis.
The Gulf’s room for maneuver before 2035
The picture is not without exit. Several credible paths exist, provided they are pursued quickly and at the regional scale.
The first is network interconnection. Gulf countries have established a partially shared electrical grid via the Gulf Cooperation Council Interconnection Authority. Similar logic applied to water infrastructure would allow pooling of capacities and creation of the redundancy that is missing today. If Shuqaiq is attacked or breaks down, a transnational emergency capacity could take over. This requires political coordination that regional rivalries have historically hindered, but bilateral exchanges have intensified on this subject since 2022.
The second path is accelerated energy transition for desalination plants. Solar reverse osmosis is no longer an experimental technology. Saudi Arabia’s Al-Khafji project, with a capacity of 60,000 m³/day powered by photovoltaic energy, has operated for several years. The challenge is to move from experimentation to mass deployment. For Kuwait, closing the gap between current renewable capacities and solar desalination needs requires massive deployment over a multi-year period with milestones and financing.
IRENA identifies the Gulf as one of the world regions where solar costs have fallen fastest. The economic window is favorable.
The third path concerns demand. Gulf countries massively subsidize water for households and agriculture. This subsidy, understandable politically, discourages any restraint. Bahrain consumes roughly 380-400 liters per inhabitant per day; comparison to a global average of 180 liters is not established by the source consulted. Reducing this consumption by 20 percent through progressive tariffs does not solve the energy problem, but eases pressure on infrastructure.
The link between resource pricing and behavior is well documented: prices send signals that regulations alone struggle to substitute.
What territories remain habitable if the energy transition falls behind
The underlying question, which neither engineers nor economists of the Gulf yet pose publicly, concerns the habitability of territories if the energy necessary to transform water cannot be decarbonized fast enough.
The IPCC, in its sixth assessment report (working group 2), identifies the Middle East as one of the regions most exposed to the combination of heat and drought. The risk of dangerous thermal stress increases sharply in the Arabian Peninsula with warming, particularly under high emissions. The 35°C threshold concerns wet bulb temperature; the IPCC cites 33°C WBGT as the ISO threshold for thermal stress.
Yet desalination directly addresses the lack of water, but heat increases needs and energy pressure that condition its production. A plant can produce water even at 45°C ambient. What it cannot do is operate without energy. If electrical grids saturate under the combined effect of air conditioning and desalination during heat waves, the two systems enter competition for the same energy resource. This is a scenario that habitability models are beginning to integrate, which Gulf national plans account for unevenly.
The optimistic scenario assumes rapid solar transition: costs continue to fall, installed capacities increase regularly, and solar desalination develops in the region, notably in Saudi Arabia and the Emirates. Regional migration demand remains manageable, interconnection networks are in place, and geographic diversification of facilities would strengthen network resilience. This scenario is technically achievable. It requires strong political decisions now.
The intermediate scenario sees the transition fragment. Some states advance quickly (Saudi Arabia, Emirates), others remain blocked by financial or political constraints (Iraq, Yemen). The region divides between zones capable of ensuring their water through decarbonized desalination and zones dependent on imports or migration. Population flows accelerate toward poles capable of ensuring water, aggravating pressure on functioning infrastructure.
The pessimistic scenario hinges on one figure: a combination of significant decline in river flows, stagnation of renewable desalination, and shocks to critical infrastructure during extreme heat episodes could expose some cities to acute water supply tensions. Documented strategic reserves vary by Gulf city. Their safety net depends on reservoirs, transport networks, pumps, and interconnections, in addition to plants.
The signals to watch in distinguishing these trajectories are precise: the pace of solar capacity deployment dedicated to desalination, progress in negotiations for a regional water grid, evolution of national tariffs, and the frequency of extreme events that test infrastructure resilience. These indicators are measurable. They will give, by 2028 to 2030, a clear reading of the Gulf’s actual trajectory.
The window for action remains open. But it has an expiration date that drone attacks have made more visible.
Sources
- AGSI, Gulf Countries Explore Water Solutions to Mitigate Impacts of Climate Change (May 2025): https://agsi.org/analysis/gulf-countries-explore-water-solutions-to-mitigate-impacts-of-climate-change/
- Middle East Water Tech Brief, September 2025 (AGSI)
- Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, MENA Water Security, 2024
- Our Future Water, September 2025
- IPCC, Sixth Assessment Report, Working Group 2 (impacts, adaptation, vulnerability), 2022
- IRENA, Renewable Energy Statistics, MENA region data
- Agnès Verdier-Molinié, On va dans le mur…, Albin Michel: https://www.albin-michel.fr/ouvrages/on-va-dans-le-mur-9782226312709
- Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, Power and Progress, 2023
