World

Capacity is only half of water security

Turn on a tap in Riyadh, Jeddah or Dammam, and the water almost certainly started as seawater. Saudi Arabia is the world’s largest producer of desalinated water. For most of the Kingdom’s cities, desalination is not a supplement to the water supply; it is the supply itself. This makes desalination plants more than industrial infrastructure. Each is a critical point of failure for the cities it serves. Their most vulnerable point is not inside the plant, but in the stretch of open water in front