It is no secret that we live in a water scarce region. Confronted by limited freshwater resources and growing demand – increasing more than 60 percent by 2025, desalination ensures access to clean water across the Gulf.

Governments and companies are prioritizing water sustainability and overall efficiency to meet this rapidly increasing demand. As a result, seawater desalination capacity of GCC countries is expected to grow by at least 37% in the next five years with investments of up to as much as $100 billion by 2020, according to MENA Desalination Market.

Thermal techniques such as multi-stage flash (MSF) and multiple effect distillation (MED), both of which distill seawater using heat, have been the primary method for producing desalinated water in the region since the 1960s and have maintained their competitive edge for decades. However, reverse osmosis (RO) – a process that forces seawater through semi-permeable membranes to remove salt – has overtaken these methods to become the most cost-effective and energy-efficient solution for producing water in the Gulf.

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