Saudi Arabian cultivated fields as visible using Google Earth. Each circle is an irrigated area of about 1 km diameter. The whole square is about 10 km side. The coordinates are 26°47′21.64″N, 49°10′41.43″E.
Look at these irrigated fields in Saudi Arabia, just an example of the cultivations that dot the desert. However, in a few years these fields may disappear. Peak water may have taken place in Saudi Arabia already more than 10 years ago.
According to recent news from Reuters (2008) the Saudi government has decided to stop all subsidies to agriculture. It means abandoning a policy that had obtained self sufficiency in food production and that had allowed Saudi Arabia to be a major food exporter in the past. According to Reuters, “The kingdom aims to rely entirely on imports by 2016″. The desert is going to win back the land it had ceded to agriculture.
These news come as a surprise, but not so much. Saudi Arabian food production has been based on “fossil water.” It is water from ancient aquifers that can’t be replaced by natural processes in times of interest for human beings. Fossil water is non renewable, just as oil is, and it is unavoidable that it has to run out one day or another.
A wealth of data on the Saudi Arabian water situation can be found in the paper by Walid A. Abderrahman (2001) “Water Demand Management in Saudi Arabia”. From this paper, we learn that water production in Saudi Arabia has reached a peak in the early 1990s, at more than 30 billion cubic meters per year, and declined afterwards. Today, it is at around 15 billion cubic meters, less than half than the peak value. We also learn that most of this water, 90% at the peak, came from non renewable aquifers.
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I cross-checked Dr. Bardi’s quoted energy efficiency of desalination [4 kWh/cubic meter is among the lowest values reported, but it is probably possible on large scale plants.] Our own CSIRO here in Australia is involved in a multi-university research project with the goal of improved energy efficiency. Stephen Gray of Victoria University is the lead scientist, so I took his comments from 25 June 2007 as being a current estimator [from “Why Desalination Doesn’t Work (Yet)”]:
Current methods require about 14 kilowatt-hours of energy to produce 1,000 gallons of desalinated seawater.
That’s equivalent to 3.6 kWh per kilolitre [same as cubic meter] — much the same as Dr. Bardi’s 4 kWh/kL.
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