For now, if you ask people in any country in the world, which country is the richest country in the world? I think 80% of people prefer Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia, which once invested 33 billion US dollars in partnership with China in the aerospace industry and is rich in oil, has a special buff in addition to being rich, that is, the country's annual water consumption ranks third in the world.
The high amount of water consumption may not seem like such a shocking attribute, but you should know that Saudi Arabia is located in the Arabian Peninsula, which is a famous desert country, most of which is in a subtropical desert climate, dry and hot, even if the temperature in the east is lower, the average annual precipitation is less than 200 mm.
It is such a hot and rainy country, and the annual water consumption can be second only to United States and Canada, which has to make people think deeply, where does the water come from?
The 15 most water-scarce countries in the world are distributed
Why does Saudi Arabia use the third largest amount of water in the world every year?
First of all, let's take a look at why Saudi Arabia needs so much water?
The first point has to mention the living habits and religious beliefs of the Saudis. In Saudi Arabia, 85% of the people believe in Islam, because of their religious beliefs, so they need to pray many times a day, such as the ablution that is in the bones of the Saudis, and the exposed parts of the body are washed several times a day.
Over time, people across the country have become more conscious of their personal hygiene, so their daily water needs will be greater.
From a national point of view, in recent years, Saudi Arabia has continued to shine on the world's online media platform, the world has just hosted the World Cup some time ago, and has also cooperated with China in the aerospace industry, which has directly led to the rising economy and population of Saudi Arabia, so it is reasonable that the demand for water resources is increasing.
At the same time, the two major areas of development in Saudi Arabia are agriculture and industry, so whether it is irrigation for agriculture and water for industry, it is undoubtedly a test of Saudi Arabia's total domestic water demand.
Therefore, after various reasons, Saudi Arabia's annual water storage is very large. The rest of the world may be at ease if they run out of water, but the Saudis have risen to the challenge, coming up with a variety of ways to replenish their domestic water warehouses and implementing them one by one.
Although some methods have been forcibly banned after a period of time, we still need to have a comprehensive understanding of what Saudi Arabia is doing to meet the water consumption of the entire country.
What has Saudi Arabia done to increase its domestic water resources?
Being located in a desert area and still having a huge demand for water is a challenge for Saudi Arabia, so in recent decades, Saudi Arabia has been trying to aggregate domestic water resources to meet the country's needs.
In the seventies of the last century, the domestic development pattern of Saudi Arabia was dominated by agriculture, but the natural water resources in the desert area could not meet the domestic agricultural irrigation, so the Saudi government shifted its attention to groundwater resources.
You must know that although Saudi Arabia is a desert country, it has a huge storage capacity of 36 trillion cubic meters underground. Therefore, at that time, the state issued a policy of pumping groundwater resources for agricultural irrigation.
As a result, 40 per cent of the annual water is pumped from the ground, and 80 per cent of this groundwater is used for agricultural irrigation. If groundwater can be pumped all the time, then for Saudi Arabia a large part of its water needs will be solved. But groundwater is not inexhaustible.
Saudi Arabia has such a large amount of groundwater because it is located in the Arabian aquifer, which is the largest in the world. But the source of this water is fossil water, in other words, it cannot be replenished naturally.
If Saudi Arabia continues to pump like this, then this part of the groundwater will inevitably be exhausted one day, and as the groundwater resources decrease, it will directly react to the land.
With the continuous decline of the groundwater level, environmental problems such as land subsidence and soil salinization have emerged, which have had a serious impact on the ecological environment in Saudi Arabia. As a result, the policy of pumping groundwater for recharge has been slowed down.
This was followed by the construction of dams in Saudi Arabia. So far, more than 200 dams have been built across the country to harvest natural rainwater. Dams are generally located close to cities in order to be able to provide domestic water to nearby cities. At present, this part of the water storage can meet 10% of the annual water consumption of Saudi Arabia, although the volume is not too large, but this part of the water resources can be naturally replenished without damaging the ecological environment.
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The last is the development of desalination technology, Saudi Arabia is now the world's largest desalination country, and they also meet the huge annual water demand in the country through desalination technology. So where does the sea water come from? What technology does Saudi Arabia use to achieve seawater desalination? Let's take a look.
The world's largest desalination country
After pumping groundwater and building dams, Saudi Arabia has found that while these two methods can supplement the country's water needs, they are also a drop in the bucket in the face of the country's huge annual water consumption. So in the end, in order to completely solve the domestic water problem, Saudi Arabia set its sights on desalination.
Seawater desalination, as the name suggests, is to remove impurities from seawater through a series of physical and chemical methods, and transform it into freshwater resources for human use. At present, Saudi Arabia has continuously upgraded its seawater desalination technology, and the annual water resources obtained through this technology have exceeded 2 billion cubic meters, what is this concept?
In 2023, for example, Saudi Arabia collected a total of 2.9 billion cubic meters of water through various stagnant waters, and 70% of the water was desalination. It can be seen that through seawater desalination, Saudi Arabia has been able to basically meet the huge annual water consumption.
Although the current domestic water resources structure in Saudi Arabia has been relatively complete, and seawater desalination can also meet the water demand, due to the dependence of the seawater desalination process on oil resources, the seawater desalination project is not a long-term solution.
Desalination through oil is Saudi Arabia's famous "oil for water" policy, and because of the participation of oil, the cost of this project has skyrocketed.
Although Saudi Arabia has a large number of oil resources, but it is not inexhaustible, if in the process of extracting water resources is overly dependent on energy, coupled with oil is a non-renewable resource, then with the total amount of oil continues to decline, the total amount of desalination and the cost will inevitably rise, which is very unfavorable to the development of Saudi Arabia's domestic water supply.
In the process of desalination, there is also a very critical problem is environmental pollution. Because a large amount of seawater is desalined, a large amount of wastewater and excess salt and other pollutants will be generated, and once these substances enter the ecological environment, under such a large volume, they will inevitably exceed the load of the ecological environment in the future. And if the land is contaminated, it may even further affect the groundwater resources, which is not a good deal.
Therefore, in the future, if Saudi Arabia wants to continue to supply such a large amount of water demand in the country every year, it must cooperate with renewable resources for freshwater production, such as wind and solar energy. Because that's the only way to be sustainable.
Information sources:
Finance Associated Press 2024-06-13 How the desert becomes an oasis Saudi Arabia is committed to promoting seawater desalination to meet 90% of domestic demand by 2030
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