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Middle East increasingly reliant on desalination plants as water shortages loom
Desalination plants are vital if the world is to have enough water to drink.
Can technology make them more efficient and less harmful to our seas?
- Daniel Bardsley
- The National
In his 18th-century poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the English wordsmith Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote of a sailor stuck in equatorial waters where there was, “Water, water everywhere, Nor any drop to drink”.
Coleridge might just as well have been writing about someone living in the Gulf region, which has abundant salty seawater but faces the combined challenges of very limited freshwater resources and rapid population growth.
The issue was in sharp focus this week when a…