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A single plant, about 55 kilometres southwest of Dubai Creek, built to supply a meaningful share of the city’s drinking water from the sea. Desalination is how Dubai gets most of its fresh water, and Hassyan represents the current state of the art: seawater reverse osmosis at unprecedented scale, run on solar power. The table below gathers the project’s key facts.
Table 1: The Hassyan seawater reverse osmosis project at a glance.
Source: MCC Economics summary of developer announcements and trade press reporting, as linked in the article.
Figure 1: Representatives of the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority and ACWA Power signing the phase one water purchase and shareholder agreements for the Hassyan project. Photo courtesy of DEWA, as published with the ACWA Power announcement.
Because energy is the main cost of turning seawater into drinking water, and Hassyan will use less of it per litre than any comparable plant. Reverse osmosis works by pushing seawater at high pressure through membranes fine enough to hold back the salt, and the electricity driving that pressure has always been desalination’s economic and environmental weakness. Hassyan’s 2.9 kilowatt-hours per cubic metre represents about a 35 per cent reduction on the technology of a decade ago. Two further choices sharpen the gain: the plant runs on solar power, cutting the fossil fuel use and carbon emissions that usually accompany desalination, and it employs advanced pre-treatment and post-treatment processes that extend membrane life and improve water quality, as Veolia describes.
It is a cornerstone of both. On water, the plant contributes to the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority’s goal of raising desalination capacity to 730 million imperial gallons a day by 2030, securing supply for a growing city in one of the world’s driest regions. On energy, running the plant on solar aligns it with the Dubai Clean Energy Strategy 2050 and the Dubai Net Zero Carbon Emissions Strategy 2050, which target fully clean energy sources. Hassyan is where those two agendas meet: water security delivered without adding to the emissions the energy strategy is trying to remove.
Figure 2: Mohammad A. Abunayyan, Chairman of the Board of Directors of ACWA Power, and his statement on the Hassyan agreement, as published in the ACWA Power announcement.
The project sits near the Jebel Ali Wetland Sanctuary, and its design incorporates measures to protect local biodiversity, including endangered turtle nesting sites. That matters because large coastal infrastructure and sensitive marine habitats are usually in tension, and how Hassyan manages that tension will be watched as closely as its energy numbers.
Because Hassyan sets a benchmark other water-stressed regions will measure against. Combining record energy efficiency with solar power at this scale is a proof point that desalination, long criticised as energy-hungry, can be made compatible with clean energy goals. For governments, utilities and investors weighing water infrastructure across the Gulf and beyond, the project’s cost, energy and delivery figures will become reference numbers, which is exactly why this page sets them out.
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