Thirsty Places: Dubai

At the inland end of Dubai Creek, where the water that once carried the pearl boats and the dhows from Iran ends in a tidal lagoon, several hundred flamingos stand in the shallows most mornings of the winter, with the towers of the financial district rising behind them through the haze. The lagoon is the Ras Al Khor wildlife sanctuary, and the water the flamingos stand in is partly the Gulf, coming in on the tide, and partly the treated sewage of the city, pumped in to keep the wetland wet. It is the most honest view of Dubai's water there is: a city of nearly four million on a desert coast, with no river and a hundred millimetres of rain a year, standing in a lagoon that it has made.

This site is written in Dubai, and this article is about where the city's water comes from, what it costs, where it goes, and what the storm of April 2024 revealed.

No river

The coast of the Gulf between Abu Dhabi and the mountains of the north is sand, salt flat and a few creeks, and the rain, which falls in a few winter storms, averages about a hundred millimetres a year, a tenth of London's. Under the sand is groundwater, but it is brackish along the coast and fresh only in the gravel plains under the mountains, where the oasis towns of Al Ain and the old date gardens drew on it through falaj channels for a thousand years; the farms of the last fifty years have pumped that aquifer far below its recharge, and the wells of the interior are salting. Dubai itself has, in practice, no fresh water of its own. Until the 1960s the town drank from wells and the creek's edge and from water brought in by boat, and the first desalination plant, in the 1970s, was the moment the city's growth became possible.

Boiling the sea

The plants at Jebel Ali, thirty kilometres down the coast from the creek, are the largest desalination site in the world and until recently almost all of its water was made by boiling. The method is multi stage flash: seawater is heated and passed through a chain of chambers at falling pressure, and in each it flashes partly to steam, which is condensed on tubes and collected as fresh water while the brine passes on to the next chamber, and the heat for it comes from the steam of the gas turbines that make the city's electricity, which would otherwise be thrown into the sea. That is why Dubai's water and power have always been one company, one site and one fuel, natural gas, and why the water has cost in energy what the desalination article on this site describes: about four times what a membrane needs, justified by the fact that the heat was free. A plant that boils the sea also makes brine at nearly the sea's temperature plus ten degrees, and the Gulf off the plants is measurably warmer and saltier than it was.

The plants are changing. Reverse osmosis, which pushes seawater through a membrane under pressure and uses a third of the energy, has become cheaper than the heat it replaces, and the utility's new capacity is all membranes: a plant at Hassyan, south of Jebel Ali, of about half a million cubic metres a day, with the electricity to come from the solar park in the desert that is already the largest single site of its kind in the world. The plan is for every drop of the city's water to come from membranes on solar power by the early 2030s, and the boiling plants, which tied the water to the gas, are being retired as the new ones come on. The brine goes back to the Gulf either way, saltier from the membranes than from the heat, into a sea that is shallow, nearly closed and shared with a dozen other cities doing the same.

The water that leaves the plants is, by the standards of this site, strange. Desalinated water is nearly pure, with almost no minerals, and water that pure is corrosive to pipes and flat to drink, so the plants add lime and carbon dioxide back into it to give it some hardness and a taste, which the hard water article on this site explains from the other direction. It is then chlorinated and pumped into the city's reservoirs, concrete tanks on the high ground inland that hold a day or two of supply, and from there into a network that is young, well built and loses a far smaller share to leaks than the cities of the places articles on this site. A Dubai tap delivers water that was the sea the day before and that meets the drinking standards; most households drink from bottles anyway, out of habit and taste, which is a decision the bottled water article on this site has examined.

The price

Desalinated water costs about a dollar a cubic metre to make, which is the cheapest it has ever been and still more than almost any city with a river pays, and in Dubai the price at the tap for nationals is heavily subsidised and for everyone else is in rising blocks that make the first cubic metres cheap and the last expensive. The result is a city that uses water the way a rich city does: in showers, in pools, on the lawns and the trees along every road, in the cooling of the towers, and in the fountains, and the use per person is among the highest in the world. The utility has pushed it down with meters, tariffs, and a decade of campaigns, and the trend is downward; the level is still a desert city living like a wet one, which is possible because the sea is large and the gas, for now, is cheap.

Where it goes

The city's sewage goes to two works in the desert, at Jebel Ali and Warsan, by a network built at speed as the city grew and, for a famous stretch of the late 2000s, by truck: thousands of tankers a day queued at the Al Awir works from the towers and labour camps that the sewers had not yet reached, and in 2009 some of the drivers emptied their loads into the storm drains instead, which emptied onto the beach at Jumeirah, which closed. The sewers caught up. The works now treat nearly all of the city's sewage to a standard that the greywater article on this site would recognise, and almost every cubic metre of the treated water goes back out through a second network of purple pipes to the parks, the road verges, the golf courses and the trees, so that the green of Dubai is sewage, which is the right use for it in a place where every other drop came from the sea. The flamingos at Ras Al Khor stand in the same water.

The storm

On 16 April 2024 it rained on the Emirates as it had not in the country's records, more than a year's rain in a day across most of Dubai and above 250 millimetres at the wettest stations, and the city stopped. The roads became rivers, the underpasses filled, the airport, the busiest in the world for international passengers, closed its runways for a day and took a week to clear, and cars floated in the streets of the villa districts. The reason was simple and known: Dubai had built forty years of city on the assumption that it would not rain, and its storm drainage was a scatter of soakaways and pumps for the few millimetres a winter usually brought. The water had nowhere to go but down the roads and into the basements, and some of it stood for a week until it evaporated or was pumped out. Two months later the government announced a drainage programme called Tasreef, a network of tunnels and pumping stations across the city at a cost of about thirty billion dirhams, to be built over the following decade, with a capacity for a storm several times what the city had ever planned for. It was the first time the desert city had designed for too much water rather than too little.

What it teaches

Dubai is the city on this site where the water question has been answered by money and the sea. There is no river to fight over and no aquifer to save; there is a coast, a power station and a membrane, and as long as the energy is there the water is there, two million cubic metres a day of it, at a price the city can pay. The questions that remain are the ones that money moves rather than removes: the brine in a shallow sea, the gas behind the water until the solar replaces it, the use per person of a city that has never had to feel scarce, and the rain, which the city had planned to ignore and which, in a warming Gulf, is becoming the other half of the problem. The flamingos at the end of the creek stand in water the city made. So does everyone else.

Ninety nine percent from the sea, a hundred millimetres of rain, and a day in April when the rain was the thing that ran out of room.