98.8% of Dubai's water is supplied by its desalination plants-Bloomberg, Sept. 2013

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Sept. 2013 article

9/23/2013, "Desalination Plants Supply 98.8% of Dubai’s Water, Forum Is Told," Bloomberg, Randall Hackley

"Desalination plants that make seawater potable supply 98.8 percent of Dubai’s water, with the remaining 1.2 percent coming from groundwater sources, the Arabian Water and Power Forum was told today.

Dubai is the commercial, banking and tourist hub of the United Arab Emirates, the second-biggest Arab world economy after Saudi Arabia. The arid, water-scarce U.A.E. contains about 6 percent of Earth’s proven oil reserves.

Producing desalinated water is so energy-consuming that future water and energy plans must aim for a more sustainable balance, Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer, chief executive officer of the state-owned utility Dubai Electricity and Water Authority, or DEWA, told the forum.

“We succeeded in reducing our unaccounted-for water in our water supply system to 10.88 percent in 2012 from 42 percent in 1988,” the CEO said, according to a statement. “The combined power generation and desalinated water production in Dubai is most-efficiently done using natural gas and liquefied natural gas as the primary fuel” in almost all cases supplemented by diesel oil as a secondary fuel, he said."

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April 2013 article 

Water desalination enables economic expansion for UAE "to further drive our urban prosperity and economic advancement.”

April 9, 2013, "Dubai opens UAE's largest desalination plant," Waterworld.com, Tom Freyberg

"Dubai’s Electricity and Water Authority (DEWA) has opened its ‘M Station’ in Jebel Ali that has a generation capacity of 2,060 MW and can produce 140 million imperial gallons (MIG) of desalinated water per day.

Said to be the largest of its kind in the UAE, the US$2.7 billion facility was officially opened by HH Sheikh Hamdan bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Deputy Ruler of Dubai, Minister of Finance, and President of DEWA.

The site includes eight multi-stage flash (MSF) units each producing 17.5 MIG per day. It also has six F-class gas turbines, each generating 234 MW and three steam turbines, generating 218 MW each.

DEWA CEO and MD, HE Saeed Mohammed Al Tayer, reportedly said that DEWA now has enough water and electricity reserves to last until 2020.

M Station was built in partnership with numerous project consultants and contractors, including Fisia, Siemens, Doosan and Alstom.

(UAE's) Al Tayer said: “We are now able to achieve a total production of 9,646 MW of electricity, and 470 million gallons of desalinated water per day, to meet the current and future needs of the Emirate of Dubai, including planned expansion to further drive our urban prosperity and economic advancement.”"



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