CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2022
| Author | Abu Hawash, Mohammad Sami |
|---|---|
| Title | Mining Brine and Water: Desalination in the Context of the West Asia - North Africa Water Regime |
| Summary | “Evidently, the world water crises of the future are already here in the Arab countries.” This is what the President of the Arab Water Council chose to say in his foreword to the third Arab State of the Water report. Water scarcity pervades into every issue in the region. Between the 1960s and 2011, Arab countries on average lost 72.68% of their per capita renewable water resources. As a result, desalination is proliferating across West Asia and North Africa (WANA). Desalinated seawater helps WANA cope with ensuing water scarcity, but it also has several drawbacks. Desalination is energy intensive, desalination plants are vulnerable, and they produce a salty byproduct called (ocean) brine / seawater concentrate. The volume of brine produced everyday can be higher than that of potable water at some desalination plants, so each plant must have a way of disposing of this byproduct safely. This paper investigates whether the WANA region could use brine as a public good. The findings of this study (which was based in qualitative analysis and expert interviews) suggest that more investments in brine concentrate mining makes sense for the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) sub-region of WANA. As for the rest of WANA, municipal & industrial wastewater management and a reckoning with the colonial impact on the distribution of water resources will yield better returns. |
| Supervisor | Bodenstein, Thilo |
| Department | Public Policy MPA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2022/abu-hawash_mohammad.pdf |
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