GCC Desalination Expansion & Why Water Is The New Oil

Expert Insights from: Brian Doucette, Former COO NOMAC, 30 years of experience in desalination projects

Brian Doucette has spent 30 years keeping the lights on and the taps running across the Middle East. As former COO of NOMAC, now ACWA, Saudi Arabia’s leading independent power and water company, he’s watched the GCC transform its relationship with water from an operational afterthought into a strategic national priority. We sat down with him to understand what’s really driving the desalination boom, who’s winning the race, and what comes next.

More Than a Water Problem

There’s a version of this story where desalination is simply about quenching thirst in a desert. Brian Doucette doesn’t tell that version.

“It’s not just about meeting immediate water needs,” he explains. “It’s about infrastructure resilience and the water-energy nexus. GCC governments view desalination as a strategic pillar, on par with energy investments and urban housing projects, ensuring a long-term sustainable supply.”

What’s driving the expansion? Population growth, of course. But also industrial diversification, the demands of mega-projects that didn’t exist a decade ago, and a sharper awareness of resource security that the pandemic and global supply chain shocks made unavoidable.

Each of the major national frameworks, Saudi Vision 2030, the UAE’s Water Security Strategy 2036, Qatar’s National Vision 2030, treats water autonomy not as a utility goal but as a sovereignty issue. Doucette sees this framing as the central reason why investment has accelerated so dramatically.

Saudi Arabia: Money Talks, and It’s Talking Loudly

Ask Doucette which country is leading in desalination, and he doesn’t hesitate: Saudi Arabia. By sheer volume, the Kingdom is in a league of its own. Landmark reverse osmosis initiatives in the Eastern Province, combined with the broader infrastructure ambitions of projects like NEOM, have created a pace of development that most markets can’t match.

The driver, bluntly put, is capital. “They have so much money to throw at it,” Doucette says. “They’re going to scale up pretty fast.” Indian EPC giants, he calls out Larsen & Toubro specifically, are executing at a pace that would be unimaginable elsewhere, standing up maximum-capacity desalination plants in a year or less.

But Saudi Arabia’s advantages come with well-documented challenges. The Kingdom’s infrastructure buildout happened largely 25 to 30 years ago, and much of that fleet is now aging. Aging plants mean aging supply chains, and Doucette flags the risk of suppliers no longer being in business, proprietary components no longer being manufactured, and the cascading difficulty of maintaining systems whose original vendors have long since moved on.

Localization is the other ongoing tension. “Saudi Arabia has a very stringent localization policy,” he notes, “and they need to do a careful balance between localization and outside expatriate expertise. That’s always going to be a challenge. It’s been a challenge for as long as I’ve known KSA.”

Privatization is the more recent shift. Saudi Arabia is only now beginning to embrace public-private partnerships in water at scale, something Doucette sees as both overdue and necessary.

UAE and Qatar: Smarter, Not Just Bigger

Saudi Arabia’s approach is, in Doucette’s words, to “throw money at it.” The UAE is different.

“UAE has better public-private partnerships. They’ve been a little smarter about it.”

Taqa, Abu Dhabi’s flagship energy company, has become the reference entity for how to structure and execute desalination investment in the Emirates, moving quickly through project development cycles while maintaining quality. Abu Dhabi’s Tila IWP and the Rabigh 3 project in Saudi Arabia are both cited by Doucette as benchmarks for what modern public-private synergy looks like: innovative financing, efficient membranes, and genuine corporate-government alignment.

The UAE’s edge isn’t just structural, it’s reputational. With COP28 hosted in Dubai and Abu Dhabi’s clean energy commitments on the global stage, the Emirate has made sustainability standards part of its brand. That matters for attracting technology partners and institutional capital.

Qatar operates differently again. Smaller market, more disciplined approach. Nearly every power plant in the country runs as a combined cycle, capturing waste heat through a heat recovery steam generator (HRSG) to power the desalination process. It’s a thermodynamically efficient choice, and it reflects a country that diversifies its energy inputs rather than relying on a single approach. Doucette sees Qatar as an increasingly attractive destination for premium foreign investment, particularly for cutting-edge plant configurations that larger markets don’t always prioritize.

Retrofitting the Old While Building the New

One of the most underappreciated dimensions of the GCC’s water challenge is what to do with infrastructure that’s been running for 30 years. Building new is cleaner, more efficient, and allows developers to incorporate renewables and modern layouts from day one. But retrofitting is faster and cheaper when it works.

“Retrofitting is kind of a pain,” Doucette says, with characteristic directness. The HRSG, the massive heat recovery steam generator that feeds the desalination process, is a prime example of the complexity involved. Replacing it means moving hundreds of tons of equipment, potentially cutting it out entirely, or sending teams of welders into the boiler itself to repair fire tubes and steam tubes. It’s not impossible, but it’s not simple either.

New-build plants, by contrast, offer a blank slate: optimized layouts, standardized designs, and modern suppliers with live supply chains. The trade-off is timeline and capital. Doucette’s read on the near-term market is that Saudi Arabia will pursue both aggressively, retrofitting what can be salvaged while building greenfield capacity in parallel.

Location matters too. Desalination plants don’t exist in isolation; they need power generation nearby to feed the process. Developers essentially look at a map of existing power infrastructure and ask: where can we connect? That geographic constraint shapes which projects get built and where.

The Next Five to Ten Years

Doucette’s near-term outlook is structured around three themes: technology integration, cost reduction, and capacity ramp-up.

AI-driven monitoring is coming to desalination infrastructure. Solar-powered reverse osmosis, coupling renewables directly with RO systems, will continue to scale. And the relentless push to bring down the cost per cubic meter of desalinated water will drive both technology investment and operational consolidation.

Saudi Arabia will remain the volume leader. The UAE will set the innovation and sustainability benchmarks. Qatar will continue attracting sophisticated foreign investment for premium projects. Oman, he notes, is also quietly ramping up, leveraging its own policy frameworks to build long-term water security.

“Overlook the synergy between water and power generation and you’ll hamper project efficiency from the start.”

That’s Doucette’s parting message to project developers who underestimate the integration challenge. Environmental impact assessments, historically an afterthought in the region, are now a genuine requirement. Capital requirements are consistently underestimated. And the water-energy nexus isn’t an abstract concept: it’s the engineering reality that determines whether projects succeed or stall.

For a region that produces almost no natural fresh water, desalination isn’t optional. It’s the infrastructure that makes everything else possible.