Water ways

Sudhir Kumar, engineering group manager at MWH.
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Water transmission systems in the Middle East are expanding at a rapid pace, which means good business and not a few challenges for the companies responsible for designing and engineering them.

Water not only sustains life, it also fuels growth. In a region experiencing rapid population growth as well as increasing urbanisation and industrialisation, business in building and upgrading water transmission system is brisk. The Middle East is thus a growth area for companies that model and design such systems.

“The Middle East is extremely important to us, its one of the fastest growing, if not the fastest growing part of our water business,” says Richard Zambuni, global marketing director, geospatial, at Bentley.

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“And the reason the Middle East is so important is for a syndrome of issues: you’ve got very fast population growth, and the population is nearly all in densely populated cities. The infrastructure is being built, in most cases, it doesn’t pre-exist. Its being built now to service these growing populations.”

On top of building new infrastructure comes the need to replace ageing existing water transmission systems. Small wonder then that Bentley have recorded impressive growth figures over the last four years, with compounded growth of around 25 percent in the Middle East and Africa.

MWH, one of the other big players in wet infrastructure design and engineering, are similarly committed to the region. Last year, the company made the Middle East region one of its four distinct geographic business areas, alongside Europe, the Americas and Asia.

“Recent development shows how important the regional market is to MWH,” says Sudhir Kumar, principal civil engineer and engineering group manager at MWH in Dubai.

Desalination to destination
One of the determining factors of water transmission in the region is the heavy reliance on desalination to produce potable water. This means that drinking water often has to travel long distances before it arrives at cities and developments located inland.

Zambuni points out that most big cities in the region are either costal, or can otherwise be supplied by river water. Nevertheless, this does not apply for all major urban centres.

Delivering desalinated water to places that are both far from the sea and high in elevation, such as Al Ain, Riyadh and Harare is expensive, says Kumar.

“After being desalinated at Jubail and Ras Alzaur in Saudi Arabia, water is pumped over 400 kilometers inland through a number of pipelines to the capital city of Riyadh making it one of the most expensive water supply schemes.”

Long distance water conveyance necessitates careful planning, taking into account issues such as security of supply, water age, risk of contamination and water disinfection requirements. To this must be added higher capital, operation and maintenance costs.