Bahrain ‘can be hub for desalination engineers’
BAHRAIN could become a major hub for desalination engineers with a little investment, according to an expert.
Fifty per cent of the world’s desalination plants are in the GCC, and yet the technology is imported, Arabian Gulf University water resources Professor Waleed Zubari told the GDN.
In order to build better sustainability, local talent is need to work the industry, he said.
“First, the pretext – 90 per cent of your drinking water is coming from desalination.
“You can’t stop desalination and you can’t keep going in the same vein – you will reach a breaking point.
“It is imported technology, even though more than 50pc of all desalination is in the Gulf – we should be the owners of this technology, not importers of it.
“This means you’re in a serious trouble – you’re completely reliant on it and it’s imported.”
Serious research and development needed to be done in the sector, but he said he believed the GCC countries needed to combine their resources and expertise.
“When you look at Bahrain’s size, and see that it needs to do research and development, Bahrain doesn’t have this budget,” he said.
“In fact, most countries can’t do it alone, so there has to be co-operation at the Gulf level.
“But Bahrain could easily become the place where these engineers graduate.
“Up to now, across all Gulf universities, there is no specialisation of desalination at an undergraduate level.
“This seriously needs to change.
“At the graduate level, it exists, and we have some nice initiatives – for instance, the King Abdullah University for Science and Technology has a strong desalination programme.
“There’s also work being done in Kuwait and in Qatar, but they’re not co-ordinating their work and so they’re probably duplicating what they’re doing.
“Technicians we have are largely expatriates, whereas you can have vocational training and polytechnic colleges that could train Bahrainis in this.
“We just don’t have the training centres and we need it.
“Bahrain could be a major hub for these things if we think about it and do it.
“You just have to invest a little bit.”
