The global water desalination market is likely to witness a firm growth at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7.8 percent from 2018 to 2025. Nearly 1 percent of the global water demand has been met via desalination over the last few years. The global water desalination market is considered to have a strong future, owing to its expansion over the recent years.
The increasing need for water has thrown light on the development of technologies that focus on alternative water sources and its conservation, i.e., reuse and disposal. Desalination has emerged as a vital part of the water industry, which has been incorporated in arid regions and geographic areas with exhausting water supplying sources. Utilization of saline water as a feed source and desalting it with process technologies such as reverse osmosis (RO), electrodialysis or multi-effect distillation (MED), has made desalination a viable option for sufficing potable water needs across the globe.
Desalination technology has been used for a few decades in Middle East and Africa; however, increased funding for these units in non-arid regions including Asia Pacific, North America and Europe. Presence of water-intensive industrial sectors such as metallurgy, agriculture, oil and gas and chemical manufacturing is expected to boost the requirements for potable water in these regions, which is expected to widen the scope for the desalination market growth by 2025.
The Middle East and Africa desalination market reached $7.9 billion in 2017. Desalination capacities in this region are expected to increase in the future as a consequence of supporting government initiatives in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and South Africa. For instance, in April 2018, Kuwait’s Minister of Oil Al-Rashidi said that around 76 percent of the construction operations of a new reverse osmosis desalination plant in the country was completed. The establishment of the manufacturing sector in oil-based economies in the Middle East is also set to open new opportunities for the desalination sector over the next few years. North Africa is witnessing an increasing number of investments in the water sector, which is likely to trigger the trend of desalination in the region over the next few years.
