The Petro-State and the Saltwater Kingdom: Desalination, Extraction, and Climate Risk in Anthropocene Arabia

• In Event: Sugar, Water, and Electricity: New Origin Stories for Today’s Climate Crisis

Abstract

This paper explores the intertwined histories of petroleum extraction and desalination in the oil-rich monarchies of the Arabian Peninsula. Mirroring the Gulf’s ethos of endless energy, the region’s large-scale adoption of desalination technology has given rise to an equally problematic environmental imaginary of “infinite water.” With renewable capacities of less than 500 cubic meters per capita, states like Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates suffer from absolute water scarcity. And yet, their fossil-fueled hydro-imaginaries have rendered renewable water resources obsolete. Decades of subsidized desalination—much of it paid for by the sale of oil, which has intensified the region’s water needs—have transformed the Petro-States of the Gulf into “Saltwater Kingdoms,” lulling Gulf populations into the false belief that water is a free resource. Desalination has nurtured luxury lifestyles kept afloat by cheap carbon-fueled water. Even in the face of the growing recognition of a looming post-oil future, the free flow of oil-subsidized water remains tied to carbon-intensive lifestyles that seem projected to endure for the foreseeable future. Despite the looming threats to the health of Gulf ecosystems, choked by briny effluent, algal blooms, and the prospect of virtually unlivable heat and wet-bulb humidity, the region’s leadership knows that drawing down fossil fuel production would deprive their societies of both the raw materials to make fresh water and the means to finance and maintain the infrastructures that they depend on. Positioned as both the problem and the solution, desalination has placed the region in an archetypal Anthropocene bind: stuck between the economic imperatives of carbon wealth and the apocalyptic climate stresses poised to engulf the region.

Author

• Michael Christopher Low, University of Utah