Pipes and pump systems at the Agadir desalination plant in the Souss-Massa region of Morocco. The plant converts seawater from the Atlantic Ocean to water for drinking and agriculture. Photo / Clea Rekhou, The Washington Post
The drought has held its grip for seven years and counting. Scorched vegetation crinkles underfoot.
The colour has drained almost entirely from Morocco’s agricultural heartland, with one exception: inside vast mesh-covered agricultural enclosures, where lush tomatoes grow on vines, destined for supermarkets in Europe.
These man-made oases are being sustained not by rainfall but by seawater – filtered of salt and piped in from a plant on the coast.
For decades, the process known as desalination had been the purview of the oil-rich Gulf.
As droughts intensify, it is booming as a last-ditch solution for countries that had once depended on – and built civilisations with – natural rainfall.
The coastal plant here, the first in a wave of megaprojects, is Morocco’s bet that desalination can help preserve a way of life, including water-hungry activities like large-scale agriculture.
“The most important lesson here – there is a solution to facing climate change,” said Tarik Hamane, the chief executive of Morocco’s state-run water utility.
The idea of desalination has long been seductive, as it involves harnessing the biggest resource on the planet, the world’s oceans.
Recent cost reductions have only heightened an outlook, popular in tech circles, that the technology can help humans overcome the water shortages that are becoming more acute as the planet warms.
Elon Musk said last year that desalination could “turn any part of the world green – including the entire world”.
Critics say it is an imperfect lifeline. The process pollutes waters by discharging brine, an ultra-salty extract that is dumped back into the sea and can increase water temperatures.
Desalination also requires significant energy and yields greenhouse gas emissions if powered by fossil fuels.
The International Energy Agency says global energy demand for water desalination has nearly doubled since 2010 and is poised to double again by 2030. The rise in electricity demand is on par with the predicted increase stemming from data centres.
“Everybody loves the idea of a silver bullet,” said Peter Gleick, co-founder of the Pacific Institute and a scientist who studies water resources. “But desalination has a lot of problems.”
A Washington Post analysis of global projects, based on data provided by industry tracker Global Water Intelligence, shows how desalination is spreading in new and increasingly water-scarce parts of the world.
Among plants currently online, 65 of the 100 largest are in the Gulf region, particularly Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
The geographic balance swings with new projects, whose scale will exceed those already in existence. Of the 100 largest plants planned or in the works, 63 are outside the Gulf – often in nations that lack the same resources and development.
“If you have no water, is the cost of desalination a high price to pay?” said Shannon McCarthy, the executive director of the International Desalination and Reuse Association, an industry group. “Water is everything.”
Algeria is planning nine of these large-scale plants, according to the data.
Egypt has three in the pipeline.
Iraq, facing the historic decline of its once-mighty river system, in July signed contracts to build one of the world’s largest facilities.
Jordan, one of the most water-stressed countries on Earth, is planning not only a mega-plant but also a 400km pipeline that would bring desalinated drinking water to its capital.
And then there is Morocco, where water from rain and snowmelt has decreased steadily over the decades, and where some of the largest dams are at critically low levels. King Mohammed VI last year called on the country to “accelerate” its desalination plans.
By 2031, Morocco will have four of the 10 largest facilities on Earth.
“It will be very helpful to maintain life and also the agriculture sector,” Morocco’s Water Minister, Nizar Baraka, said in an interview.
Two of the future plants will help supply water directly to farms. Others are intended solely to provide drinking water to cities and will increase the overall capacity – leaving more natural water sources for agriculture.
Some of the country’s most economically crucial farms have already directly benefitted since the 2022 inauguration of a plant near the city of Agadir.
The facility reserves about 55% of its water for the drinking needs of 1.6 million people. The rest is dispatched through an intricate network of pipes towards the parched plain responsible for most of Morocco’s vegetable exports.
Eventually, the water reaches the hangar-size enclosures – some guarded by security – where trickles irrigate tomato plants nestled in plastic-lined beds of imported mulch.
The tomatoes, once picked, then move on to packaging facilities like the one belonging to Karam Green Agri, one of Morocco’s largest exporters.
One recent afternoon, during a tour of the facility, manager Ali Ouramdan drew back the window shades of a conference room, giving an overhead view of the busy packaging floor.
Tomatoes rattled down conveyor belts. Yellow-uniformed workers sorted them by size and colour. Forklifts hoisted pallets of packaged tomatoes marked with labels like Tesco or Lidl.
Amid the drought, surrounded by a landscape of sand, Ouramdan said desalination had helped push Karam Green Agri’s exports to their highest level yet.
“A record year,” he said.
Morocco’s desalination emphasis can’t be explained by climate change alone. The water deficit also has been driven by human factors – particularly the Government’s decisions about what crops to plant and at what scale to grow them.
Europeans wanted fresh produce year-round, and Morocco had positioned itself to serve and profit from those appetites.
Agriculture is the “real elephant in the room”, said Hakima El Haite, Morocco’s former special envoy for climate change.
Farms today account for roughly 85% of the country’s water needs, but that hasn’t always been the case.
A century ago, farmers planted barley, wheat and oats for animals in small-scale plots, depending entirely on rainfall. Over time, Morocco ramped up its ambitions, launching a mid-20th-century dam-building spree to capture more rainfall and support larger-scale production.
By the 1990s, experts were warning that Moroccan agricultural water needs were outpacing supply. Farmers were already digging wells and tapping aquifers – groundwater reserves that can buffer against drought.
But rather than pulling back, Morocco kept going. In 2008, it unveiled a blueprint for turning itself into an export powerhouse.
That strategy – called the Morocco Green Plan, led by an agriculture minister who is now Prime Minister – offered subsidies and encouraged the expansion of water-thirsty crops not native to Morocco.
The strategy had an economic payoff, bringing wealth and an influx of jobs to rural areas. The Government also emphasised more efficient irrigation. But rather than saving water, farmers leveraged those gains to expand even further. And by the time the drought hit, the mismatch was dire.
Morocco was growing watermelons in the desiccated inland area of Zagora.
It had citrus groves where rainfall covered just a tiny fraction of the needs.
It was exporting tomatoes from a region with near-empty aquifers.
“Morocco has done exactly the opposite” of what it should have, said Mohamed Bazza, an independent expert and former water resources officer at the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation.
That’s left Morocco facing the water equivalent of a budget deficit.
It’s a predicament increasingly common worldwide, and the country is now scrambling to expand its supply to avoid what Bazza called a “catastrophe”. Desalination is central to that effort. The Government is also working to reuse more water, cut down on leakage and transfer water from wetter regions to dry ones.
With enough efficiency gains, agriculture “could be” made sustainable, said Baraka.
However, desalination, experts say, is not a cure-all – and it could never be deployed at a scale large enough for the country’s total needs.
Morocco’s farms, Baraka said, require roughly 12 billion cubic metres of water per year. Meeting that demand would require the output of 35 of the world’s largest desalination plants.
And even then, desalinated water – costing roughly twice as much as groundwater pumped from wells – is too expensive and logistically complicated for many farmers.
The businesses that can afford it are typically the biggest exporters growing the most lucrative crops. They also need the fortune of being close to a desalination plant.
The upshot: some agribusinesses prosper, while other farms wither.
In the agricultural heartland, known as the Souss-Massa region, that divide is already visible.
The tomato fields run by large exporters have arranged to get hooked up to the network carrying desalinated water. The labyrinth of pipes stretches only about 40km inland.
Farther away, vast citrus groves lie dying and abandoned. Agriculture experts say land is being sold off. Farms have laid off workers. On one recent afternoon, an excavator tore through a field of citrus stumps.
To the extent there was any activity, it came from farmers who had given up on oranges or limes and switched to cactus.
“And even to grow cactus, you have to be lucky,” said Karim Aitsaid, a fruit seller in the inland town of Sebt El Guerdane. He was selling melons from another region.
Eventually, the scale of agriculture will have to shrink, said El Haite, the former climate envoy.
“Otherwise,” she said, “desalination risks becoming an expensive stopgap rather than a long-term solution.”
Even with their limitations, the mega-plants that will eventually rise along the Moroccan coastline – from Rabat to Casablanca to Nador – still represent a boost.
Over the next five years, the share of Moroccans drinking desalinated water will rise to 60%, from 9% today. Some 30% of the new water will be earmarked for irrigation.
King Mohammed VI has laid out the vision for Morocco as a desalination pioneer: developing its own domestic construction companies, training technicians. He has pledged to run everything on renewable energy.
But for now, Morocco has just one large-scale plant in operation – the one feeding the tomato farms. It takes power from the coal-dependent grid.
The desalination plant, run by the Spanish company Cox, sits at a precipice overlooking the Atlantic.
Long intake tunnels reach into the depths, marked by barely visible buoys, pulling seawater toward shore. Then snaking, 1.8m-wide pipes deliver that water upward towards the plant and into a grey hangar-size building where it’s transformed.
There, 4m-long white pipes are stacked horizontally towards the ceiling. The pipes contain tightly wound spirals of membrane, resembling golden gift wrap. The water enters one end of the pipe at high pressure. And then it exits, stripped of its impurities, while the salty waste is deposited from a different outlet.
Experts say that advances in this process, known as reverse osmosis, are fundamental to the desalination boom. Until 20 years ago, countries had been relying on thermal methods, heating the seawater and capturing the condensed salt-free vapour. Improvements in membrane technology – making them thinner, more durable – turned reverse osmosis into the dominant technology.
The cost of desalinating water fell tenfold over a generation, in some cases to 50 cents per cubic metre. That price decrease suddenly put desalination within reach for developing countries that believe they have little other choice.
Even in the Cox plant, employees say they sense the urgency. They drive to work past the tomato enclosures. They have a map of the irrigation network that has sustained farms – and they’ve heard pleas from farmers who live beyond it.
“This plant has tried to save the situation,” said Jose Antonio Randeiro, the director of operations and maintenance. “Otherwise this area was going to dry out.”
Several workers led a tour one morning that followed the water on its chronological journey, starting at the intake pipes – where the air smelled of sea salt – and ending at mineral pools, where the smell of salt was gone.
Then Manuel Hurtado, maintenance director at the plant, and technical director Miguel Angel Ugalde headed back outdoors to one final stop: a water analysis station.
“Now we’re going to taste the water,” Hurtado said.
He mentioned that earlier in the day, Cox finalised a long-awaited expansion of the plant. Its chief executive had flown in, signing an agreement with Morocco to boost capacity by 45%. The work also would involve the construction of a wind plant for energy needs. A news release described the move as further aiding “one of the areas most affected by water stress”.
“Today is really good news,” Hurtado said.
They walked over to a grid of outdoor pipes, a tap at one end.
Ugalde passed around some paper cups, and Hurtado turned on the spigot.
“This is water from the seas,” he said. “Cheers.”
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