Saudi Arabia uses more than half of the petrol they extract on desalination.
It's not sustainable and once it runs out, the country will go back to being a poor desert.
It's not sustainable and once it runs out, the country will go back to being a poor desert.
Separately, a reputable energy sector overview notes desalination is about 6% of Saudi Arabia’s electricity consumption (in 2020) [0] [1], which is nowhere near implying over half of extracted petroleum.
300,000 ÷ 9,500,000 ≈ 3.2% of crude production.
[0] https://www.ifri.org/en/studies/geopolitics-seawater-desalin...
[1] https://www.eia.gov/international/content/analysis/countries...
That is perhaps the source of the discrepancy.
With cheap oil, there is little financial incentive to upgrade these plants.
Remember the government need not 'pay' market price for this oil - they can prop the market up by restricting oil exports whilst simultaneously using oil internally at production cost.
It genuinely puzzles me why they wouldn’t buy some solar panels to run desalination. The oil they’d then be able to sell instead of burning would pay for it easily.
Of course there is not always a good reason. The reason may be that the country is run by aristocrats who are rich and comfortable and don’t care and the present thing works so why fix it. If the system does stop working it’ll only really impact the poor.
I doubt they are going to go back to being poor that hard. They might not get as much easy money, but once the core infrastructure is built, it doesn't cost as much to maintain it.