Water. desalination + reuse

INERVIEW May-June 2014 | Desalination & Water Reuse | 39 | evaluate correctly". Having the KPIs, we will know exactly how we are doing, so I think it is very important and will be a very powerful tool to know exactly what is going on. It is like a dashboard, which you can look at and make adjustments if you see there is a problem. Are there plans to increase the membership? Of course! We have now around 2,400 members with about another 4,000 members in our affiliates. To me, IDA itself should have not less than 5,000 members, which means more than double what we have now. That is one of our objectives, and I will try my best to achieve this, along with my colleagues, our organization and the plan we are evolving. We should reach 5,000 or very close to it. The good think about the KPIs is that, at the end of the road, you will see whether you have achieved your goal or at least how much of it has been achieved. That is what I mean by measuring performance. I think 5,000 can be achieved, hopefully by the end of my term. We have a committee for Membership with a new chairman, Johnny Obeid of Veolia Middle East. We are expecting a lot from him, and we are trying to give him all the support he needs What else would you like to have achieved by the end of your presidency? I think the change has started already; this something that everybody is feeling. I have felt it and so has the administration in Topsfield. There is a lot more engagement now from the members and board of the association. Take the Operations Committee (chaired by the president and including the two vice presidents), which is the most important committee, as an example. Usually they do not do very much and just converse by phone. For the first time, just two months after I was elected, the committee had a real face-to-face meeting for about five hours and it was wonderful! Everyone explained their opinions, and we exchanged ideas and evolved an agenda. We are planning to have another one at the Singapore International Water Week (1-5 June 2014). So between each meeting of the main board, I am planning to have a meeting of the Operations Committee. I think that will help a lot. So you are formalizing the committee meeting structure more? Yes, especially the Operations Committee. What other committee chairs do is up to them; some committees just have a video- conference or do whatever they want. Video-conferencing is very helpful, because, as you know, we are living all over the world, but not every meeting should be a video-conference. I think you should meet at least once or twice a year, and everyone can explain themselves in a better way. Committee members then feel their engagement, feel they are being heard, and other people know what a person is talking about. Are you planning to have any other IDA initiatives like the Energy and Environment task forces? I think we could. I cannot make a prediction right now, but let's wait for the strategy plan for the next five years. I think we should come up with some initiatives from that plan and, if necessary, we can form a special committee for such an eventuality. There is also a possibility that, in light of the new strategy, a committee could be dissolved or merged with another committee. Both the Energy and Environment groups seem to have been set up to counter a public perception that desalination was energy-intensive and bad for the environment. How do you see this? Energy-intensive? I think, yes. But I think now with the new technologies, especially with all the breakthroughs we are having in reverse-osmosis, even in the thermal technology, in multi-effect distillation, there is a lot of research. So, I think there has been a big reduction. As for the environment, everything has pluses and minuses. Maybe brine might affect marine life nearby, but I don't think it is by that much, especially if you are talking about the large oceans, except maybe the Gulf. There is also a large number of ideas about how to reuse the brine, which should help, and this is one of the breakthroughs that we are hoping industry will be able to come up with. Do you have a plan for engaging the public more with IDA? This is one of our objectives. Of course, we must promote the industry – that is our main objective – but the public is very important because the end-user is the public, especially in areas where they depend on desalination, such as Saudi Arabia, the area from which I come, and indeed most of the MENA regions. It is very important that the public should be aware and that they should be educated. At the moment, there is a good effort. IDA is doing some things, but maybe not as much as it could. Maybe that is one of the things we could address in our new strategic plan. I am hoping for a lot of changes during the next two years – one of them is to reach out to people much more, to organisations, to industries, to countries rather than just being focused on certain geographical areas. For instance, I have a meeting shortly with a representative from South Africa about how desalination can be promoted in his country. Let's talk about your country, Saudi Arabia. What is the future for desalination there? I think desalination is the future for Saudi Arabia. I quoted one of the verses of the Quran in my speech earlier today: "Every living thing comes from water". It is very important in a country like Saudi Arabia and the Gulf region. Desalination is the solution – there is no other solution. Even if there is groundwater, this should be used for other purposes because its amount is decreasing with time. Our challenge is how to make desalination sustainable; how to rely on a sustainable resource like seawater. If we proceed to improve and make a breakthrough in renewable energy resources, it will make it more sustainable. This will affect the whole world. The number of desalination plants in the world is increasing drastically, but in some areas they have not even thought about desalination in the past. Now they are taking it seriously. How much of this desalination in Saudi Arabia will be private or public? I think right now it is about 50:50. In the last few years, we have had many Independent Water & Power Projects, but I think in the future it will remain at 40:60 or 50:50 because the government will continue to provide certain sorts of services especially for the big cities. But on the industrial side, it will become 80-90% sourced from the private sector. Whatever industry is producing, they can accommodate the price of their water in the price of their goods for whatever it costs. But the government has to provide a subsidy for the people who need it more, not for those who are making money. l

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