01
Executive overview
Why this report matters
Summary Insight: Desalination is becoming increasingly important to water security, but its long-term value depends on energy performance, grid resilience, environmental safeguards, project timing, tariff design, and operational efficiency. This report compares alternative pathways ranging from continued capacity expansion to accelerated circular transformation and a high-stress water-energy crisis, helping decision-makers identify robust actions without presenting the scenarios as forecasts.
This Our Future Water Intelligence report provides a structured scenario assessment of seawater reverse osmosis, renewable power, brine valorisation, legacy-asset retrofits, digital operations, project finance, regulatory readiness, and water-energy resilience.
Projected savings attainable by retrofitting legacy desalination infrastructure currently lacking energy recovery devices, while addressing 111 million tons of CO2 emissions exposure.
02
Buyer relevance
Who the report is for
- Utility Executives & System Operators: Assess how capacity expansion, energy recovery, digital controls, maintenance, storage, and grid conditions affect desalination reliability.
- Regulators & Policymakers: Examine how efficiency standards, brine regulation, environmental safeguards, tariff policy, and procurement frameworks shape sector development.
- Infrastructure Investors & Financiers: Evaluate project bankability, retrofit opportunities, power-price exposure, public-private delivery, technology risk, and long-term asset performance.
03
Decision scope
Questions answered
What is the purpose of the Global Desalination Futures report?
The report provides a precautionary framework for comparing alternative desalination pathways under uncertainty. It helps decision-makers test infrastructure, energy, regulatory, environmental, and financing strategies without treating a single pathway as a prediction.
Why does the water-energy nexus dominate the scenarios?
Desalination requires reliable and affordable power, while electricity systems can also depend on water for cooling and fuel production. Grid disruption, high power prices, emissions constraints, and renewable variability can therefore alter water-production cost and reliability.
How does the report treat brine valorisation?
Brine is assessed both as an environmental liability and as a potential source of industrial minerals and other recoverable products. Commercial viability depends on concentration, technology, energy requirements, market demand, mineral ownership, environmental rules, and project location.
Which near-term actions does the report prioritise?
Priority actions centre on energy-efficiency upgrades, digital monitoring, asset maintenance, renewable-power procurement, water-loss reduction, environmental safeguards, and regulatory clarity. These measures can improve resilience across several scenarios before major new capacity is committed.
04
Inside the report
Analytical coverage
Architectures: Current Expansion Path
Examines how established procurement programmes and continued seawater reverse-osmosis expansion could address widening supply gaps while preserving conventional financing and operating models.
Enablement: Accelerated Circular Transformation
Maps the shift toward renewable power, high-efficiency membranes, energy recovery, brine valorisation, resource recovery, water reuse, and digitally optimised operations.
Resolution: High-Stress Nexus Crisis
Assesses compounding failure modes in which drought, power constraints, fuel disruption, regulatory delay, supply-chain pressure, and deferred investment create concurrent water and energy deficits.
Alignment: Efficiency and Digital Operations
Evaluates digital twins, smart meters, energy-recovery devices, process analytics, predictive maintenance, minimum-efficiency requirements, and non-revenue-water reduction as near-term resilience measures.
Capability Building: Investment and Regulatory Readiness
Links independent water projects, public-private partnerships, green finance, circular-economy regulation, performance metrics, environmental safeguards, and delivery capability with bankable infrastructure.
05
Included
What you receive
Complete digital report
The full analysis in a professionally formatted PDF.
Decision-focused analysis
Evidence interpreted around the report’s central strategic and operational questions.
Supporting evidence
Relevant data, documented developments and source material used throughout the assessment.
Analytical frameworks
Structured interpretation of the financial, operational, governance, resilience or resource issues relevant to the report.
Forward priorities
Key developments, risks and issues to monitor following publication.
06
Evidence & method
Built for defensible decisions
The report is grounded in documented public, institutional, regulatory, utility and sector evidence appropriate to its stated scope. Source periods, definitions and reported claims are retained within the complete analysis.
07
Lead analyst
Robert C. Brears
Lead Analyst, Our Future Water Intelligence
Robert C. Brears is a water-security specialist and author whose work examines utility transformation, infrastructure, governance, finance and climate resilience for executive and policy audiences.
- Evidence-led water intelligence
- Decision-focused system analysis
- Report-specific treatment of scope and terminology
08
Water Scenarios: Global Desalination Futures
- Format
- Digital report · PDF
- Length
- 47 pages
- Edition
- 2026
- Price
- USD 999
09
Report details
Publication details
- Publisher
- Our Future Water Intelligence
- Report family
- Scenario Report
- Report type
- Scenario Reports
- Edition
- 2026
- Format
- Digital report · PDF
- Length
- 47 pages
- Reference
- OFW-DESALINATION-FUTURES