Veolia, the global champion of sustainable desalination, set to double its operated capacity by 2030

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Sustainable desalination

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With tremendous progress achieved in terms of efficiency and footprint over the past 25 years, desalination became an essential part in the toolkit to face water scarcity. It has become cheaper by reducing energy intensity, more effective and increasingly scalable to meet the growing global demand, in terms of size, volume, and efficiency.

The desalination market is set to accelerate growth over the next 5 years, driven primarily by the Middle East, Pacific Asia and some countries in Europe, with the capacity planned for award representing around 40 million m3 per day.

Already a leader in the desalination sector, with 18% of the world's installed desalination capacity built using its technologies, Veolia is set to consolidate its market leadership, while doubling its operated capacity from 1.4 million m3 per day by 2030.

Recent contract wins worldwide attest to Veolia’s strong ambitions in the desalination market, for example the Mirfa 2 & Hassyan Desalination plants in the United Arab Emirates, the Cornwall Desalination plant in the United Kingdom and the exclusive discussions for Rabat Desalination plant in Morocco. 

With more than 50 years of continuous effort, Veolia has become the champion of sustainable desalination, driving major breakthroughs and innovation in the market:

• Energy consumption divided by almost 7 since 1970
• Increasingly compact and efficient units, thanks to solutions such as the BarrelTM technology and Intelligent Reverse osmosis processes integrating AI
• Minimisation of the environmental footprint of the facilities, by reducing chemicals usage and more renewable decarbonized power supply
• Respect of the marine environment, particularly when it comes to brine management.

Veolia continues to drive innovation in this field and fueling other water technologies, such as micropollutant treatment and wastewater management, creating synergies that address multiple water-related challenges at once.

ABOUT VEOLIA

Veolia group aims to become the benchmark company for ecological transformation. Present on five continents with 215,000 employees, the Group designs and deploys useful, practical solutions for the management of water, waste and energy that are contributing to a radical turnaround of the current situation. Through its three complementary activities, Veolia helps to develop access to resources, to preserve available resources and to renew them. In 2024, the Veolia group provided 111 million inhabitants with drinking water and 98 million with sanitation, produced 42 million megawatt hours of energy and treated 65 million tonnes of waste. Veolia Environnement (Paris Euronext: VIE) achieved consolidated revenue of 44.7 billion euros in 2024.