Internationally, the statement is clear: water tariffs often do not generate enough revenue to cover all the necessary costs, keeping pace with increasing regulations and requirements, investing in infrastructure renewal for this highly capital-intensive sector addressing ageing assets, and, in some cases like the UK, providing returns for stakeholders and investors.

However, there are also existing models where the water business is financially sustainable. And this is exactly what we will explore today.

I think it is a good moment to publish in our new website the conversation we had with Ravid Levy time ago.

I saw he’s been in India recently taking an active part in Thermax Limited corporate event titled 'Odyssey Beyond 1000', in Pune India.

A funny anecdote the first time I came across Thermax time ago.

To be honest, I had never heard of the company before.

During our very first meeting, they shared a presentation along with their organizational chart. What was actually a relatively small subcontracted package within a much larger project, they had assigned around 27 people to the job, each with a clearly defined role and responsibility.

They had almost as many people working on that single package as we had across the entire project team on our side. I remember thinking, “Wow... I’m basically here with one or two colleagues coordinating this, and on the other side there are 27 people in the meeting.”

The engineering capacity and scale that companies in countries like India can mobilize...demographics, talent availability, and geopolitics shape the global engineering industry…

As I was saying, Ravid presented 4 upcoming global trends and opportunities shaping industrial water tech in the coming years:

🚀 Hyperscaled datacenters (not only cooling water, but also power & semicon fabs)

I see interesting moves around this…I'll explore this in more detail and share my thoughts.

♻️ Circular resource recovery (both from desal brines and organic waste streams)

🔬 Micropollutants (mainly, but not only PFAS. With integrated separation, destruction and monitoring)

🖥️ Digitization of water systems (leveraging AI, big data and iOT for realtime optimization and towards autonomous operation)

He also published some days ago an extremely interesting reflection about AI and Data Centers, read carefully and reflect on it.

How long will the datacenter water hype last?

Everybody's talking about how thirsty is AI. They usually mean how much fresh water is needed to cool the chips that process the data that makes the AI we all use and love (or hate, or fear or admire)

First let's separate facts from fiction regarding datacent'rs water thirst:
According to a Global Water Intelligence (GWI) and Xylem report that was published earlier this year, only a small part of the water used by the AI industry is for cooling datacenters directly (<5%, don't let the "billion liters" or "trillion gallons" figures confuse you). The majority is indirectly used to produce power (>50%) and to make the semiconductors (>40%).

In carbon terms we would have called it Scope 1 vs. Scope 2/3 water use.

Overall, datacenters is still a minor water user compared to less hyped industries like food&bev, mining, oil&gas, , power etc. Not mentioning agriculture, but it is growing much faster than all the others.

So the huge public and professional focus on datacenter's water cooling may be missing the real impact of AI on the water cycle, which mostly happens way beyond their fence.

Obviously, this doesn't mean water use for cooling is negligable, but here lies the question I openned with:
There is huge incentive for AI hyperscalers to reduce direct water use, both to mitigate their direct impact, but mainly to get 'lisence to operate' from public, regulators and politicians (i.e to un-NIMBY their projects).

And when these giants have incentive they also have the resources to invest in development and scaleup of low, or no-water cooling technologies. And they already do:
Air cooling, direct-to-chip, under-water, floating, space... they will do whatever it takes to keep booming, and if water (or power) is limiting, they will buy their way out.

The AI companies are doing it in a pace the water industry can hardley comprehend. We're used to technologies that scale based on regulatory incentives limited by usual infrustructure and investment constrains (i.e very slow). Suddeny, we need to cope with space travel speed and resources that dwarf the entire watertech industry.

So there is a window of opprtunity for water tech to solve a real bottleneck for the fastest and richest industry in history.
But not forever. Sooner than later, there will be alternatives that will make direct water use in datacenters redundant, or less limiting altogether. This change happens as we speak.

So if you're targeting water solutions for the AI industry, do it FAST
AI fast, not water fast

I met Ravid Levy for the first time last year in Amsterdam. Five minutes, maybe, in the corridors of Aquatech, the kind of quick hallway exchange that a congress makes possible and that you promise yourself to continue one day.

Five years running an Australian subsidiary during the Millennium Drought, and now a decade coordinating Israel’s national water innovation community, a government-backed non-profit whose whole job is to connect the dots across the country’s water ecosystem.

If you wanted one person to explain how a country actually works as a water system, you’d struggle to find better.

We many think this is a technology story: drip irrigation, desalination, reuse percentages that make the rest of us wince.

But listening to Ravid, the real lesson is institutional and economic. A country that built a set of rules that made the invention inevitable, and, crucially, that made it pay.

The island principle

Start with geography, because everything else is built on top of it. Israel sits on the semi-arid eastern edge of the Mediterranean, half of it desert, the rest not much wetter for most of the year.

What we now politely call “climate change” was simply the baseline here from the beginning, a climate you cannot count on.

Then add the geopolitics. As Ravid puts it, Israel is effectively an island.

Israel has to plan as if it were surrounded by ocean: rely on your own resources, because you cannot import water at any meaningful scale.

Two facts — a hostile climate and no external lifeline — force a single conclusion. Water is a strictly limited, strategically vital, domestically-sourced resource.

The answer was the Water Law, drafted in the early 1950s and still in force after many updates.

Its founding principle is deceptively radical: all water in the country is public domain.

Underground, above ground, clean, dirty, even seawater, none of it is private.

If you own land above an aquifer, the land is yours and the water beneath it is not. You need a licence, and you pay, to extract it.

Every drop carries a price tag, and something or someone must pay it.

You cannot price, allocate, or plan a resource you don’t fully control.

The closed box

By law, the Israeli water sector is a closed economic system.

This is totally different to many countries as we all know.

Which means one thing above all: water must pay for itself. Tariffs are engineered to reflect the true cost of service and the cost of future infrastructure.

The sector is not subsidised from outside, and it cannot over-invest beyond what water prices can support.

Now hold that up against Spain. Here tariffs routinely fail to cover operating costs, let alone the reinvestment the networks need.

The gap is filled, or more often not filled, by political cycles and competing budget priorities.

The result is chronic under-recovery and deferred investment, dressed up as affordability.

A stable, ring-fenced financial base that lets the water system plan and build on its own terms.

If water has to fund itself, the price has to tell the truth.

That’s an uncomfortable proposition politically, and it’s exactly why so few countries do it.

One grid, and a plan that runs to 2075

Being small helps. Moving water is a problem of topography and distance, and a small country can afford a solution that a continental one cannot: a single national grid.

Something like 80–90% of the population, plus most agriculture and industry, is connected to one network run by a national water company that answers to the government.

The payoff is operational flexibility.

Drought in the north’s natural resources run thin, so the system leans harder on desalination and groundwater elsewhere and shifts water south-to-north across the same grid.

In wetter years the balance flows the other way.

Supply follows demand around the country instead of being trapped where it happens to fall.

And that grid is managed against a plan that is almost absurdly long-term.

The Israel Water Authority already has a complete strategic plan out to 2050, and a preliminary one to 2075, modelling different scenarios for rainfall, population, and economic growth, and pre-positioning the solutions to meet them.

When your resource is scarce and your box is closed, you’re forced to think in decades.

Scarcity, it turns out, is a discipline.

Reuse: a strategic choice, not a by-product

Around 90% of all domestic wastewater in Israel is reused.

And roughly 50% of the water used in Israeli agriculture comes from reuse.

Reuse in Israel goes almost entirely to agriculture — not to potable supply, not to industry.

A strategic choice, and the entire regulatory, technical, and management apparatus for wastewater is bent toward it.

There are two grids, and they never touch: a national blue grid for drinking water and an almost-national purple grid for reuse.

Within the purple grid, quality varies by region and by plant, and so does price.

Higher-quality effluent costs the farmer more but unlocks more sensitive crops and irrigation methods; lower grades are cheaper but come with tighter rules on how they can be applied.

There is no single “cost of reused water.”

Why agriculture, and why does it work? Partly, again, geography.

Ravid tells a story about arriving in Melbourne and asking why treated wastewater was being discharged to the ocean instead of reused.

The answer: do you know how far the farms are?

In Australia — and much of the US — the distance between cities and major agriculture may kill the economics in some cases.

In Israel the fields sit close to the cities, so treating effluent near the population and piping it to nearby farms makes sense.

Distance is a hidden variable in every reuse business case.

The waste and the resource are the same object, viewed from two ends.

Desalination, and the paradox of water that’s too clean

Then there’s the sea.

Roughly 70% of Israel’s drinking-water mix is desalinated — higher in some places, lower in others — with total production around 700 million cubic metres a year and rising toward a billion.

Strip that out and you lose something like 20–30% of national use.

That’s the equivalent of two days a week without water, which is the actual reality in some neighbouring countries that haven’t built this capacity.

Climate resilience in a dry region starts with water resilience, and desalination makes supply climate-independent.

Combine desal, reuse, natural resources, efficiency, and non-revenue-water reduction and you are close to being climate-independent for water.

We’re selling independence from the sky.

But Ravid is refreshingly unromantic about the downsides, and one of them is genuinely counterintuitive: desalinated water can be too clean.

Double-pass RO strips almost everything, which is wonderful for keeping PFAS and micro-pollutants out of the network, the risk profile of a heavily-desalinated supply is lower than most.

The flip side is minerals. Calcium and alkalinity are added back per health regulation; magnesium is not regulated, so in desal-heavy areas it runs low.

I’m going to write something separate on the magnesium question, because I suspect it’s a quiet issue in a lot of desal-dependent systems and nobody’s talking about it.

The innovator’s paradox

I asked Ravid what’s left. If Israel has more or less solved independence, resilience, reuse, and desalination, what do you do for an encore?

His answer is that this is precisely the reason his innovation organisation exists: how do you keep a train running fast when your own urgency has largely been managed away?

He frames it as three circles.

The local circle is far from empty, brine valorisation (Israel desalinates a lot, so it produces a lot of brine that is currently benign waste rather than a resource), sludge and resource recovery, PFAS and micro-pollutants in specific groundwater pockets, and above all decarbonisation: the water sector accounts for 8–10% of national power consumption. That’s an enormous carbon footprint hiding inside the resilience story.

The regional circle is about exporting hard-won knowledge to neighbours with acute water stress, where geopolitics complicates but doesn’t erase real opportunity.

And the global circle is the big one: Israel has spent fifty years managing exactly the pressures — heat, scarcity, population — that climate change is now handing to everyone else. Which makes the country something like a beta site, or a preview, of the water future much of the world is walking into.

Two kinds of water, two kinds of money

Ravid splits water innovation into two sub-sectors.

There is physical, “wet” innovation — anything that touches the water itself: treatment, desalination, membranes, the physical assets.

A litre of water will always weigh a kilogram; it’s incompressible, it can’t be digitised, it has to be moved from A to B by physics.

So this side is inherently slower, more infrastructure-bound, more public.

Expecting it to accelerate and exit like fintech is, in his word, naïve — and funding it with the same impatient venture money is a category error.

And then there is the digital side — the data embedded in that physical asset. That can and must move as fast as any other digital industry. It should be funded like one and judged like one.

The mistake we make is applying a single yardstick, a single funding model, and a single set of exit expectations to both, simply because it all sits under the “water” label.

For a century, quality analysis has meant lab-based standard methods — accurate, authoritative, and almost impossible to miniaturise or automate cheaply.

So online quality measurement got deployed only where you absolutely had to.

Meanwhile we’ve cheerfully installed three million remote-reading water meters across Israel (100% AMR mandated by next year) because they’re cheap and reliable.

Now imagine a quality sensor as cheap and reliable as that meter — for PFAS, bacteria, heavy metals, or just pH and conductivity — deployed at the same density.

Ravid calls it the democratisation of water-quality measurement: real-time visibility into pipes, rivers, and beaches we currently just assume are safe, and a flood of data that opens entirely new AI and analytics markets on top.

The regulators may take a while to accept it but the technology is arriving anyway.

Plumbers with a degree

Spain — like much of Europe — faces a silver tsunami: a generation retiring in the next five to ten years and too little talent behind them. Everyone’s studying code haha.

Ravid’s optimism here is contrarian. AI, he thinks, will help — but not the way we assume.

The professions most exposed to automation are the office ones; the professions that touch physical assets are the hardest to replace with a robot.

The factories, the data centres, the agriculture, they all keep needing this resource.

So water is, in his phrase, a very safe stock: it’s not hyping, it’s not booming, it will never die.

A key quotes

On necessity as the engine

“The oldest cliché in this business, or any business, is that need is the mother of all invention. If you have a specific ongoing challenge, you either meet it or you stay behind.”

On planning as an island

“We cannot rely on resources coming from outside the borders. This is how we must organize our water system — as if it’s an island in the ocean.”

On water as public domain

“All water within the country — underground, above ground, dirty, clean, even seawater — is a public domain. It belongs to the public. There is no private water in Israel.”

“Every drop of water has a price tag, and someone, something, needs to pay for that. There is no free water.”

On the closed economy

“All the revenues remain within the water sector, and these are the only resources that by law are available for its development. Water must pay for itself.”

On long-term planning

“The Water Authority already has a complete strategic plan for the whole sector until 2050 — and in fact a preliminary plan till 2075.”

On efficiency

“It’s very, very foolish to waste the little water you have through leaking pipes.”

On the reuse strategy

“Almost 90% of all domestic wastewater is being reused — and we must say, to agriculture. That’s the strategic choice Israel took.”

On why geography decides reuse

“I asked in Melbourne why they discharge treated wastewater to the ocean instead of reusing it. The answer was: ‘Do you know where the agriculture is?’”

On desalinated water quality

“It’s the cleanest water you can get. However, sometimes it’s too clean, if you like.”

On resilience

“Climate resilience and climate adaptation in a dry area starts with water resilience.”

On Israel as a preview

“Israel is kind of a beta site — almost a preview of what other major areas in the world are now, or will be, facing. It’s a bit like back to the future.”

On physical vs. digital water

“A liter of water will always weigh one kilogram, whatever we do. It’s incompressible. It cannot be digitized. It must be transferred from A to B according to physics.”

On measurement

“Some people call it the democratization of water-quality measurement. Until now, the ability to test was only in the hands of those who had to do it or could afford it.”

On the sector as a safe bet

“It’s not hyping, it’s not booming, it’s not exiting in billions — but it will never die.”

On the profession

“We used to say we’re just plumbers with a degree. But a plumber with a degree might actually become a very attractive thing for people who think forward.”

Among these islands, we find both very large and very small ones.

But “big” or “small” can refer to either land area or population. After all, an island with a population density of 1,200 inhabitants per km² is completely different from one with only 100 inhabitants per km², even if they have a similar surface area.

Some of the world’s most famous islands include big ones such as Great Britain, Singapore, Japan, Australia, and many others, each with its own unique story.

A few days ago, I posted about the ongoing power blackouts in Cuba, driven by its dependence on imported fuel from Venezuela. That made me wonder why hydropower wasn’t playing a larger role in the country’s energy system.

Among the comments, someone simply replied, “Like Cyprus!”, referring to its dependence on imported fuels for electricity.

I started looking at the issue from different angles, and eventually decided to compare three very different islands: Cuba, Cyprus, and Gran Canaria.

My goal is to better understand how water management differs on relatively small islands compared with continental systems, and how factors such as rainfall, reservoirs, groundwater, desalination, tourism, energy, and geopolitics shape their water strategies.

Read more

Earlier this week, I came across a LinkedIn post that I wasn’t expecting:

When I founded Desalytics, the goal was simple: solve real-world water challenges in Africa and build a sustainable legacy in the process. After an unforgettable journey, I have stepped down as CEO.

Reflecting on that legacy:

We built an extraordinary, world-class, highly technical team across Sub-Saharan Africa with >45% women.
We brought clean, sustainable water solutions to communities and industries that needed them most.
We created a strong, scalable company poised for long-term growth.
We empowered young aquapreneurs to start and grow their businesses.
And we won multiple awards in the process!

To our incredible team, suppliers, clients, global events organizers, and partners: THANK YOU. A founder is only as good as the people who join them on the ride, and I was lucky enough to be surrounded by the very best. A big thank you to my wife, who has always remained supportive of my mission.

I'll always be Desalytics' biggest champion. Onward!

Before we find out what’s next, I wanted to take the opportunity to openly publish the conversation I had with Walid a few months ago.

When you play the episode above, the first five seconds feature some music. That music is Walid’s.

Desalytics has become a reference for many by creating immense value across Africa.

Walid has always been on the front line of the industry, with a deep understanding of where the sector is heading. I wanted to hear his perspective on what was happening, where the industry was going, and what he believed was coming next.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to introduce one of the features that will be available in our Knowledge Hub, which will be released over the coming weeks: the event tracker!

Having attended so many conferences and industry events, Walid shared his recommendations on which ones are most worthwhile depending on your interests.

I’m sure his wife is incredibly proud of him because I’ve witnessed firsthand how hard he works. The effort he puts into attending events, building relationships, and connecting people across the water sector is remarkable.

What’s next for Walid? I don’t know. But in this talk, he said:

“Water is addictive. Once you’re in, you stay in. If people try to leave, they ultimately join another water company.”

So…I hope we’ll soon see him in a major interview or long-form conversation with Antoine Walter or another leading voice in the industry. I’ll definitely be paying attention!

He got into water almost by accident

Curiously, Walid did not choose water.

His father pushed him into civil engineering, and in the final year a new option appeared: water and environment.

Notice that subtle detail: water and environment. This has been the traditional way of looking at water for last decades. And that's why many are surprised by the rise of the new water economy we have been discussing lately — corporate water, water reuse, water resilience, and beyond…

He signed up. He was the only student who did, and the faculty was ready to cancel it.

Then the dean gave a speech about water and the future of water, and fifteen students enrolled. That was roughly thirty years ago.

I find that story disproportionately important. A single speech, one afternoon, decided whether a cohort of water engineers existed.

From there: a master’s in water sciences, then a first job at Nalco that had nothing to do with what he had studied — boilers, cooling towers, an industrial water world he did not know existed. Then GE. Then Danaher. Twenty years moving from service engineering to sales to leadership.

Three companies, three competencies, one career.

The Desalytics thesis: capital and proximity

Walid told me that in his corporate years, Africa was permanently on the slide deck and permanently postponed. Everyone studied it but nobody committed.

A US-listed company reports quarter by quarter, and Africa is a mid-to-long-term market. The maths never worked.

Then a young entrepreneur he had worked with in Africa called him for coaching on how to grow his business. Walid listened and concluded the problem was not selling, it was access to capital.

The entrepreneur asked if Walid could finance his orders. Walid’s answer was better than a loan:

“Look, I’m not a bank. But maybe if I partner with you — I have ownership in your company — I can bring you much more value than just the financing part.”

Money plus somebody who walks into the customer meeting with you.

A month later a partner in Zambia wanted the same arrangement.

And Walid asked himself the obvious question: if I have spent five years saying Africa is the future, why not replicate this across sub-Saharan Africa?

Clients across the region named two problems, and only two:

1. No local stock. Every order meant waiting for a distributor to ship from far away.

2. No local expertise. Nobody to call, nobody to come to site, nobody to troubleshoot.

Solve those two and you have a company. That is the whole thesis.

“Our best-selling product is our people”

I asked him the standard commercial question: of everything in the portfolio — water quality testing, treatment, disinfection, membranes, dosing pumps, antiscalants — what are the top sellers?

He refused the premise.

“If you ask me about one product that we’re selling the most, I would say our people. Which we don’t really price, but indirectly, companies are buying from us because of the people, not because of the products themselves.”

Anyone can find any product online today and buy it from the cheapest source.

Nobody needs a distributor to be a catalogue.

What a customer cannot buy online is somebody who imports, holds stock, invoices in local currency, delivers to site, and then stays on site to explain how the thing actually works.

Somewhere in that exchange we landed on a formulation I have not stopped using since: not B2B — P2P. People to people.

And Walid treats that literally, which is the part I respect most.

Desalytics partnered with Wilson Learning to run commercial development for their African teams. Every employee has Udemy access (now they need The Water MBA access!). The team is roughly 50% women.

“I don’t believe in all these government-funded aid and donations. I think you need to build from within. And what better way than to build the next generation of commercial and technical expertise within Africa?”

The events map and a preview of what’s coming to the Knowledge Hub

Walid attends everything. Or at least it looks that way from the feed haha. So I asked him to be selective: which events actually earn the flight?

He has deliberately compressed his own calendar to six or seven per year. I highlighted in green those which I also visited during last 3 years, which I’d definitely revisit.

Exhibitions

• WEFTEC — the largest in the US, around a thousand exhibitors, with a serious technical conference running in parallel. Rotates between cities. I am thinking of attending the 100th edition in Chicago in 2027. Reaching 100 editions is a remarkable milestone and could make the event truly special.

• Aquatech — Amsterdam as the anchor, plus Mexico and China. Smaller, but they give you a genuinely different regional lens.

Conferences

• GWI Global Water Summit — the place to be, but senior. As he put it: you cannot go there and talk about an antiscalant. Match the room to what you sell. It’s not on my radar in the short term, mainly due to the cost barrier for me personally. However, I guess it is a great high-level networking event.

• WEX Global — boutique, heavily weighted to decision makers, and frequently held in Spain. The key feature is retention: 60–70% of attendees come back every year, so relationships compound. Next 2027 in Madrid!

• European Desalination Society — consistently well-built events, and one I can vouch for personally. Next 2027 in Liverpool, UK! Yeah desalination in UK! We talked about this recently you know already the story behind.

“When you go to an event, be engaged — otherwise don’t go. If you’re going just to walk around the exhibition, there’s no point. Try to be a speaker, try to be a moderator.”

This conversation is part of why we are building an events module inside our Knowledge Hub, going live over the coming weeks: which event, for which profile, at which stage, with what objective…

So members of our community can discover events or webinars that were not previously on their radar, or simply identify emerging patterns. For example, the rise of a new Biosolids Summit in Portugal.

When new events start appearing, it is usually because something is happening, a new trend, a growing challenge, or an emerging opportunity in the sector…

The gap is adoption.

Walid does not accept the premise that water is a laggard sector. His argument:

“We can take water, reuse it, recycle it, and drink it again. We’ve managed to shortcut the natural water cycle into a few hours. No other industry has shortcut a nature cycle in such a good way.”

The failure is downstream in adoption — the business models, the incentives, the liability structures.

At GE Water, with a chemicals division and an equipment division under the same roof, it took him three years to convince GE’s own equipment people to use GE’s own antiscalant.

Because the equipment team carried a contractual liability: deliver a cubic metre to specification, with pH and conductivity monitored, or lose payment per day.

Under that risk profile, the rational move is to change nothing.

That is the adoption gap in a sentence. It has nothing to do with R&D and everything to do with who eats the downside.

Then the counter-example: Hong Kong flushes its toilets with seawater.

A network of dedicated seawater pipes, chlorination and filtration and nothing more, mandated for new buildings starting in the 1960s. Today around 80% of toilet flushing in the city runs on seawater.

“It’s not really rocket science as innovation. It’s more of adoption.”

Ask a contractor to voluntarily run two pipe networks instead of one and he will decline, correctly, because it costs him money now and saves someone else money later.

Mandate it and the entire supply chain reorganises within a cycle. Same with greywater recycling: trivially implementable today, almost nowhere implemented.

For those of you who have followed my argument about the knowledge gap versus the investment gap, this is the same animal seen from a different angle.

The binding constraint is that the people who decide have no mechanism, and no incentive, to say yes.

From scarcity to abundance

Walid told me he changed his conference talks last year. He stopped talking about water scarcity and started talking about water abundance.

His reasoning: if the political will exists, abundance is technically achievable.

The bottleneck is not physical.

And here he named the typical structural problem:

“The worst part with water infrastructure is that it’s underground. Nobody sees it.”

Build a two-billion sewer and the electorate sees a hole in the road for eighteen months and then nothing. The infrastructure that determines whether a city functions is, by design, invisible to the people who vote on it.

Walid’s diagnosis of why we are stuck is that our conferences are internal. Water professionals talking to water professionals about water.

The message rarely leaves the room. It is the reason I have started accepting invitations to podcasts that have nothing to do with water — entrepreneurship shows, renewable energy platforms — to occupy one small seat at a table where nobody was going to mention water otherwise.

“Very few of our friends would know that water crosses all the energies — food and beverage, power, mining, petrochemical. Cooling, heating, cleaning, diluting, mixing. It’s everywhere.”

What he would tell a young engineer

I asked him for advice for someone starting now.

Many companies have cut training and development as a cost line. So choose employers who have not.

“Don’t get too comfortable. After four, five, seven years, if you’re not growing — not moving departments, not learning — you will not be learning. Take every learning opportunity, and create your own. Some people say they’re not lucky. Of course you’re not lucky if you don’t create your own luck.”

And on money: it will come. Optimise the next role for where it takes you, not for what it pays.

Then the word that closed the conversation:

“You’ll have setbacks in your career. Stay grounded. If you’re where you are, it’s because of chances and opportunities you had that others might not have had. Be humble, and take care of the people around you.”

Walid, in his own words

As usual, a brief journey through the talk:

On how he got into water

“I started by chance in the water industry. My dad was pushing me to do civil engineering — it wasn’t really my choice originally.”

“I was the only student registered for the option, and they were about to shut it down. Then our dean came and made a big speech about water and the future of water. So I ended up being fifteen in this option.”

“My first job was in Nalco. It was nothing like what I had studied. I never thought that this existed.”

On Africa

“We’ve always talked about Africa, how it can be the future for growth. But Africa is very complicated. When you’re a stock-listed US company driven to deliver growth quarter by quarter, Africa is mid to long term.”

“Currency fluctuations, currency shortages, commodities, political instability. If oil and gas is down, Nigeria and Angola are down. If mining is down, Zambia and Tanzania are down.”

“Their main challenge was that they don’t have local stock, and they don’t have local expertise to support them. If we can solve these two, we could be successful.”

On the partnership model

“Look, I’m not a bank. But maybe if I partner with you — I have ownership in your company — I can bring you much more value than just the financing part.”

“I don’t believe in all these government-funded aid and donations. You need to build from within. And what better way than to build the next generation of commercial and technical expertise within Africa?”

“In our team we have 55% women, which is really great in our industry — especially now, when talks about diversity are getting challenged.”

On people, not products

“If you ask me about one product that we’re selling the most, I would say our people. Which we don’t really price.”

“Companies are buying from us because of the people, not because of the products themselves.”

“Today with the internet you can find any product and buy it from anywhere. If you don’t add the local support, what’s the point? It’s all about price then.”

“People to people. P2P, not B2B. We should use that going forward.”

On events

“It depends on what you want to achieve. You cannot go to a CEO and talk about an antiscalant.”

“When you go to an event, be engaged — otherwise don’t go. If you’re going just to walk around the exhibition, there’s no point. Try to be a speaker, try to be a moderator.”

“WEX is a boutique event. Almost every year you have 60 or 70% coming back, so you become at ease working with them.”

“I’ve tried to limit my trips to six or seven events per year. You don’t want to go as a spectator. You want to add input. It’s a better usage of your time.”

On meetings and AI agents

“One time someone sent his AI agent to record the call. I was like — seriously? At the point of joining, we want you to interact, not just to listen.”

“What’s the point of wasting an hour to attend as a listener? Just take the notes. Don’t invite me to this call.”

On innovation versus adoption

“We can take water, reuse it, recycle it and drink it again. We’ve shortcut the natural water cycle into a few hours. No other industry has shortcut a nature cycle in such a good way.”

“Where I see a gap is in the innovation of adoption. The models for adoption, the incentives for adoption. That’s where we’re really struggling — not on the innovation part.”

“It took me three years to convince our own equipment guys to use our own antiscalant. Not because they didn’t want to, but because they had liabilities.”

“Hong Kong mandated that every new building would use seawater for toilet flushing. Today 80% of toilet flushing across Hong Kong is seawater. It’s not rocket science as innovation — it’s adoption.”

“If you’re a contractor, why would you build with two different pipes? Same with greywater recycling. Why would you do it if the government doesn’t force you to?”

On political will

“That’s the elephant in the room.”

“I shifted from talking about water scarcity to talking about water abundance. If the political will is there, we can shift to a world of water abundance.”

“The worst part with water infrastructure is that it’s underground. Nobody sees it. Implement a two-billion sewer project and the people who vote will not see it.”

“Once the political will is there, there are no water challenges. Singapore, the Netherlands, Namibia — these are places that had to deal with water issues and dealt with them.”

“Singapore even created a song for water that schoolkids had to sing. It took them twenty or thirty years. It’s not a short-term gain.”

“Our conferences are internal conferences — water professionals talking to water professionals. We’re not really taking the message outside.”

On the next twenty years

“We’re good at predicting after the fact.”

“Water positive will really gain a lot of traction. It will create opportunities for reuse, for decentralised systems, for emerging contaminants.”

“People talk negatively about desalination because it’s energy-driven. But if you don’t have water, you need water. There is no miracle. First you reduce, then you reuse, but eventually you have to generate new water.”

“If you spoke to Amazon, Google or Intel in the past, none of them would put water as a key challenge. Today they’re hiring people from our industry to drive their strategies.”

On building a career

“So many companies have dropped their training and learning programmes for cost cutting. Work for companies that value your development.”

“In Nalco I learned value selling. In GE, leadership, diversity and compliance. In Danaher, continuous improvement. Try multiple companies.”

“Don’t get too comfortable. After four, five, seven years, if you’re not growing, you will not be learning.”

“Some people say they’re not lucky. Of course you’re not lucky if you don’t create your own luck.”

“Don’t put the money first. Money will come. Work on developing yourself, and everybody will want to hire you after.”

“People in our industry are very helpful. If you ask anybody for help, they will help you. But you should be willing to help others — it’s give and take.”

On staying grounded

“You’ll have setbacks in your career. Stay down to earth. If you’re where you are, it’s because of chances and opportunities you had that others might not have had. Be humble, and take care of the people around you.”

“Water is addictive. Once you’re in, you stay in. If people try to leave, they ultimately join another water company.”

Since our community has grown significantly—and many new subscribers have shown a strong interest in the Desalination MBA section available to our Premium members—I thought this was the perfect time to share it.

I have already written and spoken about this topic over the past few months, so I won’t repeat everything here. Instead, I encourage you to watch the workshop and come back to it whenever you face questions in your own projects.

And of course, we also touch on one of those classic engineering debates that always sparks lively discussions, which configuration is better: dual-flow or centre-flow?

I’d also like to take this opportunity to share a couple of stories and real project scenarios that I encountered some years ago, related to different approaches for screening seawater before it is pumped to the pretreatment stage (whether DAF or filtration).

If any of you have practical experience, feedback, or a different perspective on these solutions, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Those discussions are often where the best learning happens.

1. First, I’ll simply show you the most common arrangement from the below options that Client may request. There is a winner combination lately on major projects.

2. A short story about drum screens...

3. Why not screen underwater? Intake + screening in one integrated solution.

4. And a bonus with a question…❓ about the ongoing debate on whether 316L stainless steel with cathodic protection is suitable for seawater service instead of using superduplex.

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Literally: between all of them they killed her, and she died all by herself.

It describes a death by distributed responsibility. Everyone contributed. Nobody is guilty.

The victim, conveniently, appears to have expired on her own…

I asked Jesús Maza a simple question — whose fault is it that our sector doesn’t move faster and better and with more money allocated to it? — and he answered with that proverb.

And honest description of water governance, and it is the reason this essay is titled the way it is. Everybody’s business is nobody’s business.

The man, and why I wanted to talk to him

I have worked in water since 2012 all around the globe, visited more than 15 countries, participated in Tenders and Projects in more than 30 countries.

Thirteen years in the sector and I have never once added value to my own country.

My entire career has been export. This is not unusual, it is the Spanish water paradox.

A dry country with a structural water deficit that happens to be one of the global technology leaders in water, which means our companies do most of their business abroad, which means Spanish water professionals often know Riyadh and Santiago de Chile better than they know Valladolid.

So two years ago, when I started The Water MBA from Seville, I realised I had a gap: I did not understand the sector in my own country. I did not know who the institutions were. Until late last year, I did not even know what DAQUAS was.

As it turns out, life had other plans: my children attend the same school than his grandchildren, and I’ve built a good relationship with his sons. We now often run into each other at the kids' dance performances. Life is awesome!

Jesús Maza is an economist, not an engineer, which matters more than it sounds.

Before water, he worked in the research and consultancy arm of a savings bank, and then on territorial development projects for the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank across Latin America.

He was CEO of EMASESA between 2011 and 2015, later director of the Escuela Internacional de Servicios Públicos, and in 2024 he was appointed to lead DAQUAS (below story).

EMASESA matters to me personally: it is the utility that sends me my bill. And I pay. It serves Seville and eleven surrounding municipalities — over a million people — with the El Carambolo treatment plant that I visited last year (here the report)

A brief history of an alphabet soup

For decades, urban water in Spain was represented by two associations that coexisted, mostly cordially, because they did two different jobs.

AEAS — the Asociación Española de Abastecimientos de Agua y Saneamiento — was the technical body. Nearly fifty years old, it grouped the vast majority of urban water operators along with pipe manufacturers, valve makers, contractors and technology suppliers. Its function was to hold the technical level of the sector, through a structure of specialist commissions: treatment, cybersecurity, supply, infrastructure, quality.

AGA — the Asociación Española de Empresas Gestoras de los Servicios de Agua Urbana — existed for a different reason.

In 2023, the reunification process began. AEAS and AGA agreed to merge into a single business association covering public companies, private companies, mixed companies, suppliers and even public administrations.

When I recorded this conversation, the merged entity still did not have its final name — Jesús literally told me they were “waiting to find the definitive name.”

That name arrived on 13 May 2025: DAQUAS, Asociación Española del Agua Urbana. Around 300 members. Operators representing roughly 80% of the Spanish population for supply, sewerage and treatment services.

The politicised utility

That was the mandate.

But the mandate has been quietly rewritten every few years for four decades — new drinking water directives, new discharge limits, new micropollutant obligations, extended producer responsibility, cybersecurity requirements, digitalisation plans, carbon footprint reporting, drought resilience — while the revenue model has stayed frozen in a municipal political debate about not raising the bill.

Water is a human right. it is also a capital-intensive industrial business with a 100-year asset base.

Those two truths are both correct and they pull in opposite directions, and the tension between them is resolved not by economics but by the electoral calendar.

Jesús was blunt about this. Water tariffs become a weapon thrown between political parties that, on the substance, believe exactly the same thing — party A says the other one raised the bill, party B says the same when the roles reverse.

Which is why his stated objective as president is, in his words, to take water out of the political debate and put it into the government’s agenda of priorities.

Out of politics because it actually matters.

The one-cent coin

He asked me to imagine walking down the street and seeing a one-cent coin on the pavement.

Would you bend down to pick it up? Nobody does. It is not worth the effort of bending.

One cent is what a Spaniard pays for five litres of tap water. He had bought a 25cl bottle of water on the AVE the day before for three euros.

In Catalonia, under drought, treated effluent is now being pumped back up to the head of the catchment to be treated again as raw water. That is the full integral cycle. It is priced at roughly two euros per cubic metre.

His other analogy, when you buy a beer (this may sound more familiar to you), the price includes the hops, the malt, the bottle, and the truck that brought it to the bar.

The numbers, since we are being economists about it

DAQUAS published its XVIII National Study in December 2025, covering 36.4 million inhabitants.

• Average domestic price: €2.23/m³ — around 43% below the European average, among the six lowest in Europe.

• The price that would actually cover the service and the investment deficit: €4.69/m³.

• Accumulated investment deficit: €4.485 billion.

• Annual sector investment: €2.415 billion — operators have doubled what they invest.

• Network renewal: 0.54% of supply mains and 0.12% of sewers per year, against a recommended 2%.

• Non-revenue water: 19%, of which real losses (leakage) are 10.1%.

• Total annual billing for urban water in Spain: €9.617 billion.

• The water bill represents 0.84% of the average household budget, against the UN affordability threshold of 3%.

There is no asset management framework on earth in which that is a plan. It is a slow-motion decision to let the network fail, taken by nobody in particular.

And the leakage debate makes his point better than anything. Brussels is currently arguing about which efficiency indicator to adopt.

Jesús told the ministry, essentially: fine, let’s find an index, but let’s be clear we’re building an instrument to measure misery. If we invest in the index instead of in meters and mains renewal, the index will simply keep measuring the same misery with more precision.

Doubling the tariff would take the household water bill from 0.84% to something like 1.5–1.8% of household spending, still half the UN affordability limit.

And every Spanish operator, public and private, already runs social tariff mechanisms: nobody is cut off for inability to pay.

Nobody.

Every country solves this differently, and most of them don’t

This is where the Spanish debate connects to the global one, and to the conversation we had in the podcast with Ben Solís on how water gets funded (below link), amazing episode.

The ideal is a self-sustaining business: the tariff covers OPEX, CAPEX, renewal and a reasonable return, while staying affordable.

The world is full of examples where this does not happen, and each failure mode looks different.

England and Wales: a fully privatised, economically regulated model where the regulated tariff has proven insufficient to simultaneously pay investor returns, cover operating costs, remain politically acceptable for affordability and renew infrastructure.

Egypt: tariffs heavily subsidised, with the gap absorbed by the general state budget. Affordable, socially defensible, and structurally dependent on fiscal space that competes with every other ministry.

The sacrificial line item is always asset renewal, because it is the only cost you can defer without anyone “noticing” for twenty years. Until it does.

Public, private, mixed and why the argument is a distraction

Roughly speaking, Spain splits into about 30-something per cent purely public operators (municipal services and public companies), around 35% private concessions, and the remainder mixed companies where a private partner and a municipality or provincial council share a commercial vehicle.

Jesús’s verdict, which I think is the correct one and which I will quote for years:

Efficiency is not the property of the private or the public. Efficiency belongs to the efficient.

There are efficient public companies and inefficient ones.

Efficient private companies and inefficient ones.

The same private operator can be efficient in one contract and inefficient in another, because topography, environment, politics or simply the person in the chair changed.

And the public/private line is far blurrier than the ideological debate assumes.

He told me a story about being asked, when he arrived at EMASESA, whether he had come to privatise it.

His answer: there’s no need — EMASESA is already partially privatised.

It is a 100% public entity with twelve municipalities on its board, and it works superbly. And its treatment plants are operated by private companies. Network maintenance is contracted out. Leak repair is contracted out. Building an in-house workforce to cover all of that would produce a payroll that no utility of that size could sustain.

That hybrid is the model. And Jesús argues it is a model worth studying and worth defending, because other countries copy it.

The corollary he raises is one every contractor in this industry feels: stop awarding on price alone. The EU has opened a review of public procurement, and DAQUAS’s position going in is that lowest-price auctions damage quality, efficiency and the health of the supply chain.

Term, technical quality, improvements, sustainability — these should carry weight. Cheap gets expensive. We know this in EPC. It is no different in O&M.

So whose fault is it?

Back to the question that titles this essay.

Spain has more than 8,000 municipalities, 17 autonomous communities with very high levels of autonomy, a central administration with increasingly diffuse competences, and a European layer that legislates directly on the environmental obligations.

Water service is, ultimately, a municipal competence.

So: ask a mayor of a village of 200 inhabitants what his infrastructure investment plan is. He is legally responsible. He has no capacity whatsoever. He discharges the problem onto an operator, public or private, and moves on.

The result is dispersion. And dispersion produces inequity: a Spanish citizen’s relationship with water is materially different depending on whether they live.

Different tariffs, different rules, different service standards, different transparency. That inequity should worry politicians far more than it does.

DAQUAS is asking the ministry to take up the flag of harmonisation — to gather urban water legislation, which fragments further with every transposition patch (wastewater here, drinking water there, cybersecurity somewhere else), and integrate it.

Not necessarily a national economic regulator — Jesús concedes that is very hard in Spain, whatever other countries have done — but at minimum a coherent, homogeneous, stable framework.

And he added the line that should be on a poster in every ministry:

DAQUAS publishes an annual tariff calculation model, and he wishes people would use it, because — his words — have you ever tried to understand a water bill? I don’t understand it. And I’m the president.

That’s why our Knowledge Hub to be released soon during next weeks will include a specific page explaining a water tariff :)

What we can actually do

I closed by asking what an individual professional can do. His answer had nothing to do with technology.

Explain water to the people closest to you. My wife has never in thirty years had a problem with water — it arrives, always, even during COVID when the entire country was at home.

That reliability is the single greatest achievement of Spanish urban water and simultaneously the reason it is not valued. Invisibility is the price of excellence.

When we’re told the supply will be cut for two hours, we fill entire bathtubs in panic, and then we empty them. We have no calibration for what this service costs, because we have never lived without it.

So: talk about water outside the circle of civil, industrial and chemical engineers. Explain that regenerated water can irrigate crops and feed industry. Explain that the world technology leader in this field is sitting here, in Spain, exporting.

There is one more thing I would add, which I raised with him and which he did not disagree with: we may be losing the generation that built this.

The professionals retiring right now are the ones who made Spain a global reference in urban water, and the intake behind them is thin.

Capital that took forty years to accumulate can be lost in five. Whether the sector gets revalued in Spain before or after that gap becomes visible is, I suspect, the real question of the next decade.

FORTUNATELY, there is hope. And this will be demonstrated through the 1st IWA - Young Water Professionals Iberoamerican Conference, were the new generation with less than 35 years old will gather in Madrid.

Water conditions everything. Agriculture, industry, the economy, where people can live. It is a physical asset.

Nobody is going to change that.

The demand for what we do is not in question.

Quotes worth keeping

On the price of water

“If you see a one-cent coin on the ground, you don’t bend down to pick it up. One cent is what we Spaniards pay for five litres of water. Yesterday on the train I bought a quarter-litre bottle for three euros.”

“When you buy a beer, the price includes the hops, the malt, the bottle and the truck that brought it. With water, the price only includes the water.”

“The tariff imbalance is genuinely alarming. Producing five litres of water does not cost one cent — not remotely.”

On investment and infrastructure

“At the current renewal coefficient, there are pipes that will only be replaced every 400 years. That makes no sense at all.”

“Fine, let’s agree on an efficiency index. But we’re going to have an index to measure misery — because if we invest in the index instead of in meters and mains renewal, the index will keep on measuring the same misery.”

On regulation without financing

“You read the directive and it says genuinely interesting things, and I don’t dispute a single obligation in it. But it doesn’t say one line about how it’s financed. Not one line.”

“It’s not just transposing an environmental directive. A serious financial burden arrives with it, and nobody talks about that.”

On contract structure as a financing tool

“Maybe it doesn’t all have to come from European subsidies, and maybe it doesn’t all have to come from price. Maybe it’s enough to tell an operator: instead of managing for five years, you’ll manage for twenty — and you’ll make the investments.”

On politics

“The tariff is a weapon thrown between parties that actually believe the same thing. Water should come out of the political debate and go into the government’s agenda of priorities.”

“If we play politics with water, the one who pays is the citizen — and the most disadvantaged one. Not the comfortable family in Málaga or Seville, but the man in a village in the Sierra de Granada where the water arrives almost by accident.”

On public vs private

“Efficiency is not the property of the private or the public. Efficiency belongs to the efficient. There are efficient public companies and ones that aren’t; efficient private companies and ones that aren’t.”

“They asked me if I’d come to privatise EMASESA. I said there’s no need — EMASESA is already partially privatised. It’s 100% public, with twelve municipalities on its board, and it works superbly. And the treatment plants, the network maintenance and the leak repairs are all run by private companies.”

On procurement

“Let’s not depend on price alone. If you go to a pure auction system, you’re damaging quality and efficiency. Term, improvements, technical quality, sustainability — these should count too.”

On governance and responsibility

“Entre todos la mataron y ella sola se murió.”

“The problem is that it’s difficult to find someone responsible, because it depends on so many people, and with such disparity between them.”

“Have you ever tried to understand a water bill? I don’t understand it. And I’m the president.”

On what professionals should do

“Help us tell the story. Help people understand water — not just civil, industrial and chemical engineers. Help people appreciate a sector that is a world technology leader and that is right here, in Spain.”

“Technical people have to do a lot of evangelising for water, because water is fundamental.”

On the job

“They told me at EMASESA that water hooks you. And it does.”

"The problem isn't that people want to get rich. It's that they don't want to get rich slowly."

Real wealth-building takes patience and time, most people reject it in favor of fast money.

Well, working in and for water is the same. Don’t panic if you feel you are missing out on a three-digit % increase because the headlines are all about other industries.

Water is also there, embedded. The backstage of the scene.

I did not say that. this came directly from Alexander Loucopoulos, one of the finest members of our community, and one of the best at articulating the complexity of the water business in a way that many can understand easily.

Alex is #1 on our leaderboard (the one who helped us bring in more members who share our vision for the community) and it’s not about numbers: I would rather you bring in the people who really want to be better and share our values.

Refer friends to The Water MBA sharing this link.

Alex also gave us a great opportunity by inviting us to New York last September to present our community at Rethinking Water (see a short behind-the-scenes video below). It's a highly recommendable gathering that is now expanding to more countries around the world.

So, as I was saying, I went to the gym walking last Sunday, after lunch, and played his conversation at Bloomberg in New York.

I recommend you listen to it: relax, no multitasking, find 30 minutes and listen, because you’ll frog-jump a few steps ahead in understanding our business.

The idea I want to build on is the one Alex mentioned about the gap between the macro and the local.

Read more

Not another Udemy playlist on how to prompt ChatGPT. Not a YouTube “10 AI tricks that will change your life.” I have nothing against those, but that is not what I need.

What I wanted was simpler to describe and much harder to find.

How does AI actually transform water on a real plant, with real membranes, real pumps, real chemistry, real operators?

I looked. I didn’t find it.

So I decided we would build it.

When we agreed to do this, I asked Sandro for two promises:

1. Keep it human, not technical. I don’t want to spend the course learning Python — my brain is not wired to digest that, and I doubt I’m the only one.

2. Make it real. Specific cases, clear situations, what to actually do — in language any of us can understand well enough to take action.

Quick note: this is the start of a new format for us. I don’t want to be the bottleneck for those of you who need specific topics drilled into far deeper than I can take you.

Starting from the plant floor

The honest place to start is operations, because that is where water either works or it doesn’t.

And here I have to be equally honest about myself. I am a civil engineer. My world is Business Development and EPC delivery,

AI in the control room is not my domain of expertise, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

So I did what I always try to do, I went to someone who actually knows.

I picked Sandro Hansen. I’ve listened to Sandro at events and congresses for a while now, and he has quietly become one of my favourites: someone with genuine, hands-on experience applying AI in water operations, not just talking about it in the abstract.

Just as important for us, Sandro shares the value this whole community is built on — knowledge sharing. Why we both believe this is necessary for so many of us, right now.

“Start now, start small, start with a real problem”

The first thing I asked Sandro was the question I imagine a lot of you are quietly asking yourselves: am I too late? Or is what we see today going to look nothing like what we’ll see in two years?

His answer was that now is a good moment to start.

The technology has been around for a long time. What changed is that computational capacity is finally accessible, and large language models arrived.

He put it in terms I understood: before, to use AI you needed to program, to do data science the hard way — like the old DOS days, where you typed every command into a black screen.

Then Windows appeared, the mouse appeared, and suddenly everyone could enter the computer. LLMs are that moment for AI. You no longer need to be a programmer to interact with the models and get real things done.

But the more important part of his advice was about how to start.

According to Sandro, roughly 90% of AI failures in our industry come from a single mistake: people using the technology for the technology.

They want to say they’re “doing AI,” so they launch a project without any clarity about what they’re actually trying to solve.

A few months later they announce that AI gave them nothing. But the technology was never the problem.

The question is whether you had a real problem to begin with — and whether you were clear about it.

A while back I ran a poll here asking what an AI course should focus on. One of the options simply carried the word problem, against others like optimization.

Almost everyone clicked problem. We all know we have them. The work is turning that instinct into a well-defined starting point.

AI is not magic, do your engineering homework first

If there is one message from Sandro I would tape above every control room, it’s this:

His example was beautifully concrete. A filter calculated to pass 300 m³/h will not suddenly pass 4,500 m³/h because you pointed an algorithm at it.

If your plant has a physical limitation, no amount of software solves it. You have to do your homework first.

He’d just visited a plant that did exactly that. They reworked the pretreatment, then moved from 400 m² to 440 m² membrane elements — higher production, lower energy.

Their consumption fell from 3.3 kWh/m³ to 2.8 kWh/m³, and here is the punchline: that was pure engineering, no AI at all.

Then AI comes in — trimming from 2.8 to maybe 2.6, or shifting production to the hours with more solar generation, so the same water costs less.

It’s (almost) all about data

To optimise any process, you need to see what goes in, what comes out, and how it performs.

For an ultrafiltration system, the outlet turbidity alone tells you almost nothing — you need the inlet turbidity too, because that’s what lets the system reason about whether to do a backwash, a chemical-enhanced backwash, or a full CIP, and which of those is the smartest economic decision at that moment.

And then he made a point that will sting a little for those of us trained to save every euro in a bid: don’t skimp on sensoring.

A pressure switch tells you when you’ve hit a limit. A pressure sensor tells you, in real time, whether fouling is developing faster than planned — and the price difference between the two is not large.

Same story with a level switch versus a level sensor: the switch stops your pump or prevents an overflow, but without continuous level data you can’t close a water balance inside your own plant.

We optimise so hard on capex that we quietly starve our future selves of the data that makes everything else possible.

He also told a story. A plant had its SCADA data retained for only 30 days.

It started as a small site, sensors kept getting added, memory stayed the same — and one day anything older than a month was simply gone.

Before you invest a single euro in “AI,” Sandro’s advice is to make sure the knowledge your plant already generates is stored properly and accessible. That’s business safety.

His sequence, honestly:

A UF cycle might need 45 to 90 days. A Mediterranean or North-African desal plant needs both summer and winter, because train an algorithm on August water and unleash it in January and it will fall over.

Do that groundwork, and a well-planned project can reach payback in around two years. Skip it, and of course the payback never shows up.

So what happens to the operators?

This is the question that comes up every single time, usually with some anxiety behind it, so let me say clearly where I’ve landed after this conversation.

We humans are not good at repetitive tasks. As Sandro mentioned, we get bored, we drift, we make mistakes.

But on the other side, we have something no model has: imagination. Intuition.

So here is what we believe actually happens.

AI won’t substitute the operator — it will run in the background, analysing information faster and continuously, and hand insights back to the person doing the job.

The difference won’t be operators versus machines.

It will be operators with a co-pilot versus operators without one.

The co-piloted operator is more productive, makes fewer errors, and — this is the real prize — perceives anomalies before the alarm goes off.

The plant becomes more efficient and more effective, and the human stays firmly in charge.

Sandro sees the same shift in the tooling. We’ve moved from AI that only analyses to agents that can act — always within limits you define.

You might let an agent nudge chemical dosage within a set range if it decides that’s warranted, while you keep control of everything else.

And increasingly the interface is a conversation: an operator starts a shift and asks the system where the two most important problems are today, or “I need 10% more water tomorrow — which train, in the most economical way?”

Watch the pressure climb on an RO and ask why, and the model might answer that it’s 70% biofouling, 30% scaling — so you know where to look first.

This is exactly the knowledge gap

Regular readers know I keep returning to one theme: the water sector’s problem is not only an investment gap, it’s a knowledge gap.

Sandro reached the same conclusion from the operational side without me prompting him.

He said, plainly, that you cannot find all of this in one place: you have to stitch it together from data science, from storage, from sensoring, from the algorithms, from the water itself.

That scattered, un-findable knowledge is precisely the course we’re building, a practical middle level that takes you from the designing engineer through construction, operation, and the supervisors and managers who have to plan it all.

Enough to make a good decision.

The invitation

We’re opening the first cohort now, and we’re keeping it small on purpose.

If you want in, the best thing you can do is send us your real problems and specific questions. Sandro and I genuinely want to build the sessions around what you need to solve, plant by plant, rather than around what we assume.

I’ll be in the room too, by the way. Not as a host performing expertise, but as another member, learning alongside you.

One last note about where this is going. This is the first of a new format for The Water MBA: courses led by real experts, on the specific topics you’re hungry for.

I don’t want to be the bottleneck. There are subjects many of you need drilled into far deeper than I can take you — so from here on, when the right expert and the right demand meet, we’ll bring them together.

That’s the whole point of this community. This is simply the first one.

Register for the Course

A few quotes

A few lines from the conversation worth keeping.

On when to start

“Now is a good moment. The technology has been around for years — what changed is that you no longer need to be a programmer to use it.”

On where to begin

“Start now, start small, and start with a real problem. The technology will work. The question is whether you have a real problem to solve — and clarity about it.”

On why projects fail

“Around 90% of failures come from launching an AI project just to say you’re doing AI, without any clarity about what you’re solving.”

On engineering first

“AI won’t make magic. A filter calculated for 300 m³/h will never pass 4,500. Do your homework before you reach for the software.”

On the real prize

“They went from 3.3 to 2.8 kWh/m³ with pure engineering, no AI. Then AI takes you from 2.8 to 2.6.”

On data

“If you don’t have data, you can’t do anything. And to optimise, you need to see what’s coming in — not just what’s going out.”

On sensors

“People try to save money on sensoring. But that’s exactly what steals the biggest benefit from AI later.”

On planning and payback

“Invest first in planning. A well-planned project pays back in about two years. When people say the payback never came — well, how did they start?”

On operators

“AI won’t substitute the operator. It runs in the background and hands the insights back. The difference isn’t operators versus machines — it’s operators with a co-pilot versus operators without one.”

On the co-pilot’s edge

“The real prize is perceiving the anomaly before the alarm goes off.”

On agents

“We’ve moved from AI that analyses to agents that act — always within the limits you define. This is not the future. It’s already happening.”

On the knowledge gap

“You can’t find all of this in one place. That’s why projects start and finish with an outside force — the internal team was never given enough to carry them.”

Think of a Joint Venture (JV) as a swimming pool. Everyone shares the same water. Whatever happens inside the pool affects everyone. If someone jumps in, everyone feels the splash.

Now think of a Consortium as a firewall. A forest may be burning just a few metres away (your partners inside), while your own trees remain green. You’re not completely isolated—wind and smoke will still affect you—but the firewall provides much greater protection from events outside your own expertise or control.

Let’s use a practical example based on a PPP project.

Imagine a client—for example, the government of a country—awards a developer or private equity company (TAQA, Acciona, ACWA Power, Engie, etc.) a 25-year Water Purchase Agreement (WPA). The tariff has been calculated based on the project’s lifecycle cost.

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I still remember receiving a call from someone on my team:

“I quit. I need to stop.”

I asked, “Do you mean another job?”

“No. I need to stop. I need to wake up on Monday and not open my laptop.”

Anxiety had reached its limit.

When I was younger, I didn’t pay much attention to these situations. I’m not even sure whether burnout has become more prevalent or whether we simply talk about it more openly today. But I genuinely want to understand the root causes.

One of my biggest challenges nowadays is that my job is neither a typical 9-to-5 nor purely technical or purely decision-making. I get home, and my brain keeps spinning:

• “What an absurd thing that person said in this morning’s call.”

• “Tomorrow I’m going to raise this issue with my boss.”

• “There are weaknesses in this Excel model.”

• “We’re behind on deadlines.”

• “Why can’t others complete tasks as quickly as requested?”

The laptop closes, but the mind doesn’t.

Personally, my anxiety decreases when I have a clear set of actions under my control. If it were just me, supported by AI agents executing tasks exactly as I want and when I want, I feel I could navigate almost anything.

The real challenge is navigating an entire human ecosystem. How do you control what is outside your control?

Other people’s priorities. Human resistance when everyone is overloaded. Tasks that never get done as planned. Stakeholders pursuing their own interests. The gap between what the client expects, what your team can realistically deliver, and what the budget actually allows.

That’s the battlefield.

Perhaps burnout isn’t only about working too many hours. Perhaps it often comes from carrying the cognitive load of managing constant uncertainty, competing incentives, and dependencies on dozens of people and factors you simply cannot control.

And maybe one of the hardest lessons in leadership is accepting that progress is rarely limited by technical knowledge. More often, it’s limited by the complexity of humans working together.

I’ve come to believe that productivity is as much an engineering problem as any other, and one we’re far worse at solving.

So I sat down with , founder of Equist and a man with sixteen years across the corporate and non-profit worlds, to talk about it.

His opening line tells you everything about why he’s worth listening to: he describes himself as the most unproductive person he used to know.

Always burnt out, always with too much to do, checking every box of what not to do if you want to stay sane.

He had to learn the way out the hard way, and decided to help other people do it faster.

The five things grinding us down

Tejas surveyed around fifty employees across different companies and found the same five pressures showing up again and again.

Reading them, I recognised every single one from my own desk.

1. Communication overload.

You wake up to 150 new emails and fifty different requests, and by the hour the pile only grows.

The trap, as Tejas put it, is believing you’ll ever clear it — that there’s a day coming where everything is finally settled. There isn’t. The reward for good work is more work.

The more you get done, the more comes back your way. Accept that, and you can start making real choices instead of chasing an empty inbox that will never exist.

2. Constant time pressure.

Everything is urgent, everything was due yesterday.

But as the old line goes: what is urgent is seldom important, and what is important is seldom urgent.

In water, where projects are long and multidisciplinary, this is brutal — the genuinely important work (the strategy, the relationship, the design decision that saves you in commissioning) keeps getting shoved aside by whatever’s screaming loudest today.

3. Fading boundaries.

We used to shut down a desktop and go home. Now we just close the lid — and the phone keeps us tethered anyway. Tejas knows people who wake at two or three in the morning to check email. When does work end and life begin? For too many of us, the honest answer is that it doesn’t.

4. Inadequate rest and rejuvenation.

The revenge social-media binges, the scrolling, the shorts — all of it eats the rest that focus depends on. We’re tired in a way sleep alone doesn’t fix.

I personally take 30-40 minutes break at lunch time to do some exercise as routine.

5. Lack of clarity.

Ask five people on a team what its objectives are and you may get five answers. Tejas once asked a team simply what do you do — not the mission, not the purpose, just the work — and nobody could articulate it cleanly. We’re so buried in our own tasks that we lose the larger view entirely.

Three levels, but only two you control

Tejas frames the solutions across three levels: the individual, the team, and the organisation.

Org-level productivity — structure, vision, strategy — matters, but for most of us it’s fixed and far away.

The rubber hits the road (I love this expression) at the individual and team levels.

That’s where we actually live our days, and that’s where the gap is widest. So that’s where he spends his time, and where I’ll spend the rest of this piece.

Fixing your own productivity

At the individual level, Tejas works through six areas. Think of them as a diagnostic: when your day falls apart, one of these is usually the culprit.

1. Mindset.

This one arrived late in his own journey. He spent years hunting for the tool, the hack, the template, the software — when the most powerful lever was how conducive his own mindset was.

If a voice in your head is telling you it can’t be done, no app will save you.

2. Prioritisation.

There is no version of the day where you do everything.

One technique I’d single out: protect fifteen to twenty minutes a day for the one task that will help you grow — the strategy, the new idea, the thing that’s important but never urgent.

We always tell ourselves once I finish this, then I’ll get to it. We rarely do. Fifteen minutes a day, defended, beats the someday that never comes.

3. Planning.

Here’s an exercise worth doing: forget your constraints and write out your ideal day.

Two things happen.

You get clarity you may never have had before, and you usually discover the ideal day is closer to achievable than you thought — maybe not a hundred percent, but eighty.

And the deeper point Tejas made stuck with me:

It’s the one moment in the day you think about your work before drowning in it.

This is the one place I’ll admit my own practice. Every morning I open my notebook and write eight points — what I want from the day, the meeting that matters, the thing that can’t slip. I don’t always finish them.

But the planning keeps me from getting lost in the volume. Even when you don’t comply, having the plan helps.

4. Task management.

The average person carries around a hundred open tasks — scattered across a sticky note, an app, a flagged email, a half-remembered promise.

The tool barely matters. What matters is that everything lives in one place. Tejas keeps a master list digitally so it’s always with him, then writes the day’s handful on paper for the satisfaction of crossing them off. Mix the two if it helps.

5. Attention.

For me, this is the central barrier of the age — for business and for life. Getting five uninterrupted minutes of someone’s focus is genuinely hard now, and it’s only getting harder. I know that if I sit down to a one-hour webinar, I won’t hold my own attention either. The ability to focus is becoming a serious competitive advantage. The people who relearn it will pull ahead.

6. Triggers.

And even when your focus is perfect, an email lands or a meeting starts and it’s gone. The whole game is learning to absorb the triggers without letting them shred the deep work.

What to actually do about it

Tejas closed the individual section with concrete moves:

1. Build a deep-work office.

Focus blocks in the calendar — one or two protected hours a day. Dedicated quiet zones if you’re physical. Deep Work Mondays, or even a deep-work morning, so people catch up before the meeting machine starts (that 8am Monday call when you’ve barely begun the week is the worst feeling in corporate life).

And track your deep work — you can’t improve what you don’t measure. He logs every working day in a Google Sheet, and the tracking alone keeps him honest.

2. Become priority-focused.

Define weekly priorities. Map the highest-priority tasks for each role, then check how much of the week actually went to them.

A salesperson who spent the week in internal meetings and two hours with a client did not have a good week. Twenty percent of the work delivers eighty percent of the impact — find that twenty percent, go deep, and you build expertise and process you can actually scale.

3. Enable a positive mindset.

Recognise people beyond awards: a blog post telling someone’s story can be more powerful than a trophy, because almost everyone has an interesting story to tell.

Fixing the team

Same structure, six areas — and in our multidisciplinary world, the team level is where water projects live or die.

1. Direction.

Is the team clear on its purpose, and is that purpose inspiring? We set revenue goals and delivery targets, but those don’t move anyone. People come to work for the mission — for the impact. Keep reminding them of it.

2. Delegation.

A real skill, not a personality trait. Individual contributors often struggle to hand work off, and nobody teaches them to. It’s the central skill in the leap from contributor to manager.

3. Managing upwards.

Build a persona of your manager. Do they want the detailed brief or the short one? Written or verbal? A call right after the meeting, or time to think first? Every manager is different, and figuring yours out early saves you years of friction.

4. Culture.

High performance lives between rigidity and chaos. Too few processes and you’re ad hoc; too many and you’re frozen. You need both processes and room to experiment.

5. Meetings.

This is the one I feel most acutely in water.

The work is so multidisciplinary that you spin up a weekly follow-up for every project, every opportunity, every line — and suddenly you’re in ten or fifteen recurring calls a week with no time left to prepare for any of them.

Worse, you sit through most of them adding two minutes of value across an hour, headphones on, half-working in parallel.

His fixes: a meetings policy document; a cap on daily meeting hours; better-prepared meetings (because good meetings mean fewer meetings); the 40-20-40 rule for large ones (forty percent preparing, twenty percent in the room, forty percent on follow-up); and protected meeting-free slots.

6. Collaboration.

How do you get good ideas from everyone, not just the loudest voices top-down? Tejas pointed to brain writing — having people write their ideas down before the meeting, so they aren’t anchored to whoever speaks first.

I can’t help but “laugh” writing this. In my career, I try to get people to actually show up to meetings, so asking them to write and think before speaking… I’m very far from that now. But I still think the underlying idea is powerful (I believe Amazon, or another well-known company, has done something similar).

Run that way, collaboration can generate up to forty-one percent more ideas than simply opening the floor, where people tend to agree and build rather than originate.

What to actually do about it

1. Optimise meetings

Using everything above (do not laugh please…), the cap, the quality, the free slots. And for the big ones, collect feedback: why not ask whether an hour of fifteen people’s time was worth it?

2. Enhance collaboration,

Joint targets across teams, and a focus on meaningful collaboration — not the checkbox kind where you forward an email and call it teamwork.

Real collaboration is when you’d lose something by not doing it. One mechanism I love for water: the bridge role (a typical coordinator or good middle manager) — someone embedded enough in two teams to actively spot where they should be working together.

In a discipline this fragmented, those bridges are gold. The more workload you’re under, the more you need them, precisely when you’re most tempted to retreat into your own silo.

3. Drive direction

By aligning on first principles (why does this organisation, this team, exist?), setting clear goals — including a no criteria, an explicit line on what you will not take on — balancing process with flexibility, and, crucially, focusing on the what, not the how.

Give a team the what and let them own the how. Managing every detail of the how disempowers the very people you hired to figure it out.

Be safe!

The pattern is out across the sector: everything is urgent, nothing is ever finished, people exhaust themselves and jump from job to job chasing a calm that no employer can hand them.

The new generations are arriving already feeling it.

Small, defended, compounding choices are how you build the kind of working life you can actually sustain, in water, or anywhere.

Here as usual a brief journey through key quotes.

On burnout

• “I call myself the most unproductive person I used to know.”

• “I pretty much checked the box of what you should not do to be productive.”

On communication overload

• “The reward for good work is more work. The more you get done, the more you get in return.”

• On the trap: “thinking that you’ll be able to get over your email, finally reach a day where everything is settled.”

• Ramón: “Maybe we wake up a day with 150 new emails and 50 different requests.”

On urgency

• “What is urgent is seldom important, and what is important is seldom urgent.”

On fading boundaries

• “When does work end and when does personal life begin has become a blur.”

• “I know of people who get up in the middle of the night to check their email — 2 o’clock, 3 o’clock.”

On clarity

• “You ask five people in a team what the objectives are, you may get five different answers.”

On mindset

• “I always felt like I needed a tool, a hack, a template, a software. But in reality, one of the most powerful things is how conducive your mindset is.”

On prioritisation

• “If you want to get everything done — that’s a big red flag.”

• “Just take 15–20 minutes a day working on something that’s not urgent but important in the long run. Otherwise you’ll never have time.”

On planning

• “It’s not necessarily the plan that’s important, because the plan rarely happens. It’s the thinking you put in when you planned that matters more.”

• Ramón: “Even if you don’t manage to comply, having a planning always helps.”

On task management

• “The tool doesn’t matter so much — Notion, Todoist, paper. The main thing is being able to put your tasks down somewhere.”

On attention

• Ramón: “For me this is the main barrier nowadays — for business, for everything, even for personal life.”

• “It’s going to be a huge competitive advantage if you can learn how to focus again.”

• “We’re going shorter and shorter and shorter.”

On meetings

• “Every company has a financial policy for expenses, but we don’t have a time policy.”

• “If you spend six hours of eight in meetings, that’s 75% of your time — and 75% of the person’s cost — but it’s not governed by any policy.”

• Ramón: “In the end we are just there physically, but not mentally.”

• The 40-20-40 rule: “40% before the meeting preparing, 20% executing, 40% afterwards in follow-ups.”

On collaboration

• “Collaboration should feel like: if I don’t make this happen, I’m actually losing something. Until that feeling is there, you won’t collaborate effectively.”

• On brain writing: writing ideas down before the meeting “can generate up to 41% more ideas.”

• On bridge roles: having people who understand both teams so “they see collaboration opportunities actively.”

On feedback

• Ramón: “Feedback, in all aspects of life, is very important.”

• “You should be surprised if you don’t get any feedback, because there is always some feedback that exists.”

On managing upwards

• “Figuring out your particular manager’s persona early will save you a lot of stress in the future.”

On direction

• “Focus on the what, not the how. Give the team the what and let them figure out the how.”

• On boundaries: “Having a no criteria — deciding what you will not work on.”

On recognition

• “Recognising people beyond awards — a blog post telling their story can be very powerful.”

My thanks to Tejas Pahlajani for a conversation that, fittingly, was the most productive hour of my week.

📡A warning went up on my radar this past week, and the two hotspots are Argentina and Brazil. It didn’t come from a report. It came from three separate conversations that kept pointing at the same thing: industrial water reuse — and, to a lesser but real degree, desalination — is turning into a genuine opportunity in both countries.

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🧠 Nuclear energy is making a comeback, but not through large-scale plants. The focus is shifting toward medium, small, and even microreactors.

This could enable much wider deployment of nuclear energy worldwide, creating more opportunities to integrate desalination—where energy consumption remains the main bottleneck—into these business models.

In some cases, water will also be a critical system within these plants, creating additional opportunities for water professionals.

Last November I was at a desalination congress in Valencia, and it caught my attention they included Nuclear Energy in the agenda.

Not the giant plants we picture, but small modular reactors, SMRs.

The narrative behind is the idea that if you could bolt a compact, predictable source of energy next to a desal plant, you might unlock desalination.

But what’s driving the development of Nuclear in Energy after? I guess it is related to AI development and Data Centers and the geopolitics of Energy.

I remember 3 key sessions:

1. The first one led by Jose Luis San Vicente as Director, Commercial Operations EMEA from Westinghouse, a sober account of how nuclear megaprojects run years late and billions over budget.

They have a full reactor portfolio spanning three scales: the AP1000 (large), the AP300 SMR (mid), and the eVinci microreactor.

AP300 design certification is anticipated by 2027, followed by site-specific licensing and first-unit construction toward the end of the decade.

There’s an active European pipeline — a UK project (Community Nuclear Power) to build four AP300 units in Northeast England targeting early-2030s operation, plus MoUs in Ukraine, Slovakia, Finland and Sweden.

2. Second session with Marco Cioffi from Ansaldo Energy, about SMR’s, developing the EAGLES-300 — a ~300 MWe lead-cooled fast reactor, with consortium partners ENEA (Italy), RATEN (Romania) and SCK CEN (Belgium), formally established in June 2025.

I actually had a meeting with Marco a few days before the event to discuss a few questions about how to integrate desalination into the nuclear business model. Here is the publication I wrote a few weeks ago explaining it.

3. Third one, I had lunch and met Florent Heidet, CTO of Nano Nuclear Energy, about Micro Modular Reactors. Their own guidance points to a demonstration unit in the second half of 2027. Target market is defense, remote sites, and data centers.

A pure-play microreactor developer, the smallest scale of the three by far. Their flagship is the KRONOS MMR, a 45 MWt / 15 MWe.

Why didn't anyone tell us this two years ago? Our investment would have grown by 3.5× in just 700 days. And then we wonder why capital keeps flowing into other sectors... 😂

I left Valencia wanting to understand the nuclear business from the inside.

And it turned out the best person to ask had been sitting in my group of friends the whole time. Jose Antonio Briones (Pepe for friends) and I studied civil engineering together in Granada.

He went on to do a master’s in Paris on large energy structures, spent three and a half years at EDF — Électricité de France, the French nuclear utility — working on the structures and the installations of the reactor building, and later moved to Bristol to work on site for the lead contractor at Hinkley Point C in England.

Design office and construction site, both sides of the same reactor. So I asked him onto the community and share a conversation about it.

The first thing I learned is that nuclear engineers and water engineers are, secretly, in the same business.

“Pressurised Water” is right there in the name

Ask most people what cools a nuclear reactor. The answer is water.

The reactor type that dominates the West is the PWR, the Pressurised Water Reactor — and as Pepe pointed out, the very first word of the design is water.

The European evolution of that design is the EPR, the European Pressurised Reactor, the one built at Flamanville in France, Olkiluoto in Finland, Taishan in China, and Hinkley Point C in the UK.

Strip away the mystique and a PWR works on a principle a water engineer recognises instantly: the reactor core heats water under pressure; that water passes its heat to steam generators; the steam spins a turbine to make electricity; and a third, separate circuit pulls in river or sea water to carry the waste heat away.

My favourite detail is about control. When an operator wants more electricity, what actually happens is that the flow of water through the reactor increases.

When they want to shut it down, they gradually starve it of water. The throttle of a nuclear plant is, in effect, a water valve.

Because water is the coolant, it also decides where you can build.

A PWR has to sit on a river or on the coast, because it consumes enormous quantities of water and must have somewhere to dump its heat.

And the rules are strict in a way any of us doing marine works will appreciate: you typically can’t return cooling water more than about three degrees warmer than what you took in, so as not to cook the local ecosystem. That single constraint shapes the entire marine infrastructure.

If you visit the coral reefs along the west coast of Saudi Arabia, especially from Jeddah southwards, you’ll find several combined desalination and power complexes. I remember working on one project where I was told,

“Before you build the desalination plant, go out there, collect any live corals, and relocate them to a safe area to avoid the local impact of the brine discharge.”

When our survey team went out, they couldn’t find any living coral. All dead.

Is this explanation entirely correct? I’m not fully sure. Some people argue that it wasn’t the localized thermal discharges alone, but the generally warm waters of the Red Sea that caused the coral decline.

At the same time, the northern Red Sea remains one of the world’s premier diving destinations, and developments such as Amaala are built around protecting this unique marine ecosystem. Coral reefs in the Gulf of Aqaba are also renowned for their exceptional resilience.

This illustrates just how complex these environmental questions are. It is often difficult to attribute ecosystem changes to a single cause when localized impacts may be occurring alongside broader regional or global climate trends.

And that marine infrastructure is staggering. Pepe told me the original budget for the marine works at Hinkley Point C — just the breakwater, the intake tunnels running out under the sea to fetch water, the outfalls — was on the order of £200 million on its own.

The intake tunnels run about three and a half kilometres out to sea. A project inside the project.

I sat there doing the mental arithmetic, because in desalination we capture seawater and discharge brine too — and in our world the marine works can swallow almost the entire margin of a plant if goes wrong.

Suddenly a lot of things made sense.

For years I’ve watched marine contractors quote our desal intakes and thought how are they this expensive, they’ll never win work like that. Now I understand: many of them are calibrated to power-station, the €200-million kind.

When they see a modest €20-30-million desal intake, they’re not hungry for it. That’s why so many of our plants end up working with mid-tier, more conventional contractors — and on a desal project, the marine works so often set the schedule (no intake, no commissioning) and are the single most volatile line in the budget.

Move the same plant a hundred kilometres up the coast and the number moves with it.

Remember, we have a course that is far from perfect, but I believe it is extremely valuable for any professional with any level of responsibility related to these systems. It provides the context you need and highlights the areas that deserve the most attention to help avoid costly mistakes. → Register Here

Fukushima was a water-pump story

People remember explosions and radiation.

On 11 March 2011 a magnitude-9.0 earthquake struck off Japan. The plant’s structure did its job: the operating reactors scrammed — shut down automatically — exactly as designed. The engineering held.

Then the sea arrived. The tsunami that followed reached around 13–15 metres at the site, overtopping a seawall designed for a wave of roughly 5.7 metres.

The wave first knocked out the seawater pumps along the shoreline, then flooded the turbine and reactor buildings and drowned the emergency diesel generators and electrical switchgear sitting in the basements.

The result was a station blackout: both off-site grid power and on-site backup power gone. With no power, there were no working cooling pumps.

And here is the cruel physic, even a reactor that has been shut down is not “off.”

Pepe used the image of a cigarette: you stub it out, the flame is gone, but the ember keeps burning, and it will still burn your skin. That latent decay heat kept building until the cores overheated, melted, and produced the hydrogen that blew apart the outer buildings.

So the proximate cause of the worst nuclear accident of our century was not “literally” the reactor and not the earthquake. It was the loss of cooling water circulation, a set of pumps.

The fatal vulnerability was co-locating the backup power and the ultimate heat sink below the tsunami line.

Engineers even have a name for the nightmare: the LOCA, Loss of Coolant Accident. A water problem.

The pump that moved a continent

Now follow the chain outward, because this is maybe part of the reason that unblocked a piece of the global energy transition.

Germany had spent years arguing about nuclear. In 2010, Angela Merkel’s government had actually extended the lifetimes of the country’s reactors — the “phase-out of the phase-out.”

Then Fukushima happened. Within days, in mid-March 2011, Berlin reversed course and imposed a moratorium, pulling the eight oldest reactors offline.

By 30 May 2011 the government had committed to closing every German nuclear plant by 2022, a decision parliament ratified by 513 votes to 79.

The last three German reactors finally went dark in April 2023. As the Clean Energy Wire archive lays out, it was the swiftest reversal in German energy policy since reunification — and it threw the country’s full political weight behind the Energiewende, the renewables transition.

Whatever you think of that decision, a wave overtops a seawall in Japan. Basement pumps flood.

A continent’s largest economy abandons nuclear and pours itself into wind and solar.

The energy transition in Europe took a particular shape because a set of cooling-water pumps went underwater.

Why these projects are always late and always over budget

EPR projects in Europe have been a near-uniform story of overruns: Olkiluoto in Finland ran something like 14–18 years long and roughly tripled its cost;

Flamanville in France stretched well over a decade past plan;

Hinkley Point C’s bill has climbed from an original ~£18 billion (2015 prices) toward the mid-£30-billions, with first power now expected around 2030.

Pepe explained the mechanism.

Construction often starts before the design is fully finished, so you build, discover a clash, and rework.

The safety systems are so complex that every one generates fresh regulatory and engineering challenges — Hinkley’s design assessment reportedly logged hundreds of unresolved findings and thousands of design changes, some of them added because of Fukushima.

Europe also lost industrial muscle memory after decades of barely building anything, so the supply chain and the know-how had to be rebuilt from scratch.

But the deepest reason is one Pepe put bluntly: in nuclear, the only way to avoid delay is to compromise on safety.

A single accident can make a country like Germany tear up its entire energy policy.

So you get validation chains that are punishingly long — a document is drafted, then verified, then confirmed, three levels deep — and concrete shells one and a half to two metres thick, reinforced with diameter-40 bars you’d almost never see on an ordinary civil site, packed so densely that anchoring the actual equipment to the wall becomes a physical puzzle.

It’s the price of zero error.

It’s the same pattern we live in water, just slower and less dramatic.

A hundred years ago our job was simply to supply water and discharge it. Then we learned we were polluting, so the rules tightened. Then industrial chemistry produced contaminants nobody had heard of, and the rules tightened again.

Pepe had the phrase for it: return of experience, trial and error. Regulation is the scar tissue of past failures.

After Fukushima, the French didn’t abandon nuclear; they bolted diesel backup pumps onto steel towers several metres up, so that whatever floods, something still pumps.

And they raised the design wave at new plants to a one-in-ten-thousand-year event. The rule changed because the sea taught a lesson.

The mystery almost nobody knows: how a reactor is actually designed

When Pepe worked on the outer containment shell — the thick concrete skin meant to survive an external assault, anything from a stray airliner to a missile — he and his team knew exactly what reinforcement to install.

But they were not allowed to know the design loads themselves.

The inputs that determined how much the shell had to withstand were classified — secret défense in France — held by the Ministry of Defence together with a tiny inner circle of the design team.

Think about what that means. The engineers building the wall didn’t know what size of impact it was being built to survive, by design, so that nobody could reverse-engineer the threat the plant could or couldn’t take.

In the water world we have nothing remotely like it; our design basis is on the drawings for anyone to read. I’ve handled plenty of confidential commercial information, but a structure whose own builders are blind to its load case is a different category of secrecy — and a measure of just how strategic these assets are.

We’ve now seen desalination plants treated as critical wartime targets in the Middle East. A desal plant in Saudi Arabia, in Iraq, in Israel can be the thing keeping an industry or a city watered, and that makes it a target.

I learned this the expensive way back in 2016, costing our first Saudi project. I’d penciled in a modest budget for the security system, a fence, some cameras, the kind of thing that runs €50,000 here, etc counting a total of 2 M€.

By the time the real requirements landed — anti-vehicle barriers, high-spec cameras with specified image quality, coastal radar to spot an approaching boat, sign-offs with the authorities — we were heading toward five to seven million.

I didn’t understand it then. Critical water infrastructure and critical energy infrastructure are converging on the same threat model.

The small reactors coming for the data centre, and maybe the desal plant

Which brings me back to Valencia, and to where the technology is heading.

The pitch for SMRs — small modular reactors — is essentially a reaction to everything above: instead of one vast bespoke building that takes fifteen years, you factory-build smaller units of roughly 300 MW, deploy faster, and spread the risk.

The trade-off, as Pepe noted, is that you’ve now got ten small things to keep secure instead of one big one, which is a real question.

To give a sense of scale: a single full-size EPR puts out around 1,650 MW — enough to power the whole Madrid region. An SMR is a fraction of that, but far more manageable.

The United States is moving fastest; its Department of Energy has fast-tracked a batch of advanced-reactor developers, and the demand pull is coming overwhelmingly from one place — data centres.

The hyperscalers have been signing nuclear deals at a startling pace: Meta with Oklo and an Illinois plant, Google with Kairos Power, Amazon investing some $20 billion around Talen’s Susquehanna site and exploring SMRs, X-energy partnered with Amazon.

The largest US tech companies have collectively contracted for well over 10 GW of new nuclear in roughly a year, chasing carbon-free, always-on power for AI.

The geopolitics of energy is reaching for our sector, and we should be paying attention.

We’ll watch the SMR race. When the documents start naming desalination in the same breath as the data centre, the water sector has already been invited into the ring.

A few key quotes

A quick journey through our talk as usual.

On why water decides everything

• “Access to water is the key factor that determines where you can site a nuclear plant.”

• “A pressurised-water reactor has to sit on a river or by the sea. It needs to cool itself, and it consumes enormous quantities of water.”

On the name being the clue

• “The very first word you meet in the design is ‘pressurised water.’ The heart of how it works is putting water under pressure.”

• “When you want more electricity, what you’re really doing is increasing the flow of water. When you want to shut it down, you gradually cut the water off.”

On Fukushima

• “The worst accident that can happen in a nuclear plant is the LOCA — the Loss of Cooling Accident. Running out of cooling.”

• “The plant’s design withstood the earthquake perfectly. What it didn’t withstand was the height of the wave.”

• “The pumps were electric. The power dropped, they stopped pumping, and the whole thing was left with no cooling.”

• “It’s like a cigarette. You stub it out in the ashtray, but it keeps smouldering — and if you press it to your arm, it still burns you.”

On regulation and safety

• “It’s systematic, and almost impossible to avoid — because the only way to dodge the delays is to give up on safety, and that’s the one thing this sector can’t allow.”

• “There’s no margin for error. You cannot fail.”

• “One accident can make a country like Germany put its entire energy policy in question.”

• “Return of experience. Trial and error.”

On cost overruns and delays

• “Validation chains that are excessively long. You draft a document, it gets verified, then it gets confirmed. Three levels of validation.”

• “Diameter-40 rebar — you barely see that on any kind of civil works.”

• “The reinforcement is so dense it ends up looking like a collage of anchor plates, and eventually you run out of physical space to fix the equipment to the wall.”

On the secrecy of reactor design

• “We knew the reinforcement we had to place. We knew what we had to build. But we had no access to the inputs it was designed with — those are defence secrets.”

On the design-versus-construction gap

• “Someone makes a mistake and the error flows downstream — but when you get to site, you’re the one who eats it.”

• “It becomes a tennis match between the designer and the constructor over who owns the problem.”

• “Patience, tact, and understanding everyone’s difficulties — otherwise the project simply doesn’t move.”

On the sheer scale of Hinkley Point C

• “It’s the closest thing there is to the pyramids of Egypt. To get around the site, you had four bus lines.”

• “It wasn’t a site. It was a city being built — with barracks and a football pitch.”

On the marine works

• “The original budget for the marine works alone was £200 million. The intake pipes run three and a half kilometres out to sea. A project inside the project.”

• “You can’t discharge water more than three degrees warmer than what you took in, so as not to disturb the ecosystem. It’s measured to the millimetre.”

On critical infrastructure as a target

• “Desalination plants have already become critical targets. Any new design now has to take that into account.”

• “I put in €50,000 for security. It ended up between five and seven million — cameras, anti-vehicle barriers, coastal radar. That’s when I understood what a critical asset really is.”

On SMRs and where this is heading

• “You build one big building or ten small ones. That’s the dilemma.”

• “The Americans can afford it — they live far from anyone else’s missiles.”

• “Data centres paired with SMRs. I think that’s where the technological future is going. And here we are, watching the bulls from behind the fence.”

On the water sector’s moment

• “The elite up there — whoever they are — are making decisions to make water investable. The money is coming.”

• “The UK right now is a good place to work in water. Very few people realise the scale of the problem they have.”

It happens at conferences, in tender rooms, on LinkedIn.

And it’s almost always a bad conversation, because both sides argue from ideology and cherry-picked anecdotes.

Here’s the problem: you can’t run a controlled experiment on a water utility. You can’t privatize half of a city and keep the other half public (I think…), wait twenty years, and compare.

Every country has one dominant model, one history, one set of confounding variables.

Except one.

After 1989, the United Kingdom accidentally became the closest thing our industry has to a laboratory.

Same island. Same climate. Same Victorian pipes. Same legal tradition. Four models.

The status of the UK water sector is extremely interesting, full of opportunities for water professionals for the rest of our careers.

This is probably the topic I have spent the most time researching and discussing with colleagues over the last three years. I wanted to consolidate some of that knowledge, which is why I created this is Part I: what actually happened, 1989 to the mid-2010s, and what the experiment showed.

Part II will cover what’s happening right now, and where I think it’s going, stories such as Thames Water’s slow-motion crisis, the decision about abolishing Ofwat, the once-in-a-generation regulatory reform now on the table…all of it is downstream of the story I’m going to tell you today.

Let’s start where the British themselves started: at the bottom.

Read more

Last week I stood in front of around 30 people at EuroMed 2026, the congress organised by the European Desalination Society, and I had about twenty minutes to say something that mattered (at least to me).

For the many of you who weren’t in the room, I share again in video and writing.

EuroMed was a good congress precisely because the conversations were more practical than theoretical. The presentations felt like professionals comparing scars rather than reciting slides.

That is exactly the kind of event I think our sector needs more of, and it’s the same instinct that has driven everything I’ve tried to build over the last three years.

So rather than let the talk evaporate the moment I left the stage, I wanted to turn it into something the whole community can reuse.

A few anecdotes from the event...

By the way, I have to confess this was probably the event where I received the most unexpected positive feedback about The Water MBA.

I remember three years ago walking around conferences trying to approach people: “Hey, I’d love to chat...” and making the first move every time.

This event was completely different. Funnily enough, every time I crossed the exhibition hall from one side to the other, someone stopped me for a conversation. It made me realise that attending events has become far more enjoyable and productive than it used to be.

One conversation really stayed with me. Someone told me:

“I’m here because I saw your post saying you were attending. I came with my wife and our little kid. We’ve had a really tough year and a half, especially my wife, and she needed a change of scenery. We thought this event would be a great opportunity.”

I replied that I was simply happy if I had contributed, even in a small way, to making his wife happy—because when she’s happy, everyone at home is happier too. 😊

It reminded me that, beyond our professional ambitions and technical discussions, we can also have a positive impact on people’s personal lives.

Another funny moment (actually happened twice!). Someone introduced me to a group:

“This is Ramon Rubio. Do you know him?”

The first reaction was:

“No idea... from Company X?”

Then the person introducing me asked:

“Really? You don’t know The Water MBA?”

And suddenly it clicked:

“Ahhh... you’re the LinkedIn guy!”
“Oh... The Water MBA guy!”

I spent quite a bit of time explaining that this is no longer about me, or simply about creating content on social media.

Today, The Water MBA is an ecosystem. It brings together hundreds of water professionals who freely engage in our networking community chat, read our articles, watch our videos, and contribute to the discussions.

Social media is simply the front door, it helps more people discover the community and join what we’ve built together.

The problem I opened with

My starting point was a single observation: the sector moves faster than our knowledge.

A few years ago I began noticing two things drifting apart.

On one side, theory and the available offer of training and education — abundant, but overwhelmingly academic.

On the other, practice — where the real work happens and where almost nobody writes anything down.

The gap between them was widening, and the reason is structural. You finish a degree, you carry that theory into your career, and for a long time the assumption was that it would carry you all the way to retirement.

That assumption is dead. Things now move fast enough that if you stop updating yourself, you quietly slip into the second line of professionals — still employed, still experienced, but no longer where the opportunities are.

To make this concrete, I shared three real experiences that first revealed what I now call the knowledge gap.

1. The first was a colleague who approached me proud of a certificate — around three thousand euros — that declared him a “master” in desalination.

I wasn’t interested in testing whether he had the certificate; I wanted to know what was behind it. After two or three genuine questions, just the kind of thing a project throws at you, he couldn’t develop the context or hold the thread.

The certificate was real but the mastery wasn’t.

2. The second was about me.

I kept finding myself repeating the same explanations, again and again, to new clients, new partners, new professionals — the same handful of points that every project needed.

That repetition was a signal. If I was saying the same thing on a loop, the knowledge clearly wasn’t reaching people any other way.

3. The third was a very good engineer with twenty-five years behind him.

We were talking about water reuse and the newer European framework, and he told me, in effect, that treatment stops at tertiary — that quaternary “didn’t exist” as far as he knew.

A strong professional, suddenly unable to hold a conversation about what the market is now demanding. Not through any fault of character, simply because continuous learning hadn’t been part of the deal.

Those three moments are an example of why The Water MBA exists. I wanted an ecosystem where we learn and share knowledge together, at scale and internationally — even trying to connect a fragmented demand with a fragmented supply, and building content that can be reused for years rather than delivered once and forgotten.

The lessons I chose to share

With the purpose established, I moved into a handful of lessons drawn from mega-scale desalination — some basic, some less so, all of them things we’ve argued about privately in the community.

The outfall is where the mistakes live.

Intake and outfall together are probably one of the single topic that has generated the most engagement across three years, it became the origin of a whole course and brought many serious professionals into the community.

But of the two, the outfall is the real headache.

The intake has its challenges, yes, but the outfall is where I see people cut corners most often, especially because it isn’t only about the plant’s pumped lines.

Gravity lines, overflows, the piezometric line — these have to be discharged, usually through the outfall, and a badly designed one doesn’t announce itself politely.

No power, no water.

We talk casually about deploying desalination across the world, but at mega scale it stops being a water conversation and becomes a power conversation.

When a client tells me they want a very large plant in some location and I ask about the power arrangement — and the answer is “that has to be discussed” — I know the project isn’t mature.

A mega-scale plant can’t simply plug into a neighbourhood grid; it usually arrives alongside its own power infrastructure development.

I have friends whose projects were ready to commission at full stage and couldn’t, not because of anything on the water side, but because the power section wasn’t there. The plant waited on the megawatts.

The UK flip-flop — and the opportunity inside it.

This was my favourite, and the room felt it.

Next year’s EDS Congress lands in Liverpool, so I asked the audience the obvious question:

For years the UK line was that desalination was too costly, too energy-hungry, not environmentally friendly. Then the framing shifted.

Water stress and integrated water management have become serious enough that desalination is now appearing in UK investment thinking, with entities like Anglian Water in the picture.

One paper, one policy signal, and a settled opinion reverses.

For water professionals — including those of us with years in the MiddEast — this is a genuine opening.

I’ve already sat in recruitment conversations with UK consultancies who have a desalination pipeline behind their general water needs.

You cannot over-specify your way to a good plant.

A large desalination project sits on a long supply chain: end user, offtaker, developer, contractor, subcontractor, vendors, material suppliers — all wrapped in the geopolitics of logistics, materials and price.

Clients sometimes try to over-specify, demanding a “state of the art” plant in terms that the supply chain simply cannot consolidate at a reasonable capex or a reasonable schedule.

It’s a fair ambition, but it isn’t a one-sided business. Everyone in that chain needs everyone else for the infrastructure to happen at all.

Continuous improvement, step by step, beats a specification nobody can actually deliver.

Morocco and Egypt are the ones to watch.

Desalination is becoming strategically central in specific countries, and we feel it directly: a high inflow of members from Morocco and Egypt asking to go deeper.

That’s why some of our Tuesday editions lean into desalination — there’s a clean match between what people need and what we can supply.

Egypt’s pipeline in particular is large enough that manufacturers and technology suppliers are opening their own factories and offices there to stay competitive.

These two countries will offer opportunities at every level of the chain in the coming years.

Financing eight hundred million is not financing eighty.

Funding a mega-scale plant is different from funding a modest one — capacities that push capex toward five hundred million or a billion dollars change the entire structure of the deal.

The public–private framework becomes central, and the community is hungry to understand how PPPs actually work: the bottlenecks, the characteristics, the lessons learned.

It isn’t a perfect solution, but in the current environment it’s the vehicle many countries are reaching for to close the investment gap, with private capital carrying the funding of infrastructure the public side can’t finance alone.

The lesson under all the lessons

It’s a real gap, and it deserves the attention.

Whether you’re reading this or watching the recording: we learn something new every single day, and the day that stops is the day you fall behind.

That’s the whole reason this community exists, and I hope it’s a reason to keep pushing.

I closed in Marrakech the way I’ll close here — by encouraging people to join us, to be surrounded by colleagues who want to be the best at what they do and to keep improving while, ideally, enjoying the process.

In the end we’re human. We like to shake hands and stand shoulder to shoulder, and we also like to collaborate across borders.

That combination is the best vehicle I’ve been able to build for water professionals around the world.

The feedback in the room was warm to be honest, and I left more convinced than before that this ecosystem will matter more, not less, in the years ahead.

Twenty minutes on a stage in Marrakech, and the takeaway was almost embarrassingly simple: keep learning, or get left behind.

He shows up, he’s clearly one of us, and then he disappears into a fog of half-answered questions.

If I had to assign that adjective to a single step in a desalination plant, it would be the DAF.

A quick caveat before we go further: here we’re talking only about seawater desalination plants. Dissolved Air Flotation has a much clearer, more settled role in specific industrial water treatment applications. In desal, it lives in a grey zone in my opinion sometimes.

The range of opinions you collect from water professionals about this system is so wide that it’s genuinely hard to write about cleanly.

So I’ll do my best to give you the context around the unit that causes so many headaches.

As always in our world, understanding the root cause behind each piece of feedback is a case-by-case exercise — same region, same intake water, and yet two clients (or the consultants who wrote their specifications) will reach opposite conclusions.

And if you don’t install a DAF — what are the risks, and how badly do they hit the business model when things go wrong?

Last week at Euromed in Marrakech, I really enjoyed moderating the session with Alexander Baekelandt from SeQual, winner of the Innovation Award.

We talked about “predicting tomorrow to act today”. A great example is forecasting an algae bloom so operators can switch on the DAF system before it is too late.

As you can read later, it is not simply a matter of turning it on or off.

This predictive capability provides added value by giving operators the time they need to respond, making it the kind of insurance every desalination plant should have.

Listen to some feedback I got and you’ll hear two camps:

• “It doesn’t really work once you’re in operation. It’s bypassed most of the time, and when you finally need it, it hasn’t been maintained — or you discover it can’t go from 0 to 100 in one second, it needs time to stabilise.”

• “It should be running permanently, because it protects the RO downstream and saves you when conditions turn.”

Both camps are right, depending on the plant. That’s exactly why the DAF is the mystic.

Read more

A lot of you in our community have been reaching out as startup founders. With your recent influx of queries and feedback, I can feel how challenging the journey is.

To support this, I’m organizing a joint session with a few of you to spotlight your initiatives, visions, struggles, and current needs with our broader audience.

I’m also adding these to our knowledge hub to keep track of compelling projects moving forward (though we aren’t trying to become a dedicated tech hub).

With so many of you looking up to Paul as a global benchmark for water innovation, this feels like the right time to reshare this conversation. I know it will inspire you.

Beyond that, remember you can always lean on the BlueTech Research team for your specific cases and gain some actionable intelligence. They have an amazing crew (links at the end of the essay), who are exactly the kind of professionals you want in your corner.

I’m also sharing a couple of interesting job openings BlueTech posted a few weeks back. Check them out if you’re looking for your next step!

I recently came across an email from David Serna, and I loved his approach of compiling a section with his favourite ideas from a conversation. So, I have adopted a similar format for this case and included it at the end of the essay. I feel it is also a great way to reflect on and capture the essence of our episodes, especially for those who may want to dive deeper into the full video, which is available above as usual.

Every person in water has a water story

Paul O’Callaghan’s begins on a small island off the coast of Cork, where he swam in a body of water clean enough to build rafts on, until, in the mid-1980s, it wasn’t.

Ireland had no wastewater treatment to speak of, and a kid who had grown up trusting that water decided to do something about it.

That instinct took him through the rainforests of Malaysia with a machete and a botanist (I was thinking of generating an AI picture about this, but I’ll leave it to your imagination ;), into a biochemistry degree, and eventually into the greenhouse of a Body Shop wastewater plant, where a “living machine” of plants treated the runoff of shampoos and body washes.

He still remembers the smell. Earthy, sulfurous, perfumed. He calls it the alchemy of water, and says he never fell out from under its spell.

I bring up the origin story because it explains everything that follows.

The founder of BlueTech Research is, before anything else, a practitioner who climbed down into the tanks.

And when a practitioner spends two decades watching water technologies try to make it from a jar on a lab bench to a line item in an EPC contract, he learns something the rest of us need to hear: there are no shortcuts. There are only fewer mistakes.

The S-curve nobody can cheat

Ask Paul how long it takes to commercialise a water technology and he walks you through the stages with the patience of someone who has watched it happen a hundred times, and I learnt in detail in his latest book that I absolutely loved.

It starts with someone in a lab, a small jar, a test, a measurement.

Then comes the rig — a few lengths of PVC pipe and some valves — taken out to be tested in real-world conditions.

That alone can eat two or three years before usable data comes back.

Then you build a full-scale unit. Then another.

By roughly the third full-scale installation, you’re finally ready to standardise; generation four is usually the one that works the way the brochure promised.

And even after you have a proven, standardised technology, you wait again — another six, seven, eight years — for consulting engineers and EPC contractors to trust it enough to write it into a tender.

• Trust, very important.

As someone who sits on the EPC side, this landed hard for me.

I’ve turned away good technologies at my own table, not because they didn’t work, but because they weren’t on the approved vendor list or didn’t have the references.

Paul’s point is that this isn’t dysfunction. It’s physics.

What you can do is make fewer mistakes, because every mistake adds to the timeline and burns money and time you don’t have.

That is the entire value proposition of being a careful operator in this industry. Speed is mostly an illusion. Discipline is real.

You simply cannot force a natural process to move faster than it can. That’s why time is the ultimate moat, it creates a natural barrier that protects those who are willing to keep compounding over the long haul.

Why more money doesn’t buy more speed

The corollary is the part investors least want to hear.

The thesis is sound. The execution fails on timing.

A company raises at a great valuation on a great story, revenue-positive in four years, easy.

Four years later it’s revenue-generating but not revenue-positive, the next round reprices it, and the original investor either gets diluted or walks.

The deeper trap is believing that more money buys proportional speed. It doesn’t.

You need capital to survive, but there are rate-limiting steps in scaling physical water infrastructure that simply don’t care how much is in the bank.

Triple the funding and you might go fifteen or twenty percent faster, not twice as fast.

So the two qualities that actually matter, Paul argues, are patient money and smart money.

And when a VC pulls the plug at year seven or eight, that’s often not the end of the story, the founder is usually so committed that they carry the IP onward into the next vehicle.

Companies die; the technology and the people frequently survive.

The market is consolidating and quietly opening up

The water wheel is always turning. Over twenty years, Paul has watched the number of water-tech startups stay roughly constant while the quality climbed sharply, they’re smarter and better than they used to be.

At the same time, consolidation has reshaped the top of the market, with the big platforms rolling up membrane and solutions businesses, while a stubborn gap persists in the mid-market.

Two shifts stand out.

First, the move from single-technology vendors to integrated solutions providers, increasingly bundled with operational, service contracts.

The logic is the complexity of water itself: selling someone an end-of-pipe wastewater plant is one thing; helping them reuse that water for clean-in-place, boiler demineralisation, and rinse loops is a holistic problem that pushes buyers toward integrated partners.

Second, large industrial corporates are now willing to sidestep the big players to work directly with startups on moonshots.

We didn’t see this before; the old world was framework agreements, three approved vendors, an RFP, an EPC contract.

But when a company needs to do something genuinely new, the appetite changes.

That collaboration between corporates and startups, around capabilities the conglomerates don’t yet hold, may be the most interesting trend in the sector right now.

Kill your darlings early

The hardest lesson in the conversation came from Brave Blue World, the documentary Paul produced.

The first shoot, in Singapore, felt great, and then they reviewed the footage and realised it wasn’t going to scale. It had the feel of a television interview, not a story people would carry with them.

This is the sunk-cost fallacy (we can list endless examples probably in our daily jobs) in its purest form: you’ve come so far, what do you do?

They chose to throw a great deal of that material away, go back, and redesign the project from the ground up, and they made that call early.

That decisiveness is why the film eventually worked, why it found a director who took them to Kenya, India, and Mexico, and why it ended up on Netflix with Matt Damon and Liam Neeson.

By the way, I have a direct message from Matt Damon to all of you.

Just kidding!

In all seriousness, though, every single one of us can help. If you aren’t ready to invest $5 a month in a premium subscription to The Water MBA, that’s completely fine, but consider donating that same amount to Water.org instead.

You, too, can make a meaningful difference.

Anything is possible

When I asked what corporates most need to learn, he gave me a sentence: anything is possible.

L’Oréal didn’t believe a water-loop dry factory was achievable until they built one — and now every L’Oréal factory will be one.

Intel set audacious 2030 water goals and hit them ahead of schedule.

When Microsoft presented its progress recently, jaws dropped at the pace.

They came from people arriving with a fresh outlook and refusing to accept the assumed timeline.

That, in the end, is what keeps a man surprised after twenty-five years in a sector he supposedly knows cold.

Paul started as a wastewater and biosolids specialist; with every move his aperture widened, until he arrived at a genuinely radical reframe of the whole practice.

Our job, he argues, is to leave water in nature.

Reduce leaks, capture industrial water, explore atmospheric water capture, and you leave more in the green water cycle, where it slows down, purifies, and regenerates. Invert the equation and the engineering looks different.

The thread running through all of it is a beginner’s mind. Paul owns a library of books on water and still, by his own account, gets surprised all the time.

For a platform built on the conviction that we always have something left to learn, I can’t think of a better note to end on.

Never be afraid of being challenged, he told me, and never hang on too tightly to your beliefs.

That’s the whole curriculum, really.

My favorite ideas from the conversation with Paul O’Callaghan

On the Alchemy of Water

I was fascinated with the alchemy of water and the sensory nature of it — you’re feeling the humidity on your skin, you’re smelling it, but you’re also looking at science in action.

I fell under the spell, and I’ve never fallen out of it.

On Working With Good People

If you work with good people, good things happen. That’s an immutable law.

If you’re working with smart people who share that passion and know why you’re doing the work, you have fun doing the work.

On Why Water Innovation Can’t Be Rushed

The third house you build is the house of your dreams — not the first one.

I don’t believe you can shorten it. What you can do is make fewer mistakes.

A mistake is adding to the timeline. It’s a waste of money, it’s a waste of time.

On Not Being Left Behind

I don’t want to be left behind. I don’t want to be the last person selling a PVDF membrane when PFAS compounds have been outlawed and everyone’s moved over to ceramics.

That’s our role — getting your binoculars so you can see a little further over the horizon, maybe see around a corner to any potential disaster, and avoid making a mistake.

On Patient Money and Smart Money

There’s patient money, and there’s smart money.

It doesn’t go twice as fast because you have twice as much money.

When you see failed companies, it correlates with a misalignment between the expectations of the investor — both in valuation and in timeline.

On the Sunk Cost Fallacy

There’s a thing called the sunk cost fallacy. You’ve gone so far — what do you do?

We were prepared to lose a lot of that material, because we were going to go back, redesign, and rethink the project. And I’m glad we did.

On Anything Being Possible

They came in with a fresh outlook and said: anything is possible. And before you know it, there’s half a dozen projects.

On Leaving Water in Nature

Our fundamental job is not to take water from nature — it’s to leave water in nature.

If you leave water in nature, nature creates water. If you leave water in nature, nature slows water down.

We’re not running out of water. We can create water abundance.

On Staying Surprised

What keeps me motivated is continually being surprised.

I’ve got a lot of books on water, but I continue to be surprised all the time.

Have a beginner’s mind. Never be afraid of being challenged, and never hang on to your beliefs.

Meet and follow-up closely Bluetech Research Team:

Lily Chen, I like the conversations she brings to the table in Blue Notes Pod.

Saurabh Singh, he’s one of the few that I activated a ring bell in LinkedIn to make sure I receive notifications when he publishes something, because among all the stuff out there, I feel it is authentic and valuable for me.

Paul O’Callaghan, no need much more introduction.

Interesting career opportunities for Research Analyst and Key Account Manager.

For most of my career, the number I (and probably you) carried around was: 70% agriculture, 20% industry, 10% domestic.

That’s the textbook split of how humanity uses freshwater, and it isn’t wrong.

But averages are liars.

I live in the Guadalquivir basin. Here the split is closer to 90% agriculture, 5% domestic, 5% industry.

Agriculture isn’t a slice of the pie, it is the pie.

Then, a few years ago, I learned that Singapore looks nothing like this: almost no agriculture, demand dominated by industry and households (read later the policy innovation about water reuse recently announced…)

Same planet, same molecule, a completely different economy of water.

That’s the moment my brain got rewired.

That sector is industry. Industry is a different animal.

It doesn't use the most water. But it has a balance sheet, a cost of capital, a board that understands risk, and a reason to act now.

That combination is rare in water, and it changes everything.

While these financial interests ensure that capital flows, the shift from standard financing to “projectification” also carries distinct risks for our business, as detailed at the end of this essay.

Read more

This time deliberately step off the technical ground. Not membranes and treatment trains, but commercial and market intelligence.

What does the market expose about reuse that the process flow diagram never will?

As usual, I go back to one of my favourite sources.

Partly because some of these people I almost consider good friends, they’re genuinely great peers, and I just like listening to them.

Some time ago I had dinner with Keith Hays, one of the co-founders of Bluefield Research, here on this side of the Atlantic, and the kind of work they do has always fascinated me.

At the end of this publication, you’ll find links to these contacts. They regularly share extremely interesting perspectives and genuine value on LinkedIn. I wish I had more time to consume all the great content the share out there, and I’m sure I’ve missed many, but I highly recommend connecting with and following them.

The Future of Water podcast is also one of my regular check-ins every couple of weeks, usually while I’m at the gym (pretending I do exercise). It consistently offers valuable insights and thought-provoking conversations. Highly recommended.

So in this conversation with María Cardenal, from Bluefield’s Barcelona office, to talk reuse.

The invisible craft behind the data

Most of us in this sector spend our days heads-down inside our own scope.

I know I do, a purchase order lifecycle here, a commissioning sequence there, one brine outfall…

We start to believe the work just arrives on our desk. It doesn’t.

Behind every clean number in a report there’s an enormous amount of invisible labour: understanding the market, sizing it, separating the big players from the small ones, working out who is operating where and why.

It runs on a subscription model with a database layer (the Data Navigator, which Keith first told me about) that clients filter and query.

The geographic core is the US, Canada and Europe; the verticals run from municipal water to industrial — pharma, beverage, meat, metallurgy, mining, and increasingly water for data centres and energy — plus a whole digital-water practice.

What I found most honest was when I asked María about the hardest part of her day-to-day.

Her answer wasn’t glamorous: it’s finding the information.

There’s a lot of it out there, but it’s scattered, hard to digest, hard to interpret, and sometimes it simply isn’t there at all.

She described disappearing down a rabbit hole — Alice in Wonderland, in her words — pulling thread after thread, then doing the sanity check with peers to make sure the conclusion holds.

Actually, it is quite a similar operating system to creating The Water MBA.

Reuse is a market, not a technology

Here’s the conceptual shift that runs underneath everything: the wastewater plant is no longer a treatment endpoint.

It’s becoming a provider — a source of water, of energy, of recovered resources.

Once you see it that way, reuse stops being an engineering question and becomes a market question.

María laid out a clean four-part framework for why reuse actually happens in a given place:

• Drivers — environmental: water scarcity, the need to conserve water (potable or agricultural), and protecting coastal aquifers from seawater intrusion.

• Regulatory requirements — the macro frame. The EU Water Reuse Regulation (2020/741) has applied directly across all member states since June 2023, setting harmonised minimum quality standards for reclaimed water in agricultural irrigation. On top of it, the recast Urban Wastewater Treatment Directive (2024/3019), adopted at the end of 2024.

• Local requirements — infrastructure, technical capacity, and geography. Reusing water halfway up a mountain (pumping uphill, burning energy) is a different proposition from a coastal industrial cluster where the user is next door.

• End use determines treatment — and this is the commercial crux. Agriculture, street cleaning, industrial cooling and potable reuse each need a different treatment level. There is no single right answer.

Notice what’s missing from that list: “build the best plant.” The commercial lens reframes the whole problem.

The numbers: leadership is relative, headroom is enormous

Back in 2023 Bluefield went so deep on European reuse that one report had to become two, covering 11 countries.

Their estimate for the total European water-reuse market over 2023–2030 was around €1.8 billion.

The headline most people expect is that Spain leads Europe, and it is correct. The country reusing the most water on the continent.

But here’s the figure that should keep us humble: that leadership amounts to reusing only about 14% of our wastewater.

The European “leader” is leaving most of the resource on the table.

Within Spain it’s wildly uneven — Murcia reuses something like 98%, almost all of it for agriculture, a number you simply don’t see anywhere else.

So “leader” is a relative word, and the more useful way to read those numbers is as headroom.

Layer in Bluefield’s map of incremental water scarcity — the regions sliding into stress on current climate trends — and the addressable market isn’t just deep, it’s geographically expanding.

Places like Málaga, already squeezed between population, tourism and climate volatility, are tomorrow’s mandatory adopters.

Belgium: where intelligence beats intuition

If you want to see why market intelligence earns its fee, look at Belgium.

Intuition says reuse is a Mediterranean story, sun, drought, fires.

Belgium has none of that branding, no specific reuse regulation on the books, and rain almost every day. And yet it sits in the top tier of the European reuse ranking.

Why? Because the country is under genuine water stress despite the rain, heavy urbanisation and industrialisation mean the soil simply can’t retain what falls, and the aquifers are limited.

And crucially, the demand is being pulled by industry, not policy: reuse around the Port of Antwerp, automotive plants near Brussels running closed loops for cooling and cleaning, potato-processing lines that drink enormous volumes of water.

One car factory near Brussels co-financed the reuse project that connected the local treatment plant to its site.

The lesson is one of the most commercially important in the whole topic: regulation is one driver, not the driver. Industrial demand and plain economics can lead reuse forward in a place no policy map would have flagged.

If your intelligence only tracks regulation, you’d miss Belgium entirely.

Los Angeles: the masterclass

LA has been at this since the 1980s. Not a ten-year sprint; a forty-year programme.

Bluefield frames US reuse as a five-rung maturity ladder: no reuse and drawing on natural sources; non-potable reuse; indirect potable reuse (IPR); studying direct potable reuse; and finally approved direct potable reuse.

LA runs the full stack and does three things at once:

1. Industrial supply — reclaimed water piped to refineries and industry instead of potable water.

2. Irrigation — parks, golf courses, stadiums, urban green space.

3. A seawater intrusion barrier — injecting reclaimed water into coastal aquifers to physically hold back the saltwater that creeps in as those aquifers are drawn down. It’s the same risk Barcelona lives with, solved with reused water.

I love that detail, because it captures the part of this business everyone underrates: it’s mostly invisible.

The plants aren’t in the city centre, the pipes are underground, and then someone tells you the water you flushed is coming back to irrigate the food you’ll eat.

Of course the public hesitates. That’s why IPR and DPR are 20-to-30-year programmes built on pilot after pilot, redundancy after redundancy, and patient confidence campaigns.

The technology is the easy part. Trust is the slow part.

The four commercial truths

Here’s what the market actually exposes as per Maria point of view:

1. Infrastructure is the cost, not the technology. We obsess over treatment, but the pipe that redirects the water to a user who can actually take it is often the bigger line item. That Belgian factory paid for the connection, not the treatment.

2. There is no one-size-fits-all — and over-treating is a mistake. Pushing every drop to potable grade is inefficient if it’s only cleaning streets.

   Higher treatment means more capex, more opex, more energy. Matching grade to use is the business model.

3. Who pays is the hardest equation in the room. Public and private benefits are tangled together.

   The intangible upside is real — freeing potable water for human use, enabling local industry, ESG and corporate water targets, lower emissions from industrial closed loops — but it’s genuinely hard to put on a single business plan.

   PPPs, incentives and reuse tariffs exist precisely because no one party captures all the value (you’ll read a great piece about this on next Tuesday)

4. Time is the price of entry. These are inter-generational assets. Anyone hoping to walk in, hit one technical key and flip the market is in the wrong business. We’re building for the next generation — which, by the way, is also why the demand is almost guaranteed for us :)

See you soon

The commercial reading is simple to state and hard to execute: scarcity sets the floor, regulation sets the frame, but industrial demand, infrastructure financing and public trust decide who actually builds.

That’s the part the membrane datasheet will never tell you, and the part people like María and the Bluefield team spend their days, heads-down in the rabbit hole, working out.

My thanks to María Cardenal for sharing it so generously, and to Keith and the wider Bluefield team.

The real privilege of our community is the peers and friends who’ll sit across a dinner table and tell you what the data actually says.

If you’re heading to Marrakech, come find me. Let’s talk reuse!

Continue on your own through the next sources:

Maria Cardenal, Antonio del Olmo, Keith Hays, the Bluefield website, and The Future of Water Podcast.

I couldn’t attend the event Global Water Summit 2026 myself. However, I spoke with several attendees, received a number of messages, and came across a few presentation slides.

I haven’t had enough time to fully analyse the event, so instead of sharing **10 things to know, I’ve focused on the five topics that stood out most to me.

**As a tribute to the well-known “10 Things to Know” format from GWI founder Christopher Gasson.

1. The finance gap is not a footnote

Read more

For thousands of years, humans made fresh water from the sea by boiling it. The Greeks did it on their ships; even the builders of the pyramids understood the trick.

Then, sometime around the 1980s, we replaced that thermal logic with a membrane and a pump, and the cost of water began its long fall.

It is salt, minerals, and a new way of thinking about the sea itself.

Guillem is a doctor in chemical engineering, a researcher who has put close to thirty products into the industry over his career, a university professor, and a board member of the European Desalination Society.

But the most revealing thing he said about himself was not on his CV. It was a philosophy of how innovation actually happens, and a refusal to romanticise the lab.

R&D is a conversation, not a cathedral

Ask most people to picture research and development and they imagine a quiet laboratory, a brilliant mind, a breakthrough.

Guillem’s picture is almost the opposite. The lab matters, yes, but the real work happens outside it, in conversation with customers.

The danger he describes is the “ivory tower” researcher — the one who decides, alone, that an idea is brilliant, pours years and money into it, and finally delivers something nobody wanted because it solved no real problem.

His antidote is almost embarrassingly simple: get out of the lab, go on the customer visits, listen at conferences, and let the voice of the customer shape the work.

I felt this in my own bones. When I launched The Water MBA in 2023, what I imagined in my living room mattered far less than the feedback the market kept sending back. You iterate toward fit, or you build a monument to your own assumptions.

This matters even more in water because of the rhythm of the industry. Compared to consumer electronics, water is conservative — and rightly so.

It is heavily regulated, it touches human health, and it runs on capital-intensive assets that nobody rebuilds on a whim.

So the clock runs slowly. By Guillem’s reckoning, a marginal improvement — a bit more membrane area, a little less energy, some antifouling character — takes around two years. Something genuinely new takes three to four.

The brine valorisation membrane his company launched this year traces back to an idea floated at a conference in 2022. Four years, idea to product.

It is a discipline that protects the researcher from his own enthusiasm.

When I asked whether the industry funds R&D generously enough, his answer was the honest one any researcher gives — we always want more (who doesn’t…!)

But he added the sharper point: it is not only how much you invest, it is how judiciously.

Biofouling: the only fouling that fights back

If there is one part of this conversation worth pinning to the wall of every operations room, it is Guillem’s explanation of fouling.

I have handed over desalination plants in the Middle East without ever truly understanding it.

After forty minutes with him, I finally do (to my level…).

A fouled membrane is, simply, a dirty membrane, and there are four ways it gets dirty.

Particulate fouling is the microscopic grit — colloids, bacteria, fine matter — and a good pretreatment, ultrafiltration in particular with its roughly twenty-nanometre pores, stops it at the door.

Scaling is what happens when you pull water out and the salts left behind exceed their solubility and begin to precipitate; with good design and antiscalants, and an understanding of induction time, it is well managed.

Organic fouling is the dissolved organic matter — the humic substances a river carries — that lays down a film as you permeate; you see it as a slow, logarithmic climb in energy or normalised flux, and you tame it with a sensible fouling factor in the projections. None of these three keeps a process engineer awake at night.

The fourth one does. Biofouling is biology, and biology adapts. Certain bacteria have spent far longer than humans perfecting the art of finding a solid surface and clinging to it. A reverse osmosis membrane is, from their point of view, paradise: a constant flow delivering a steady supply of food. They eat, they reproduce, they eat again, and within a week or three — depending entirely on the water — they build a gel. The gel is the problem.

It occupies the space the water needs to flow, the pressure drop between feed and concentrate climbs, and eventually the membrane is mechanically deformed and damaged.

Worse, it hides. Bacteria shelter in the feed spacers where chemicals struggle to reach, and unlike ultrafiltration — where a dose of sodium hypochlorite cleans everything, like bleach down a toilet — reverse osmosis cannot tolerate chlorine. It strips the polyamide.

So you are left fighting a living, sheltered, regenerating film with one hand tied behind your back.

A study Guillem cited, analysing around a thousand samples, found that roughly 85% of membrane fouling cases came down to biofouling. It is the dominant headache of the industry.

I’m a firm believer in the power of books. Much of my personal and professional growth has come from reading. So, if this subject resonates with you in any way, I highly recommend having Guillem’s book on your desk. It is already in our database for water books. You’ll find the link for purchase at the end of this publication.

Now ask where you can realistically intervene.

Temperature? You will not cool an ocean’s worth of feedwater; the energy cost is absurd.

Bacteria? Put ultrafiltration upstream and you stop them entering — but everything downstream is not sterile, and a single survivor is enough to start a colony. Biocides only buy a delay before the bacteria shelter and rebound.

So why is it not everywhere? Economics.

Guillem put the cost trajectory in stark terms: in the 1980s, desalinated water cost around two dollars a cubic metre, which inflation would put near thirteen dollars today. The plants now being built deliver at thirty-five to forty cents.

When water is that cheap, any added investment needs an exceptional business case to survive.

The hope is that nutrient-removal technology keeps getting cheaper until, finally, prevention beats cleaning on the spreadsheet.

Until then, the reality on the ground is what I see in the plants I commission: cleaning-in-place systems, chemical cycles, and a constant negotiation with the inevitable.

He added a point I have watched play out and never named properly:

A plant is designed for a sweet spot, with the pretreatment that keeps fouling at bay. Then the end user asks for ten percent more water.

You push the flux a little, then a little more, and the squeeze tightens until the pretreatment can no longer keep up — and by then there is no floor space left to retrofit the technology that would have helped.

A chicken-and-egg problem built into the economics of success.

Innovation in membranes: two speeds at once

When I asked Guillem how the future of water treatment looks, he gave me the most clarifying mental model of the whole conversation: innovation runs at two velocities.

The first is incremental and familiar. Elements that use a little less energy, deliver slightly better quality, or grow selective toward particular ions.

You can see this speed by reading the membranes themselves: the standard reverse osmosis element went from 370 square feet of active area in the 1990s, to 400 in the 2000s, to 440 today.

Small, steady, compounding gains — the everyday craft of the industry.

The second velocity is slow and rare and decisive. Every twenty or thirty years a genuinely disruptive innovation arrives and resets the baseline.

Thermal desalination dominated until the 1980s; then reverse osmosis took over and has held the field since. Something will eventually displace it too.

The discipline, as a researcher, is to keep harvesting the incremental gains while staying honest about the fact that you cannot schedule the revolution.

Brine valorisation: water as a chemical feedstock

Guillem’s framing surprised me. I expected hype.

Instead he reached for the technology readiness scale — where one is an idea and nine is full industrial deployment — and placed brine valorisation at TRL9. Not coming. Here.

“I have to admit that I wasn’t aware of what TRL (Technology Readiness Level) meant until a few months ago. During a conversation in our networking chat, several founders mentioned that their startups were at TRL 4, TRL 5, and so on.

So, here’s a brief summary: TRLs provide a scale to measure the maturity of a technology, ranging from TRL 1, where the concept is still an idea or basic principle, to TRL 9, where the technology has been fully proven in real-world conditions and successfully commercialized

In water tech specifically, I guess that moving from TRL 6 → 8 is often the hardest jump (real-world hydraulics, regulation, O&M complexity), but we’ll explore this further with a specific episode in the near future.

His proof is the Maven project in Indonesia. The island had a sodium chloride problem.

The OARO project aims to produce 220,000 tons of salt and 25,000 m³ of desalinated water daily.

Osmotically Assisted Reverse Osmosis (OARO explained → Standard membranes can concentrate brine up to 85,000 ppm at 80 bar, while OARO can achieve up to 250,000 ppm at 70 bar.

Salt is not a humble commodity; it is a keystone of the chemical industry, because you electrolyse it to make chlorine gas, and chlorine gas underpins the whole world of PVC and plastics.

Indonesia was importing it from New Zealand and Australia at around 130 dollars a tonne, exposed to logistics and the price shocks of a turbulent world.

So they built a brine valorisation plant. It produces salt at thirty to forty dollars a tonne — an eighty percent reduction — and, crucially, it produces fresh water at the same time.

By valorising the brine, recovery jumped from around 43% to 85%. They doubled the water and decoupled the salt from global logistics in a single move.

Read that twice.

We are beginning to see seawater not as a source of water but as a chemical feedstock with a known, fixable cost driven mostly by energy — exactly the kind of certainty a chemical business craves.

And the engineering logic is beautifully familiar. Just as desalination replaced the thermal evaporator with a membrane and a pump, brine valorisation replaces the evaporation pond — the centuries-old Mediterranean practice of flooding land with seawater and harvesting the salt a year later, ruining the soil in the process — with membranes.

It is standard desalination, reconfigured. (Guillem also left me with a piece of etymology I cannot shake — salario, salary, comes from salt, because Roman wages were once paid in it. The value was always there. We are only rediscovering it.)

Bridging that gap will force some companies to reinvent themselves and others to bring in entirely new downstream players.

But the demand is real, the example is built, and his forecast is concrete: within three to five years, the projects now on the drawing board will be executed and running.

Ultrafiltration: the right answer that is not always chosen

UF was invented around the same era as reverse osmosis, in the 1970s, but it sat quietly until the early 1990s, when a chlorine-resistant outbreak in Milwaukee — pathogens that ordinary filters and disinfection had failed to stop — made the case undeniable.

Put an ultrafiltration barrier in place, with its tight pores, and those microorganisms simply cannot pass. Adoption climbed exponentially, and as a standalone treatment UF keeps leading the way.

As a pretreatment for desalination, though, the picture is more political than technical. Well-designed ultrafiltration lowers both capex and opex and reduces the total cost of water.

Yet Guillem still sees conventional sand filters pushed in its place — sometimes because the plant builder has its own technology it knows intimately, sometimes because the land is government-owned and effectively free, which quietly erases UF’s footprint advantage from the calculation.

I have watched the same story in a brackish plant in Málaga, where the operator was convinced the plant wanted ultrafiltration, but the business model handed down to him left no room to install it.

The best technical answer and the chosen answer are not always the same, and the gap between them is usually written in the business case, not the engineering report.

What the membrane knows

If I had to compress this conversation into a single idea, it would be this: water innovation advances by recognising when an old job can be done a new way.

We replaced boiling with membranes and watched the cost of water collapse.

We are now replacing evaporation ponds with membranes and learning to read the brine not as waste but as wealth.

The hardest enemy, biofouling, will not be beaten by force but by starving it of nutrients once the economics finally allow.

And the whole enterprise only works because researchers like Guillem refuse to stay in the lab — because they treat innovation as a conversation with the people who actually run the plants.

I am already looking forward to the next chapter of this, in Marrakech, where so much of the agenda points exactly here, to fouling, and to brine.

The sea has been trying to tell us something for a long time. We are finally building the instruments to listen.

Euromed 2026

Guillem and I will be attending EuroMed in a couple of weeks.

It will be my first time there, and based on the agenda and the feedback I received from the 2025 edition, it seems like a very worthwhile event to attend (despite Porto being remembered for the famous power blackout!).

If you’re attending, feel free to drop us a message—or simply come and say hello in person. We’ll both be speaking during the event. Guillem’s sessions will undoubtedly be the most valuable ones.

As for me, I’m not particularly comfortable speaking to large audiences, but I’ll do my best to make my 15 minutes worthwhile. My goal is simple: that everyone listening walks away having learned at least one new thing.

Guillem Gilabert-Oriol joined the Water MBA in his personal capacity, and we would like to sincerely thank him for the immense value and insights he shared with our community.

1. His book on biofouling is well worth the read for anyone, expert or not, who wants to understand the enemy properly. 298 pages of pure value → Purchase Biofouling and Organic Fouling: in Reverse Osmosis Membrane Elements

2. Connect with Guillem through LinkedIn.

3. Register for Euromed 2026

Everyone says desalination problems are solved with good pre-treatment.

And everyone says most desalination issues are actually the result of poorly designed or underperforming pre-treatment.

So as you can imagine, we must talk about this :)

In previous episodes, we saw that today’s desalination business is essentially built around a membrane system, with a pre-treatment stage upstream to properly feed and protect that membrane.

Today we focus on one of the most important pretreatment stages: filtration.

In practice, there are two main approaches here:

1. gravity filtration

2. pressure filtration.

Each has its own advantages, drawbacks, and historical background, because over the years, every technology develops its own “tricks”.

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