Ask me: “Ramón, for an X m³/day plant with this feed water, how many filters do I need and what do they cost?”

You will have an answer in two minutes.

Flow divided by filtration rate, area per filter, round up, add two spares, done.

It is so easy that this week I used AI to build a 3D artifact where you change the diameter, the length or the height of the nozzle plate and watch the rates at N, N−1 and N−2 change live, together with the nozzles, the bed layers and the weight of the vessel.

I will use it in the Desalination course I am preparing, so people see the parameters move instead of reading them in a table. I am a bit behind, I admit. The last two weeks have been somewhat special. But this module is taking shape.

And here is the question.

If it is that easy, why do problems appear? And why does my design differ from another engineer’s, given the same question and the same water?

That is today’s topic: process criteria, where to fabricate these filters, the famous rubber lining challenge, the filtration nozzles and a real operating problem that came up a few days ago in the community WhatsApp group about mudballs.

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The Water MBA was never meant to repeat the headlines we already read every week. It is meant to be real exercise for your brain.

We are here to transform ourselves, and that means listening to insights that go beyond the typical narratives, even when they make us uncomfortable. If you leave today, I hope you leave with more context than you arrived with.

That is why it felt so refreshing to open LinkedIn a few weeks ago and find a post from Chris Fellows.

I followed it like a Netflix series. I activated notifications so I would not miss the next episode.

And once I had read them all, I knew I wanted to discuss them further, with him and with you.

So here it is. Raw and real talk on the picks I chose for the podcast.

For each of the ten reflections you will find what Chris said, whether we took it into the episode, what we discussed, and one or two questions to keep you thinking.

At the end, as usual, the best quotes by topic with the approximate minute.

Today’s publication is sponsored by the The Water MBA

Interested in reaching a global community of water professionals while supporting the growth of The Water MBA?

We have this space reserved for you. If you’d like to explore sponsorship opportunities and become part of our journey, get in touch at info@thewatermba.com.

Who is Chris Fellows

Chris was born in 1970 in Tucson, Arizona, in the middle of the desert. He was raised to take short showers and to hate golf courses.

At twelve his family moved to Townsville, in tropical North Queensland, where one year he measured 600 mm of rain in a single day at his house.

He wanted to be a physicist, “downgraded” to chemistry, and ended up with a PhD in polymer chemistry.

His first water problem came through the sugar industry: scale in multiple effect evaporators very similar to those in thermal desalination.

That led to a postdoc at the University of Sydney on scale inhibitors and flocculation, and then a permanent post at the University of New England.

One phone call out of the blue took him into desalination research. Another took him to Saudi Arabia, to the research arm of what was the Saline Water Conversion Corporation, now the Saudi Water Authority, arguably the largest producer of desalinated water in the world.

The plan was one year. It became seven.

I first heard his name when Christos Karishadis, visiting our community, thanked him for renaming “brine mining” as “brine valorization”.

One year ago, in Valencia

Exactly one year ago, I almost missed a flight to Valencia, to a conference on desalination and nuclear power (I already talked about that in previous publications).

I made it, checked into the hotel, exhausted, and went down to the hotel restaurant. Fully booked. No space.

Fuck. Now I had to go out and find something.

Then someone shouted my name across the room. It was Christos. He had a table. “Have dinner with us.” Hell yeah.

He was sitting with Chris, and he introduced us. We talked, and mostly, I listened. The next day I watched Chris on stage, and he was as sharp explaining complex matters to a full room as he had been over dinner.

This is the kind of serendipity in life that I love. A fully booked restaurant turned into knowing a great professional.

One year later, here you have the chance to listen to someone really worth listening to, and to connect with him directly on LinkedIn to keep the conversation going.

The ten reflections

I took eight of the ten into the episode.

1. There is a role for thermal desalination · 09:30–12:00

2. Academic effort wasted on solar-driven desalination · 12:15–17:00

3. Academic effort wasted on exotic 2D materials · 17:05–20:10

4. Seawater desalination brine is not a problem · 20:10–25:50

5. Zero Liquid Discharge makes zero sense for seawater · 25:50–27:50

6. Microplastics and nanoplastics are not a problem · 28:20–32:20

7. Untapped potential in rainwater harvesting · 36:40–41:40

8. PFAS “forever chemicals” are not a problem · 32:20–36:40

9. Agriculture is the elephant in the room · Not in the pod

10. Can the clouds give us more water? · Not in the pod

1. There is a role for thermal desalination

In his post, Chris made a point that sounds almost heretical today: RO wins on specific energy consumption, but there is no fundamental physical reason for that.

Right now it is simply cheaper to recover pressure than to recover heat of condensation. And energy is not the only factor in the cost of water, just as cost is not the only factor in choosing a technology.

His proposal is to keep roughly 30% of capacity as thermal, because it is more robust under “pathological conditions”: no steady stream of replacement membranes, bad intake water from algal blooms or oil spills, sanctions or crises cutting access to expertise.

Thermal research should be kept alive too.

I pushed back with my own experience.

When I started my career, some contracts in the GCC was about replacing end-of-life thermal plants with RO, sometimes terminating offtakes early because the numbers were so much better.

Chris answered with what he lived during COVID in Saudi Arabia: membranes could not be replaced on schedule, and the kingdom-wide water quality data they were collecting showed it.

Questions for you.

• How would you price water security in a tender, when the cheapest kWh/m³ always wins the evaluation?

• Is a thermal reserve the right hedge, or can strategic membrane stocks and dual sourcing do the same job?

2. Academic effort wasted on solar-driven desalination

Here Chris was blunt. By his estimate, around 90% of what is published in journals with “desalination” in the title has no relevance to real desalination.

Solar stills and “interfacial photothermal” desalination are his main targets.

If you want to desalinate seawater with the sun, photovoltaics driving RO is by far the best route, and for very small systems, simple and robust beats clever.

A clarification I also made in the pod: this is not about the PV plant plus RO projects we share every week in our WhatsApp group.

It is about using sunlight directly to evaporate water.

I asked Chris where this disconnect comes from, and he said he only saw it clearly after a few months working in industry. These papers ignore a century of thermal desalination learning, starting with recovering the heat of condensation.

Then he told me an anecdote. He reviewed one of these papers, accepted the science and rejected the sustainability claims.

It was published with the claims intact. His letter to the journal, signed by his desalination colleagues, was declined.

So, with Dr. Mustakim, they wrote a full review article taking the field apart.

He closed with Linus Pauling: to have good ideas, have lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away.

Questions for you.

• Who should police exaggerated claims: reviewers, journals, or the agencies funding the work?

• What would it take for industry to hand academia a clear list of the problems we actually need solved?

3. Academic effort wasted on exotic 2D materials

I have to confess I had never heard of “exotic materials” before reading this post, so I asked Chris directly.

He started with the one we all know: graphene, the wonder material that is still very hard to scale into anything useful.

Molybdenum disulfide and other 2D materials belong to the same family, and they are a fast track to prestigious journals. Show near-perfect ion rejection and ten times the flux of commercial membranes, and you can get into Nature.

The problem, as he explained, is that flux barely moves the cost of water.

Most of the energy goes into overcoming the osmotic difference, not into pushing water through the membrane.

Higher flux also means more concentration polarisation and faster fouling, and every membrane compacts and fouls back to ordinary performance within months.

Turning any of these materials into a membrane that fits an existing plant needs a lot of development, for a marginal benefit that disappears almost immediately.

His plea: keep working on them, but “stop tugging heartstrings” by claiming to solve water supply.

Questions for you.

• What membrane improvement would really change an EPC bid: fouling resistance, chlorine tolerance, lifetime, price?

• Should grant applications claiming water impact be asked to show a credible path to a real plant?

4. Seawater desalination brine is not a problem

This is the one where I agree with Chris the most.

He calls it “a hill I am prepared to die on”.

Modern outfalls use diffusers and discharge into fast-moving water. Studies find effects within 50 to 500 m, measured in hectares, not square kilometres, and those areas host different life, not necessarily less.

And avoid words like “toxic”, which some campaigns use to block desalination where it could relieve real pressure on aquifers and rivers.

I asked him why brine is such a hot topic at every conference.

Chris first drew a line: inland desalination is a different story, with evaporation ponds or deep aquifers to deal with. At sea, the dilution ratio is enormous.

Part of the problem, he said, is the word itself. In English, brine sounds like pickles, smelly and coloured.

In reality it is concentrated seawater with ppm-level additives, and every plant sends divers to check its outfall.

I shared a project I bid on next to a coral reef.

Microtunnelling avoided trenching a corridor of about 200 m of seabed, and we went deeper for dilution. More expensive, but the lesson for me is that construction often hurts more than the brine itself.

Chris complemented it with the images from his post: Google Earth views of the Gulf coast around Qatif, Dammam and Bahrain, thirty years apart, where dredging and land reclamation have turned seagrass and reef shallows into land.

Next to that, brine is a footnote.

Questions for you.

• If construction is the bigger impact, should EIAs give more weight to construction methods than to plume modelling?

• Are we over-engineering outfalls to buy public trust, and is that money well spent?

5. Zero Liquid Discharge makes zero sense for seawater

Brine leads naturally to brine valorization. Christos had already told our community that ZLD makes little sense and that minimal liquid discharge is a better focus, so I asked Chris whether he shared that view.

He did, with one nuance: at an inland mine site, ZLD can make sense. For seawater, it simply swaps an easily managed liquid waste for a very difficult solid one: dust, truck movements, groundwater risk, land take.

Then he did the market maths.

Early adopters could ship salt north as de-icing salt, but that market saturates quickly.

Even with free separation, sodium chloride is cheap everywhere, and transport kills the margin.

Applied across the board, we would have more salt than anyone could use, far from the markets that want it, in warehouses or in desert piles.

He supports valorization for strategic and economic reasons, but it will only ever absorb a small fraction of brine and should not be sold with environmental arguments.

ZLD, he jokes, means mountains of unsaleable salt, perhaps good for skiing.

Questions for you.

• Which two or three brine products have an honest business case at scale, and where?

• Should tenders stop scoring ZLD as an environmental plus for seawater plants?

6. Microplastics and nanoplastics are not a problem

When I asked Chris about microplastics and PFAS, he put them under the same umbrella as brine: many people want to be Erin Brockovich.

He was careful to say he accuses no one of acting in bad faith. It is just the temptation.

As a polymer chemist (”maybe that makes me the enemy”), his argument is chemical.

“Plastic” is not a chemically defined class, just shorthand for synthetic polymer, and nothing makes synthetic polymers hazardous and natural ones innocent.

Polymers are unreactive because the reactivity of their building blocks is used up, and their molecules are too big to cross cell membranes easily.

His classic example: styrene is a carcinogen, polystyrene is the cup you drink hot coffee from.

We evolved surrounded by indigestible polymers, from cellulose and keratin to the humic substances in surface water.

He tells his students they can eat as much polymer as they like, then adds that this is not medical advice.

In his post he goes further on treatment.

Macroplastics are a real problem for wildlife and landscapes, but micro- and nanoplastics behave like TOC and suspended solids. Sand filters retain them, sweep flocculation captures them. No novel treatment challenge.

A note from me: I am not a chemist, and this is Chris’s position. Many researchers see the health question as open, and it is an active field.

Questions for you.

• If conventional filtration already retains them, what exactly are utilities being asked to pay for?

• What evidence would it take to change your mind, in either direction?

7. Untapped potential in rainwater harvesting

That dinner in Valencia when Chris told me he harvests rain at home. I had finally found someone who actually does it, so of course I asked him how.

He lives only 1.5 km outside town, but there is no municipal network, so he and all his neighbours collect rain.

Two 20,000 L tanks off the side of the house, about 800 mm of rain a year, negligible OPEX and a CAPEX that was a small part of the house price.

Five adults lived there during COVID.

A few times they had to buy water, mostly when teenagers at home took long showers.

His in-laws down the hill, with the larger storage now required for new homes, have never run out.

I asked whether it was only for showers. No: it is for everything, drinking included, with just a filter for solids.

Nobody inspects the system, unlike septic tanks, and he has never heard of anyone getting sick.

His explanation: without interconnections, contamination has nowhere to spread.

In his post he adds an irony: when people buy chlorinated water in droughts, THMs and haloacetic acids probably spike because of the organic matter in the tanks.

He is honest about the limits. For a dense area like the City of Sydney, 237,000 people on about 26 km², you would need to capture around 40% of the rain to match his household use.

But most of Western Europe gets more rain than he does, and the UK or France declare droughts a few months after heavy rain ran off urban infrastructure.

For local communities, this is a simple solution that we in the water business should take more seriously.

Questions for you.

• Why do we not require storage tanks in new buildings, as his local council does?

• How should a regulator treat a self-supplied roof compared with a networked supply?

8. PFAS “forever chemicals” are not a problem

On PFAS, Chris was less absolute in the pod than in his post. He admitted he knew little about them until a full-day workshop in Birmingham a few years ago.

PFAS are “forever” because we designed them to be unreactive, which is also why they bioaccumulate.

Some studies show negative effects, especially for shorter chains, and drinking firefighting foam is a bad idea.

But compared with real chemical threats like DDT, chromium or tobacco, he finds the epidemiological evidence weak, with no clear syndrome attached.

His hypothesis: PFAS may be markers of other, more dangerous contaminants in the same waste streams, from landfills, factories or air bases.

In the post he adds a provocation: nature is trying to kill us, and his cauliflower surely holds thousands of untested toxic compounds at ppb levels.

His core point is economic: the regulated levels determine the cost.

He argues US limits should be at least a hundred times higher, and that most exposure comes from food and cosmetics, not drinking water.

I shared what I had just read about polluter-pays in Europe, with cosmetics and pharma pushed to contribute, and asked whether tariffs will rise anyway.

And I mentioned Dark Waters: in our business, narrative and communication move as much as data.

Again, a fair note: regulators on both sides of the Atlantic and many toxicologists hold a different view, which is why limits keep tightening. This is Chris’s dissent, argued in the open.

Questions for you.

• If the limit sets the bill, who should set the threshold, and on what evidence?

• Does polluter-pays change the debate, or simply move the cost to another bill?

9. Agriculture is the elephant in the room

In his post, Chris says seawater desalination today is in good shape: high quality, low cost, low impact, able to supply cities 300 km inland.

He even says lack of political will is the only real reason Los Angeles and Phoenix are not fully supplied this way.

What desalination cannot do is supply agriculture competitively. Even with zero production cost, pumping water inland makes it far too expensive, and most of the world’s water goes to farming.

The opportunity is high-value crops in greenhouses near the coast, like California’s strawberries.

Places like Andalucía, Israel and Saudi Arabia could produce as much or more with desalinated water, but only with big changes in what is grown and where.

Whole regions dependent on groundwater, like Al-Jawf, would have to shut down. And for China, Sudan or Kansas, no desalination breakthrough will ever be enough.

Questions for you.

• Are we ready to talk openly about what we grow and where we grow it?

• What desalinated water price would make coastal greenhouse agriculture viable at scale?

10. Can the clouds give us more water?

If agriculture needs cheap water and the ocean cannot provide it, Chris asks whether the clouds can provide more.

He points to past interglacial periods about 2 °C warmer: a warmer atmosphere holds more water, and central Australia, Arabia and the Sahara greened.

From that record he concludes that ice caps would not drown the coasts, there would be no runaway feedback, deserts would shrink rather than get hotter, and polar species would only lose range.

Questions for you.

• If Chris were right, what would change in how we plan water infrastructure?

• If he were wrong, what would it cost us to plan as though he were right?

Dialogue over monologue

You do not have to agree with Chris. I do not agree with all of it either.

But I agree with how he does it: name the claim, show the reasoning, and accept that you might be wrong in public.

Our sector needs more of that. We cannot be lazy with narratives just because they are comfortable or well funded.

Chris said it himself at the end of the episode: despite his lecturing habits, he finds dialogue more interesting than monologue, and he wants to hear back from you.

He is now part of our community. Write to him on LinkedIn, reply to this email, or bring your disagreement to the WhatsApp group.

Pick one of the questions above and tell me where you stand.

Quotes from the episode

Lightly edited from the recording for readability. Minutes are approximate.

Background

• “I was raised to take short showers and to hate golf courses.” — Chris, 01:30

• “I went into university intending to be a physicist, but I didn’t work hard enough at my maths, so I had to downgrade to a chemist.” — Chris, 02:20

• “It was basically just applying first-year chemistry to real-world problems, which was very exciting.” — Chris, 06:40

Thermal desalination

• “The number one priority for water supply isn’t cost. It is the safety and security of the water that’s supplied.” — Chris, 09:55

• “Thermal is much more forgiving.” — Chris, 10:55

• “There are benefits in having a single integrated water and power plant that you can defend against a drone swarm.” — Chris, 11:00

Academia vs industry

• “Coming out of academia, you really start to see the disconnect between what academia is doing and what industry needs.” — Chris, 12:25

• “The best way to desalinate seawater with sunlight is to use photovoltaics to generate electricity to drive reverse osmosis.” — Chris, 13:15

• “I think we do too many rounds of review nowadays.” — Chris, 15:05

• “The way to have good ideas is to have lots of ideas and throw the bad ones away.” (quoting Linus Pauling) — Chris, 16:50

2D materials

• “The marginal benefit is very tiny, and you would lose it almost immediately, because nothing stays the same.” — Chris, 19:20

Brine

• “Brine is something you have pickled vegetables in. We know brine is not like that. It’s just seawater, more concentrated.” — Chris, 22:15

• “No plant wants to damage the environment it is operating in.” — Chris, 23:00

• “For me, the construction part is more impactful than the real brine dilution.” — Ramón, 25:05

• “The impact of brine is absolutely dwarfed by the impact of dredging and land reclamation.” — Chris, 25:35

Zero Liquid Discharge

• “You’re spending an awful lot of money to replace an easily soluble liquid waste problem with a very, very difficult solid waste problem.” — Chris, 26:50

• “We would have more salt than anyone could use, and it would be far away from the markets that want it.” — Chris, 27:20

Narratives

• “A lot of people basically want to be Erin Brockovich.” — Chris, 28:35

Microplastics

• “You can eat as much polymer as you like. That’s not actual medical advice.” — Chris, 31:10

• “Plastics aren’t a chemically defined class.” — Chris, 32:15

PFAS

• “Compared to the epidemiological evidence for real chemical threats, it’s very weak.” — Chris, 33:50

• “These PFAS might be there as a marker for something else that’s happened in the past.” — Chris, 34:50

• “The regulated levels are what determine the cost.” — Chris, 35:10

• “In the water business, narrative and communication are super important.” — Ramón, 36:40

Rainwater harvesting

• “Just what’s falling on our house is sufficient to keep us going.” — Chris, 38:30

• “It’s not a sacrifice at all.” — Chris, 38:50

• “I think we could go a long way by just capturing the water that’s falling and running off our houses.” — Chris, 39:20

• “We’re quite paranoid about problems, but we have never done anything to the water falling on our house.” — Chris, 39:50

Dialogue

• “We cannot be very tolerant with the bad ideas or the wrong messages.” — Ramón, 42:10

• “I really think dialogue is more interesting than monologue.” — Chris, 42:25

My plan was to attend Wednesday and Thursday: two days of a packed agenda, hotel booked and registration paid. Around 400 euros spent before I even left home.

As some of you already know, I never made it on Wednesday. The train accident happened very close to me.

There were plenty of tickets in that lottery, and luckily mine wasn’t drawn that day. I missed the whole Wednesday programme.

That afternoon I genuinely hesitated. Was it worth carrying on just for Thursday, or was the sensible thing to go back home? In the end the bus came up to rescue at a reasonable time. I got to Madrid at six, ate what I hadn’t eaten all day, and rested.

Thursday wasn’t going to be complete either: the only ticket I could get home was a 5 pm bus. That left me the morning session, up to lunch, and the panel I was moderating.

On Wed afternoon I posted a video on social media when I realised that nobody seemed to be aware that a third train had theoretically been very close to another collision.

The video went viral, reaching around 5–6 million views across all platforms within 24 hours.

Spanish media flooded my inbox, and on Thursday night, as soon as I got home, I had the opportunity to join one of my favourite TV programmes.

Here’s the interview in Spanish if you want to hear the full story behind it.

Half a conference. And still, as almost always with these events, I came back with far more than I expected.

I watched someone in their twenties present an AI he had built himself..that gave me plenty of ideas and, more importantly, a clear feeling that I'm on the right track with my own AI learning journey: both through our water-focused course and the new enterprise-level programme I've enrolled in.

And then came my own panel. It was the last slot before lunch, right after a session where half the room was scrolling their phones. We set out to win their attention back, and we did.

Read more

Before getting into today’s episode, a brief personal note.

On 28 October, I was very close to the train accident. I was travelling to Madrid to attend the Young Water Professionals Spain Conference when our train stopped just a few metres away from the scene of the collision between two high-speed trains.

Investigations are still ongoing, but we came very close to witnessing an even greater tragedy, with the possibility of another collision.

It’s difficult to put into words everything I experienced, both inside and outside the train, and all the moments.

I just want to thank everyone who reached out and sent me messages. I’m doing well, both physically and mentally, and I’m happy to be back working on our business.

Thank you all. Now, let’s get on with today’s episode.

Last June in Marrakesh, between sessions, I was standing in a corridor with Haroon from ACWA, one of our members and a supporter of The Water MBA since the very beginning.

He just watched Darío Salinas present on the geopolitics of desalination in the Mediterranean.

Haroon turned to me and said: “It was superb. You should bring him to The Water MBA”

Darío and I already worked together in the early days, in Spanish, on a conversation about the Tajo-Segura transfer and the geopolitics of water in Spain (the video is linked above).

We’ll be back soon with a dedicated edition in English.

Today’s edition is sponsored by The Water MBA.

We are proud to announce our partnership with Kartex, the geopolitical risk and strategic intelligence consultancy.

Together, we now offer geopolitical services to any water company that could benefit from bringing this intelligence into its decision-making.

Reach out through info@thewatermba.com to request a proposal.

Why geopolitics, and why now

If you have followed recent episodes, you already know my view: geopolitics now shapes almost every decision we take on real water projects.

Which markets we bid. Which vendors we can still buy from. How a shipment of equipment reaches site. Whether a tariff survives a change of government. How to refinance a project or rescue it from lenders.

I find the field fascinating.

Darío brings the rigour of a geopolitical analyst and expert.

I bring the practitioner view. I know what hurts when these conflicts land on a project. I know what a client actually needs on a Tuesday morning, and where an analysis stops being interesting and starts being useful.

Announcing: Kartex × The Water MBA

So Darío and I decided to make it formal. Today we are announcing a partnership between Kartex and The Water MBA.

As Darío put it in Marrakesh, sometimes water “is no longer only an engineering choice. It is a territorial decision with engineering implications.”

Kartex is Darío’s geopolitical risk and strategic intelligence consultancy.

It specialises in the territorial dimension of risk, with deep experience in water, energy and climate projects.

Its method rests on three things: reading the territory at every scale that decides a project’s viability, mapping the actors who decide, block or condition each phase, and using strategic cartography as a decision tool.

The Water MBA adds the other half: the lived experience from inside business development, bids, contracts and construction sites.

Together we want to give water companies analysis that is both rigorous and usable.

From today, you can request these services through The Water MBA.

Reach out by email, or simply talk to me in person, to ask for a proposal or more information.

Six pillars: where we think we can help

To make this concrete, we have grouped the work into six pillars.

Each one comes from a pain I have seen on real water projects and inside companies.

Read them and tell me honestly: does any of this resonate with you?

1. Country risk and market prioritisation.

Before entering a new market, you need more than a water-stress map.

We cross real demand with the financial and institutional strength of the public client and the legal certainty of each country.

We also map the local actors you will have to work with, from ministries and utilities to potential industrial partners.

Why it matters: too many companies pick markets by headline pipeline, then discover who really decides only after the first contract.

2. Geopolitical due diligence for tenders and concessions.

This is analysis done before you decide to bid an EPC contract or a BOT/BOO concession.

We look at the public offtaker’s solvency and payment track record, the risk of tariff or contract renegotiation after a change of government, regulatory and currency exposure, and the country’s history of disputes with foreign investors.

Why it matters: a bid/no-bid decision is the cheapest moment to understand political risk. After signature, it becomes a claim.

3. Risk assessment during project implementation.

Delivery is where territory bites. We examine permitting and administrative timelines, electoral cycles that can redirect water policy, environmental controversy such as brine discharge and energy use, and local or cross-border tensions over the resource.

Then we build scenarios on their impact on schedule, cost and viability.

Why it matters: Torrevieja, in Spain, ran roughly ten years late. The engineering was not the problem.

4. Supply-chain risk.

Our supply chain is sometimes concentrated in a handful of suppliers and countries: membranes, pumps, tanks, pipes, chemicals...

We analyse dependence on specific manufacturing countries, exposure to sanctions and export controls, and disruption on shipping routes.

Then we propose ways to diversify suppliers and strengthen operational resilience.

Why it matters: anyone who has tracked a critical package through a closed strait or a new sanctions list knows this is no longer theoretical.

5. Strategic communication in a geopolitical context.

Water is a politically sensitive resource. We design communication and public-engagement strategies tailored to the territory where you operate or want to enter.

That includes reputational risk assessment, anticipating controversy, and preparing positions and messages for institutions, media and local communities.

6. Social licence and monitoring of public debate.

We track the online conversation around your project and your company. We map who is talking, their narratives and where opposition is forming: fishing and farming communities, anti-desalination platforms, campaigns against private water management.

We also flag possible disinformation dynamics, so you can anticipate territorial conflict and protect your licence to operate.

Why it matters: by the time opposition reaches the press, the narrative has usually been set for months.

Seven maps, seven ways a project gets exposed

Maps are the fastest way to show senior leadership what a risk register cannot.

A board member who will never read a 40-page report will understand a good map in thirty seconds.

Here are some examples from extraordinary Kartex’s work, moving from the basin down to a single transfer, and then out to the global economy.

I recommend downloading the images, displaying them on a big screen, and letting your brain connect the dots. You’ll start to appreciate the incredible complexity of how water is embedded in every aspect of this amazing life.

1. Mediterranean: desalination depends on the territory

Water stress, desalination capacity, major plants and where the water goes, country by country.

The lesson: desalination is not one homogeneous market. Two technically similar plants can carry very different exposure through regulation, energy, foreign dependence or water-policy priorities.

2. Spain: water, territories and governance

Basins, regions, transfers, desalination and territorial rivalries on one sheet. Water infrastructure does not only move a resource.

It redistributes dependencies, costs and benefits between territories and sectors. Any project assessment must ask who decides, and who gains or loses room to manoeuvre.

3. Tajo-Segura: when the project’s environment changes

Structural deficit, irrigation, cities, environmental limits, local actors and large infrastructure in one view.

The engineering can stay exactly the same while the political, regulatory or environmental frame around it shifts.

Territorial diagnosis is about knowing what can change, who can drive it, and which scenarios to have ready.

4. Tigris-Euphrates: risks born outside the project

Water availability, transboundary dependence, large dams, cooperation agreements and an unstable region.

It makes the asymmetry between upstream and downstream states visible.

The exposure of a plant, a network or an investment can depend on decisions taken by another state, far from where the water is used.

Remember our essay with Tabark Majid from Burop Happold, I link here.

5. Hormuz: desalination, energy and security in one geography

Energy facilities, terminals, ports, shipping lanes, security assets and the Gulf states’ reliance on desalination, layered together.

A plant is never isolated. Its continuity depends on power, maritime access, neighbouring infrastructure and the stability of the system around it. This is critical-infrastructure thinking applied to water.

6. From Hormuz to the global market: how a local risk scales

Zoom out and the importing markets, alternative pipelines, reserves and diversification strategies appear. The focus moves from the strait to the dependencies linking it to companies thousands of kilometres away.

A local disruption becomes energy costs, supply-chain delays and investment decisions. That is where scenario work earns its place: not to guess what will happen, but to prepare plausible options.

7. United States: water reuse and territorial gaps

Water stress, irrigated agriculture, reuse plants and state-level regulation. Reuse is growing, but very unevenly, and it depends heavily on the regulatory frame and the scale of investment.

This only takes off when the institutional environment makes it scalable.

Let’s talk

This partnership is our attempt to close the geopolitical gap for the companies that need it.

If you are weighing a new market, preparing a bid, delivering a project in a tense environment, or worried about your supply chain, write to me through The Water MBA, by email, or catch me at the next event.

We will come back with a proposal shaped to your case.

Thank you everyone!

So Thanks God it is FridAI is moving to Tuesdays.

Today I want to make a bigger point: maybe it’s time to switch the mode in which we work every day.

I take this seriously enough that I’ve enrolled in a Generative AI programme at IE Business School for 2027.

I believe companies will have to rewrite their procedures to take real advantage of AI, and I believe big corporates will move slower than small ones. More on that at the end.

In this essay I’ll share:

• Why understanding the workflow comes before any tool, and why I had to sit down with every department to learn how they really work

• Why I’m obsessed with actions, not status

• How to turn your MoMs into a database that remembers every commitment ever made

• The gap AI just erased: I can now build things that only a few people in the company could before

• A one-month exercise to redesign your own job around what you want to see in your first five minutes every morning

Read more

As many of you know, I find this field fascinating.

I would go as far as calling it one of the most relevant “revolutions” happening in our industry right now.

Corporations, data centers, utilities, NGOs and regulators are suddenly talking about the same resource, sometimes event in the same room :)

But it is also a field where it is very easy to be misled.

Water positive, replenishment, offsets, credits, scopes, VWBA, AWS, CDP, CSRD...

Unless you are on the front line, the terminology alone can leave you with more doubts than answers.

Today’s publication is sponsored by the Innovation Driven Water Sustainability Conference (IDWS)

IDWS 2026 is the platform where global water leaders gather to deliver innovative solutions for water security. It takes place from 14 to 16 December 2026 at The Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, bringing together attendees, leading exhibiting brands, top speakers, investors and innovative startups to accelerate progress across the water sector.

Building on the success of its previous editions, IDWS 2026 reinforces Saudi Arabia’s position as a global hub for water innovation and investment. From high-level government consultations to active project collaboration, it fosters partnerships, drives capital deployment and enables large-scale implementation.

• 10,000+ attendees

• 150+ global brands

• 250+ speakers

• 140+ countries represented

Register at idwsc.com

I'm happy that IDWS has recognised our business school and community as a strategic partner, and that we'll also be featured as partners at the event.

So I brought two people who are on that front line.

Both have been genuinely supportive of The Water MBA since the early days, and I think they can help all of us build real knowledge on this topic.

Their perspectives are complementary: one comes from science and utilities, the other from civil engineering and corporate strategy.

I have adapted my usual approach a little for this essay. At the end, I include the key questions we should ask ourselves on each topic.

I believe writing down the right questions is one of the best ways to give our brains a real exercise, so I invite you to take a pen and try to answer them.

Who is Semyon Chaymann

Semyon describes himself as a “water generalist”.

He is not an engineer but a scientist by training, with a bachelor’s in environmental science from McGill University and a master’s in integrated water resource management.

He splits his life between Canada and Portugal, which already tells you something about how global this conversation is.

He brings more than fifteen years of experience in water infrastructure planning and hydraulic modeling.

Most of that time was spent helping Canadian municipalities plan their water systems 20, 30, 40 and even 50 years into the future, building the hydraulic models that let them manage and optimize distribution networks.

For the past couple of years he has worked closely with Baseform, a software-as-a-service company focused on water loss reduction and predictive analytics for utilities.

His current obsession, and the reason I invited him, is the intersection between two worlds that rarely talk to each other: utilities that need funding to fix their infrastructure, and corporations that need credible ways to replenish the water they consume.

“The next challenge is connecting companies with utilities”

Semyon’s work explores the intersection of corporate water stewardship and water-loss reduction.

Why it matters: Reducing non-revenue water could connect corporate replenishment commitments with measurable improvements to existing municipal infrastructure.

I have to say: I love his website, Hydralink Infrastructure Solutions. It explains water stewardship in plain, entertaining terms, which is much harder than it sounds. Take a look.

Who is Vasilisa Gorbolskaya

Vasilisa is a civil engineer trained at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and she started her career in construction.

She entered the water world through green and gray infrastructure, working on flood prevention and risk reduction for local communities.

She then moved into water consulting and has spent the last four years at ERM, focused on corporate water strategies.

Her work has two sides: water replenishment, and water efficiency across portfolios of real assets.

In practice that means helping companies set water positive goals, reduce their own use, and select fit-for-purpose replenishment projects, both nature-based and infrastructure-based.

Her client profile has shifted a lot in those four years.

It started with large, asset-heavy organizations, from higher education to manufacturing.

A necessary disclaimer: all opinions she shared are her own and do not represent ERM.

Some of you will remember that Vasilisa and I wrote a piece together almost a year ago on finance meeting water.

It was one of my very first collaborations, and it was her idea.

Many of you wrote to me saying “finally someone is writing about this”.

Sometimes one plus one is not two, it is three or four.

Leave the water as good as you found it

I started with the most basic question, because I see many members confusing water stewardship with corporate water, or with framework compliance.

What does it actually mean?

Semyon’s answer was refreshingly simple.

Everything has a water footprint, from a bottle of water to the clothes we wear.

Then comes the part that turns awareness into responsibility: we must take action to make sure those resources stay as good as when we found them.

Vasilisa added the corporate lens: stewardship is the responsible use of a shared resource, grounded in the local context. That word, shared, is the key.

A company does not own the river or the aquifer. It shares them with farmers, cities and ecosystems.

Water stewardship is about shared responsibility

“A responsible use of a shared resource, grounded in the local context.”

Vasilisa Gorbolskaya, 18:35–19:00.

Corporate water strategy cannot be separated from municipalities, local communities, regulators and the wider watershed.

Compliance is not hydrology

There is a sentence on Semyon’s website that stuck with me.

Paraphrasing:

Compliance doesn’t necessarily mean impact

A company can satisfy reporting requirements without demonstrating that its local water resources are actually improving.

You can disclose a number, report it through a recognized framework, and still be wrong when someone checks it with an engineering approach.

Semyon pointed out that some large tech companies are now facing backlash precisely because their reported water figures are not backed by the underlying data.

A precedent is being set, and it will not stay in tech.

His answer is to bring engineering practices that utilities already master into the stewardship world.

Non-revenue water is the clearest example: volumetric accounting methods allow companies to claim benefits from reducing utility losses.

But as he put it:

Reporting numbers is the easy part

“It’s easy just to report the numbers, but it’s very difficult to actually understand what those numbers mean.”

Semyon Chaymann, around 16:35–17:30.

Water accounting requires meaningful baselines, credible measurements and evidence of outcomes, not just disclosure.

And then the principle everyone repeats, but not everyone applies: it has to happen at basin level.

Buying credits in a different watershed from the one you draw from does not reflect how the water cycle works.

Water is not carbon: the search for a common language

Both guests kept coming back to the same idea: the field does not yet speak one language.

Today, many “water positive” definitions are written by the companies themselves, on their own websites, tied to their own accounting frameworks.

Vasilisa was very honest about it: we are still feeling our way through a sensitive area.

The instinct is to copy the carbon market. It is understandable, because carbon already has scopes, credits, registries and retirement.

But water has a property carbon does not: it is not fungible.

A tonne of CO2 avoided in Brazil counts the same as one avoided in Spain. A cubic metre saved in the Guadalquivir does nothing for an aquifer in Arizona.

Water cannot be offset like carbon

Vasilisa mentioned that, according to her, WRI announced around the end of April 2026 an initiative to deliver common definitions that borrow the language of carbon while respecting this local nature of water.

She sees it as one of the fundamental building blocks to move forward.

With shared definitions, non-revenue water reductions, nature-based solutions and WASH projects could be recognized, certified and retired as credits with real trust behind them.

The second challenge she raised is less technical and more practical:

If Alejandro Sturniolo is reading this, I’d appreciate hearing whether this is the missing piece of the puzzle that AquaPositive brings to the “match.”

Without both, every new “water positive” claim is one headline away from a public outcry.

Scope 1, 2, 3... now for water

A few weeks ago, a friend who manages water for data center developments in the US told me that the next big thing was “Scope 2”.

I had no idea what he meant.

Days later, social media was full of it: the debate is moving from cooling water to the water embedded in the energy that data centers consume.

This part of the conversation was a great example of a field still defining itself.

Vasilisa gave a first explanation, Semyon refined it, and at the end of the recording Vasilisa asked for one more minute to set the definitions straight for listeners.

It shows how fresh this language is, even for those working with it every day.

Here is the consolidated version, mirroring the carbon scopes:

1. Scope 1, direct operations. Water withdrawn, consumed and discharged at the facility, from any source: a well, a river or lake intake, or municipal supply.

2. Scope 2, purchased inputs. Water embedded in the electricity the facility buys. For a data center, the water used to generate the power it consumes. This is where the conversation is heading right now.

3. Scope 3, value chain. Water embodied in raw materials and products, upstream and downstream. Think polysilicon, metals and semiconductors that end up inside the servers.

The alphabet soup of frameworks

I can list the frameworks. What I could not tell you before this conversation is when to use each one. So I asked.

Semyon’s first point reframes everything: almost all of them are voluntary.

The exception is the European disclosure regime, which is becoming mandatory for larger companies.

Very few people are fluent in all of them at once. Which one applies depends on where the company operates, its history, and its ambitions for disclosure.

Vasilisa gave the practitioner’s map, based on her own experience:

VWBA (Volumetric Water Benefit Accounting), now in version 2.0. A six-step process to identify, verify and report replenishment benefits, so the impact is certifiable. It is the one she works with most, mainly for corporate replenishment and water positive programs.

AWS Standard (Alliance for Water Stewardship). An audited, facility-level certification. If a site claims to be “AWS certified”, it has gone through a demanding process involving both the operator and the corporate sponsor.

CDP. A disclosure framework built on quantitative data: water withdrawal, consumption and discharge, reported annually.

CSRD. The EU sustainability reporting directive, mandatory for large companies, with data requirements close to CDP.

SCS Global. A certification body she has not worked with directly, but which, as far as she knows, is involved in developing the common scope definitions.

A bit of history I did not know: the VWBA itself traces back to Coca-Cola’s replenishment efforts around 2007. The tool was born in beverages and is now being stretched to fit hyperscalers.

Where stewardship meets the ground: aquifer recharge

Behind every credit there has to be a real project.

Non-revenue water reduction is one.

Managed aquifer recharge is another, and it hits close to home: farmers in my own local community are struggling with groundwater and asking exactly these questions.

Semyon has seen it from two angles.

1. First, a viability study for aquifer storage and recharge in Barbados, a water-scarce, densely populated and very flat island that relies heavily on groundwater, plus brackish water desalination.

Rain filters naturally through the limestone karst, so the groundwater is perceived as clean and is simply chlorinated. The idea is to capture rainwater that today runs off to the ocean and put it back underground.

The integrated water resource management lens immediately complicates things. Rainfall is seasonal, so you need storage. Storage needs land, which a dense island lacks. And open reservoirs in a tropical climate can become breeding grounds for mosquitoes carrying dengue or chikungunya. A water solution can create a health problem.

2. Second, a full-scale aquifer storage and recharge plant in Wichita, Kansas. There, water is diverted from a river during the months it flows, treated with ultrafiltration membranes, and injected into the aquifer. What amazed him was a complete treatment plant designed not for drinking, but for feeding an aquifer.

His honest caveat: we need a hydrogeologist in the room. Water moves underground in different directions, and someone can drill a well next to your recharge site and pump out what you are putting in. Monitoring and governance matter as much as technology.

“Water positive by 2030”: skeptical but optimistic

I closed with the polemic question.

When you read “water positive by 2030” on a corporate website, what do you really feel? Do you nod, or do you laugh?

Semyon was direct: he is very skeptical, unless the company has a real track record in corporate water stewardship.

For him the statement raises more questions than it answers.

What is your definition of water positive? Which projects? How much are you investing, and where? Will those projects actually deliver their replenishment by 2030?

Interestingly, he treats that skepticism as an opportunity: every bold claim is an invitation to dig into that company’s real water situation.

Vasilisa came from a similar place but landed somewhere more hopeful.

Because water is not fungible, a company must find projects in the same basins as its facilities, and that is easier in some basins than in others.

It depends on whether local developers exist and whether certification bodies can verify the benefits.

Companies with long-standing local relationships and a proven record of reducing their own direct use are better placed.

Still, she believes it is achievable.

Hyperscalers are already announcing deals with municipalities and NGOs, and buyers are actively asking where such projects exist, which will pull more funding and more partnerships.

The real question, in the end, is accounting and certification.

Her verdict: hard but doable. Or, as she summed it up, skeptical but optimistic.

Questions we should ask ourselves

On what water stewardship means

• Do I know the water footprint of my own project, beyond the volume on the water bill?

• When I say “stewardship”, do I mean managing water, or managing the reporting of water?

• Who else depends on the same source I am using, and have I ever spoken to them?

On compliance versus real basin outcomes

• If an independent hydrologist audited my reported figures tomorrow, would they hold?

• What baseline am I measuring against, and who decided it?

• Is my benefit happening in the same basin as my impact, or only on the same spreadsheet?

On a common language

• When I read “water positive”, do I know whose definition is behind it?

• Am I importing carbon logic into a problem that is fundamentally local?

• As engineers and utilities, are we making our projects visible to the buyers who are looking for them?

On water scopes

• Do I know which of my water impacts sit in Scope 1, 2 or 3?

• If clients start asking for the water embedded in our energy, do we have the data?

• Am I ready for a world where a data center’s “water problem” is actually an energy procurement decision?

On frameworks

• Am I reporting under a framework because it fits my impact, or because it is the one everybody uses?

• What does “voluntary” really mean when investors, regulators and communities are watching?

• If I joined a stewardship team tomorrow, which of these could I actually work with?

On aquifer recharge

• Could the surplus water we waste in wet months be our dry-season reserve?

• Who owns the water once it is underground, and who protects it from the neighbour’s well?

• Are we solving a water problem while creating a health, land or governance problem?

On “water positive by 2030”

• When I see a 2030 pledge, do I look for the projects, or just for the logo?

• Could my utility, my project or my company be the local counterpart those buyers are searching for?

Where to meet them

We are a digital community, but nothing replaces meeting in person.

• Vasilisa’s conference calendar is not closed yet; she will announce events on her LinkedIn. The easiest way to reach her is LinkedIn or our WhatsApp group.

She is also in for The Water MBA gathering I am planning in Spain around the 2030 World Cup, being all water positive.

By then, she joked, we will know if she was optimistic and right, or optimistic and naive.

• Semyon will be at the Canadian Water and Wastewater Association annual conference in Halifax in November, and at the Rebuild Ukraine conference in Warsaw.

He is developing water strategies for Ukrainian municipalities, and he found it deeply uplifting that, even in wartime, water stays at the forefront of planning for the future.

Otherwise, you can grab a coffee or a beer with him in Toronto or Lisbon.

Semyon and Vasilisa, thank you for your generosity.

This is how The Water MBA grows: members sharing what they know so the rest of us close our own knowledge gaps.

I hope this is only the second (after Chile episode) of many collaborations.

Key quotes

Minutes mark where each answer starts in the episode. Quotes are lightly edited for readability.

On what water stewardship means

“This is the intersection that I’m interested in: tying in utilities with corporate water stewardship.”

— Semyon Chaymann, min 02:37

“We also have responsibility to take action to make sure that those resources are as good as when we found them.”

— Semyon Chaymann, min 11:44

“Water stewardship is seen as a responsible use of a shared resource, grounded in the local context.”

— Vasilisa Gorbolskaya, min 18:35

On compliance versus real basin outcomes

“It’s easy just to report the numbers, but it’s very difficult to actually understand what those numbers mean.”

— Semyon Chaymann, min 16:35

“It has to be on a basin level. Water is very local. It is based on the watershed.”

— Semyon Chaymann, min 16:35

On a common language

“A lot of the time definitions are stated by the companies themselves on their websites, tied to their own accounting frameworks.”

— Vasilisa Gorbolskaya, min 21:24

On water scopes

“Decoupling energy growth from water dependency.”

— Vasilisa Gorbolskaya, min 26:34

“Embodied water is probably the least spoken-about aspect of water stewardship.”

— Vasilisa Gorbolskaya, min 52:56

On frameworks

“All of the frameworks are voluntary.”

— Semyon Chaymann, min 28:30

On aquifer recharge

“A whole treatment plant designed just for treatment of water, not for consumption, but for pumping into the aquifer.”

— Semyon Chaymann, min 35:37

On “water positive by 2030”

“I’m very skeptical when I see those kinds of statements.”

— Semyon Chaymann, min 43:20

“Hard but doable. Skeptical but optimistic, probably to sum it up.”

— Vasilisa Gorbolskaya, min 47:20

On water in times of crisis

“Even in that kind of environment, they are still thinking about water management and planning for the future.”

— Semyon Chaymann, min 50:40

It may be one of the less CAPEX-consuming parts of a desalination plant.

But it can become one of the most important when it comes to performance guarantees such as LSI, pH, Alkalinity and Hardness.

I’ve been looking more closely lately at calcite contactors / limestone filters, the problems we can encounter with them, and how different arrangements can affect the final result.

And I found something particularly interesting.

In recent projects, I’ve seen:

→ PPA special internal arrangements used by Metito in Al Jubail 1,000,000 m3/day. They make the following pitch:

The main problems PPA claims to solve are, in short:

The second half of the pitch is construction: factory testing, fewer workers on site, no scaffolding for perimeter channels, no drilling into concrete walls, and civil works that can finish before the internals arrive.

→ Leopold underdrain systems installed by GS Inima in Shuweihat 4 320,000 m3/day (I thought I’d use this opportunity to share above the Spanish workshop with Xylem on these elements)

→ and more conventional arrangements that we still find across many plants.

They may look like three different solutions for the same problem.

But they are not exactly the same thing.

And then go one step further:

What are actually the key things we should be looking at when designing or reviewing a remineralisation system?

Because post-treatment is one of those areas where the equipment can look relatively simple…until you have to guarantee the water coming out of it.

1. Why we remineralise

Reverse osmosis permeate is almost pure water, and that is exactly the problem.

Seawater RO membranes reject divalent ions and bicarbonate better than they reject sodium and chloride, so a typical second-pass permeate leaves with less than 1 mg/L of calcium, 1–3 mg/L of bicarbonate, and an LSI between –4 and –7.

Water like that is hungry.

It dissolves the cement matrix of concrete tanks, strips the protective scale off ductile iron and steel mains, leaches copper and lead from household plumbing, and tastes flat.

It also delivers none of the calcium and magnesium that health authorities increasingly expect in drinking water.

Magnesium, by the way, is that mineral whose lack in drinking water is something countries such as Israel have noted may create health issues in the future, and the mineral that big creators such as Jay Setty are now promoting as the latest fashionable supplement. Curious to think about it.

Post-treatment has one job: put back enough calcium and carbonate alkalinity, at the right pH, that the water lays down a thin protective CaCO3 film instead of eating the network.

Read more

Forecasts warn of rainfall exceeding 200 litres per square metre in 12 hours, potentially reaching 300 litres in 24 hours in the worst-affected areas.

Such volumes could trigger flash floods, overwhelm urban drainage systems and cause dangerous rises in rivers and ravines.

On 28 and 29 October I will be in Madrid for the Iberoamerican Young Water Professionals conference.

The last edition I attended was two years ago, in Bilbao.

I remember that event for a reason that had nothing to do with the agenda.

While we were in the sessions, the DANA hit Valencia.

Phones started buzzing in the room, and by the next morning the numbers were unthinkable: more than 220 people dead.

Two years later, I am going back to the same conference.

So I asked myself a simple question:

The short answer is the title of this essay. Floods will never disappear.

They will come back to Valencia, to Texas, to Pakistan and to places that today think they are safe.

The only real question is how ready we are when they do.

To close the essay I am recovering a conversation I recorded with Oliver, co-founder of Aggeres, a Belgian company that builds flood barriers.

Flood protection technology was already flagged then as one of the fastest-growing segments of climate adaptation and resilience.

Two years of headlines have only made that case stronger.

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This week we kicked off Modules 0 and 1. You can join anytime: the course is available in our academy, so you can start at your own pace.

A few seats are still free in the end, the page shows how many seats would get the early-bird discount. So don’t tell me I didn’t warn you!

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My personal advice: in any of our courses, the thinking is what matters most. I recommend pen and paper. You’ll see the difference at the end, because writing by hand helps you connect the dots.

Valencia, two years on: mostly repair, the big works still on paper

Two years after 29 October 2024, almost all the money executed in Valencia has gone to repairing damage.

The structural works that would change the risk may be partially designed, tendered or authorised, but not built.

Three messages from the news, checked

In the days after the disaster, three messages dominated the conversation. Each has some truth, and each is incomplete.

1. “We need more hydraulic infrastructure. Lack of investment is killing people.”

Largely true, with a nuance.

The Barranco del Poyo had been studied since the 1980s. A 2009 CHJ flood plan for the basin worth €221 million was never executed for lack of funding.

The diversion of the Poyo to the new Turia channel was drafted in 2006, got its environmental approval in January 2012, and let it expire in 2018 without a single shovel.

The Poyo carried about 2,282 m³/s at 18:55, against a warning threshold of 150 m³/s.

The dean of the Valencian civil engineers told the Senate that the planned works would have laminated the peak and reduced the damage, not prevented the flood.

Infrastructure reduces risk. It never brings it to zero.

2. “The floods came because the rivers were not clean.”

Mostly false. Reeds and sediment matter for ordinary floods.

At fifteen times the warning threshold, a clean channel and a dirty one both overflow.

3. “The alarm systems did not work.”

True, and this is where most lives were lost.

The ES-Alert reached phones at 20:11.

In Paiporta the first 112 call about the Poyo overflowing came at 18:32, and 192 of the 228 deaths counted happened in municipalities along the Poyo.

The Horteta ravine, a tributary that sent water into Torrent and Paiporta, had no flow gauge at all.

What has actually been done

The Confederación Hidrográfica del Júcar leads the state works. Its first two years look like this:

What did they study?

The ten projects, now with Typsa-Gecival and Aquatec-Granell, use the real behaviour of the water on 29 October as the design reference.

They combine controlled storage zones to shave the flood peak, widening of the Poyo from Torrent to l’Albufera, more room for the Magro in Algemesí, flood parks in urban areas, and removing the barrier effect of the V-30 and the railway.

The first proposals are due this autumn, followed by public consultation. The Valencian Government says the definitive Poyo works will not start before 2030.

You can have a list of 200 actions that would improve the situation.

But there is no magic wand that turns a list into concrete.

Studies, environmental approvals, expropriations, tenders and construction take years, even under emergency.

One line of the MITECO plan deserves attention: €60 million to adapt buildings with raised accesses, watertight doors and barriers. That is the scale where protection can arrive in months, not decades. I will come back to it.

Meanwhile, the world kept flooding

In the two years since Valencia, at least eleven major floods have killed several thousand people on every inhabited continent. While Spain was still drafting projects, the rest of the world kept writing new headlines.

Three patterns repeat.

1. First, speed: in Texas, Paiporta and Nepal, people had minutes, not hours.

2. Second, surprise: the Atacama desert, a cyclone where cyclones do not form, a rainfall record in Hat Yai.

3. Third, the same sentence in every language. In Mokwa, the local chairman said the flood-control works were long overdue. In Valencia, the Poyo plan had been waiting since 2009.

The Chile row is worth a second look. During the same weather system, an electrical failure at a desalination plant left 45,000 customers in Antofagasta without drinking water.

Flood barriers: protection you can build this year

Big hydraulic works take decades.

Flood barriers can protect a building, a garage or a riverfront in months.

That is why I wanted to bring back my conversation with Oliver, co-founder of Aggeres.

How Aggeres started

In 2010, Belgium suffered severe floods.

Oliver, a civil construction professional from Antwerp, watched people on the news wading through water with sandbags to protect homes that were already flooded.

His reaction was simple:

why are we still using medieval solutions?

He and his brother found almost no professional flood-protection suppliers in the Benelux, only a few in Germany and the UK.

They ran a market survey, started as distributors of other products, and soon moved to designing and manufacturing their own.

It is a path I see often in water entrepreneurship: you first learn the problem by selling someone else’s solution, then you build yours.

What a flood barrier is

A flood barrier closes the gaps through which water enters: doors, garage ramps, low walls, a riverside promenade.

The point is to protect without living behind a permanent concrete wall.

As Oliver says, cities were built next to rivers for a reason.

A city cannot turn its back on its river.

The main types

• Manual demountable barriers. Custom panels placed in doors and garage entrances. Cheap and effective, but someone must be there to install them before the water arrives.

• Watertight garage doors. Sealed every time they are closed and strong enough to hold a set water depth. No action needed on the day.

• Sliding and pop-up gates. For larger openings, chosen to fit each building and budget.

• Self-closing flood barriers. Fully passive. The water itself raises the barrier. More on this below.

One warning from Oliver: protecting doors is not enough.

Most of his clients would rather have water through the door than through the toilet. Backflow protection is part of the job.

The self-closing barrier: one moving part

The design principle is keep it simple.

A narrow, long basin is built into the ground. Inside it hangs a composite wall of glass fibre filled with polyurethane, so it floats.

The basin is connected to the water source: the river, the sewer, a drainage canal, or several of them for redundancy.

In normal conditions the basin is dry and cars drive over it.

When the water reaches a critical level, it overflows into the basin, the wall floats up and locks itself into place.

Heights go from 30 cm to 3 m, and lengths from a 3 m garage exit to hundreds of metres of riverfront.

A barrier that sleeps for five years has to work the one night it is needed.

The biggest example is in Antwerp, under Belgium’s Sigma Plan against flooding from the Scheldt.

Raising the quay embankments by another metre would have put a concrete wall about 2.25 m high between the historic centre and the river.

Instead, the Flemish water authority chose an 842 m self-closing wall of 1.5 m in several sections, plus a 2 m high, 170 m long barrier.

When we recorded, the engineering phase was almost finished and construction was due to start in phases.

The ROI paradox: zero return or recovered in four hours

The hardest part of flood protection may be deciding to pay for something before you know if you will ever use it.

A simple thought experiment

Imagine you have $1 million to invest. Like any investor, you want a return, some proof that the decision was right.

So you put the $1 million into flood barriers.

Then the expected flood never comes during the whole lifetime of the asset.

Return: zero.

On paper, a bad decision.

Next time, you will look for something else to invest in.

Now change one detail.

You install the barriers, and the next day the flood arrives.

The barrier rises, and the garage, the cars, the basement and the shop below street level stay dry.

You avoid several million dollars of damage.

Return?

Recovered and multiplied in 24 hours.

Same investment, same barrier, same quality.

The only difference is a date you could not know in advance.

Oliver’s four-hour return

This is not theory. In 2015, Aggeres installed a self-closing barrier at the exit of a public underground car park, with level -2 holding 200 cars.

They finished on the day of delivery and went home.

Near midnight, Oliver’s phone lit up: water in the activation chamber.

He thought it was a false alarm, until the thunderstorm passed over his own house.

He drove to the site and found the barrier up, holding the water back.

Without it, he says, 200 cars would have been floating against the ceiling.

The car park’s CEO called him the next day and told him it was his best investment ever. He had never seen a return in four hours.

Think like an insurer, not like an investor

The mistake is to judge protection like an investment. It works like insurance.

Nobody asks for the ROI of the fire insurance on their house after a year without fire.

Oliver uses the same comparison with burglar alarms: you install one hoping it never rings.

The numbers support that view.

A flood with a 1% chance per year sounds rare. Over a 30-year asset life, the chance of seeing at least one is about 26%.

P = 1 - (1 - 0.01)^{30}

Roughly one in four. Few investors would ignore a one-in-four risk of losing a car park full of vehicles.

The insurance logic is also where the market is moving.

In Belgium and the Netherlands, Aggeres works with insurers so that a certified installation lowers the premium, much as alarms and smoke detectors do.

Belgium already makes new building permits in flood-prone zones conditional on autonomous protection for underground car parks and low-lying buildings.

Oliver’s view is that this should be European regulation, because floods do not stop at borders.

The real barrier is human

Oliver has quotes that sit unanswered for two, three or four years.

Then the phone rings: I was flooded yesterday and I want it today. What a classic!

On the public side the barrier is different but just as human.

Engineers prefer embankments and concrete walls they can calculate, and they distrust a composite wall that floats.

Politicians prefer works they can inaugurate to protection that is invisible until the night it works.

This is not unique to floods.

In any business, decisions with an uncertain payoff get postponed: maintenance, cybersecurity, redundancy, training.

We are wired to reward visible returns and to discount rare events.

That is why the cost of not deciding is always paid later, and usually by someone else.

In Valencia, it was paid on 29 October 2024.

Floods will never disappear. Our exposure can.

We cannot stop the rain. We can decide how much of it reaches people, and how fast we react when it does.

That means working on four layers at the same time, not waiting for the biggest one.

1. Large infrastructure. Necessary, and slow. Studying is not building.

2. Warning and response. The fastest layer to fix and the one that failed most in Valencia. Automatic alerts, emergency plans that reflect today’s territory, and a population that knows what to do. I think that China is a worldwide leader in this regard.

3. Space for water. Oliver called it Waterland 2.0. The Low Countries have drained their land since the Middle Ages, and now they face record droughts and floods in the same year. Flanders even talks about desalination while it floods every winter. Keep water where it falls, store it, and release it when needed?

4. Protection at building scale. Barriers, watertight doors, backflow valves, self-closing walls. It is the only layer that can be in place before next autumn.

In two weeks I will be in Madrid with young water professionals from Spain and Latin America.

Many of them will spend their careers in countries that appear in the table above.

My message to them will be simple: do not wait for the perfect project. Floods will come back.

The question is whether we will have built anything by then.

Key quotes

On founding Aggeres

“We saw people wading through water carrying sandbags, trying to protect their already flooded homes. Why are we still using medieval solutions to protect our houses?” (~02:00)

“Initially, we were a distribution company for other solutions already on the market, quickly transforming into a production company, creating and building our own solutions.” (~03:40)

On living in a delta

“We’re living in a delta, probably the most engineered delta in the world, with land reclamation and high embankments protecting ourselves from the rivers.” (~06:50)

“Once you start building higher embankments, it gets more difficult when it rains to get the water behind the embankments into the river.” (~07:30)

On cities and rivers

“Usually the river is the reason a city exists. But as a city, you can’t turn your back to the river.” (~08:30)

“How can you provide the highest level of protection from the river without it becoming a barrier?” (~09:10)

On reliability

“If you put in a barrier system that protects you from flooding, you need to be 100% sure that it will operate once you need it.” (~09:40)

“The main idea is: keep it simple. The fewer moving components, the more secure you are that it will operate once you need it.” (~20:30)

“Eliminate the need for a person pushing a button, electricity, hydraulics, pneumatics, anything that may rust and get locked once you need it, and you make a system which is very reliable.” (~23:30)

On the sewer nobody thinks about

“You’d rather let water run into your house through the doors than have it flow back through the toilet.” (~12:00)

On return on investment

“About 90% of our domestic clients had already experienced flooding.” (~15:40)

“Two, three, four years later, they call and say: can we have it executed, because I was flooded yesterday and I want it today.” (~16:00)

“The return on investment can be 10 or 20 years, depending on when you get flooded. But once the first flood happens, the return is immediate.” (~16:30)

“It would have been 200 cars floating against the ceiling. So the return on investment was four hours after the installation.” (~18:20)

“The CEO called me and said: you’re my best investment ever. I never got a return on investment of four hours.” (~18:40)

On why people don’t buy

“The engineers prefer large embankments and concrete walls that they can calculate.” (~29:15)

“People might protect themselves and never see a flood, and that leaves you with the question: was the investment worthwhile?” (~29:40)

“It’s the same as installing an alarm in your house. If you never get a burglar, why did you install it?” (~30:00)

On insurance and regulation

“People are increasingly unable to get insured because their houses flood too often.” (~30:55)

“Floods don’t stop at borders. Climate doesn’t stop at borders.” (~32:25)

On Antwerp

“Antwerp and the river are connected. They are one.” (~26:00)

“You would have a 2.25-metre concrete wall just in front of your nose. That’s not on any political agenda.” (~26:30)

On the Gulf

“If you had told me in 2010 that the UAE would become a market…” (~34:35)

“You cannot keep channelling water. The only solution is nature-based: keep it where it falls, and give the water enough space.” (~35:50)

“The flood market is probably one of the fastest-growing sectors in the climate space.” (~36:50)

On Waterland 2.0

“We’ve been draining our country since the Middle Ages.” (~38:20)

“This summer we had one of the driest summers on record. But when it rains, everything floods.” (~38:40)

“Even in Flanders, they’re thinking about desalinating seawater, while we have plenty of water in the winter.” (~39:40)

Just what I do, how I do it, and what I’ve learned along the way.

That means you can talk directly to your usual assistant (ChatGPT, Claude, whichever you use) and ask it about anything stored and shared in our Hub.

Your AI reads our data and knowledge and uses it as input for its answers.

Here’s how it looks with ChatGPT and the Notion connector:

Why this matters

Many of you already have standard access to the Hub.

So open your LLM, for instance in ChatGPT, go to Plugins, select Notion, login. Connected.

Aurora Naranjo recently messaged me to discuss how we could improve navigation, given how big this universe is getting. She’s right.

The Hub has grown to the point where browsing it page by page is no longer the best way in form some cases.

The in-app search still works. But now you don’t have to search. You can ask. Have a conversation. Let your AI pull the pieces together for you.

Isn’t that a wonderfully democratic exercise?

“Yeah Ramón, but this is only for annual members, and it has a fee.”

Fair. I have bills to pay too. But the price barrier is small compared to the value this can give you. Or not, as I’ll explain below.

What you can ask

I’ll be sharing many creative ways to take advantage of this connection through future publications.

Start simple: “What has Ramón added today?”

It will tell you what I learned and/or stored.

And what do I store? Every day I try to learn something new. There’s no plan, just a mindset.

Take yesterday:

1. LinkedIn. Ravid Levy commented on one of my posts about flowback water in oil and gas fracking. I didn’t know it well, so I looked into it and created a page explaining what it is. Stored forever in my second brain.

2. Email. World Water Week sent me a report with the numbers from the event. I uploaded the PDF to our Water Event Tracker under WWW 2026. Stored forever.

3. Corporate job. I learned a different way of paying suppliers that can avoid usual problems along the supply chain of water projects. I documented the difference between the two payment methods on the Procurement page of the Hub. Stored forever.

I’ve kept this habit for three years. I hope to keep it for the next thirty.

Do you notice how AI is changing the way we work, and how we need to reshape ourselves to keep creating value?

Try asking your AI:

“Who are the biggest contractors in desalination?”

It will pull from the companies and projects we’ve mapped in the Hub and give you a ranked picture, with links to the relevant pages, in less than 30 seconds…

(By the way, since many of you haven’t located my current status: I spent ten years at Cox, and since 2021 I’ve been at WETICO. Just FYI.)

Or something more practical:

“I need a DAF system. Which suppliers does The Water MBA have stored?”

Here’s the difference from a generic web search: you’re drawing on a source you trust, built by practitioners, and permanently under update. (this is very important)

You get the answer, and links to the pages behind it, so you can check and go deeper.

The gym problem

Now your natural thought: “If I can access everything The Water MBA has built in three years in under five minutes, I’m way ahead.”

Not quite.

Knowledge is often shades of grey. And turning the same or different knowledge into decisions and daily performance is a different story altogether.

That’s where the real value sits today: in professionals with multidisciplinary experience who can connect dots and break silos.

Is The Water MBA the only source?

Not at all.

I believe each of us will end up with our own AI, fed with our own data (our lived experience), but also with the experience of others, the sources we trust.

In the ideal scenario, your AI draws from you, from The Water MBA, and from many others.

Personally, for example, I’d love to plug into the brain of Christos for brine valorisation, or Mohamed Ateaia for emerging contaminants.

So, once access to knowledge becomes a commodity (free, or a minor fee, which amounts to the same thing), the bar goes up.

Easy access to knowledge doesn’t level the field. It rewards the people who actually do something with it.

Compounding

I hope you find this feature valuable. Our Knowledge Hub still has a long way to go, but as you can see, I add two or three consolidated learnings every day.

The habit does the rest. It compounds daily, and that’s where the transformation happens.

One last thing

AI evolution is breathless. Look at the curve below: it keeps getting steeper, and it will go vertical sooner than we think.

This is an industrial and social revolution. Catch up.

I’m doing it myself.

With our AI in Water course, every module I go through adds another step to how I understand AI is changing the way we work and live in the water business.

See you next FridAI.

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We all know the saying: you should never make the same mistake twice.

Well… I don’t think that’s how it works.

We don’t trip over the same stone twice. We trip over it again and again.

Fourteen years into my professional career, I still see people making the same mistakes. Sometimes I make them myself.

And every time, there is that moment when you look back and think:

Oops, I did it again.

So I thought it would be interesting to put together some of the most recurring mistakes I have seen in the water business over the last 14 years… but I am still watching today.

Read more

I can tell you, from experience, that it takes something special.

I also wake up at that hour sometimes, but I have no merit whatsoever: my alarm clock is one of my kids.

So when Steve Coffee mentioned that he starts his day at four, my first question had nothing to do with water. How? Why?

The habit was learned, first through university athletics and later in the oil field, where days start early.

He has kept it because the four hours between 4 and 8 a.m. are when the most important things get done, and because, for someone who is always in a different time zone, it keeps him mentally grounded wherever he lands.

His other two rules are simple: more sleep and more water (literally).

Exercise, he admits, is still a work in progress.

I liked that answer because it says a lot about the person.

Discipline that was built rather than inherited.

And a practitioner who, after more than three decades in the field, still talks about water as the first thing he takes care of every day.

I have to confess something before going any further.

Until I started preparing this episode, I had no idea what “produced water” meant.

I did not even know how to translate it into Spanish.

I have spent fifteen years in the business and yet an entire universe of water, measured in hundreds of billions of barrels per year, was sitting right next to my sector without me knowing its name.

When I started researching, one organisation kept appearing: the Produced Water Society, probably the largest association in the world dedicated exclusively to this topic, with events in Texas, the Middle East, Argentina and beyond.

And at the centre of it, its president: Steve Coffee.

Who is Steve Coffee?

Steve has spent 32 years almost exclusively in produced water.

His background is in filtration and separation technologies for upstream oil and gas, with international expertise onshore and offshore, and he is known as an innovator in hydrocyclones and sand management.

He is Director of International Business Development and Marketing at Produced Water Solutions, and he created the Society’s Young Professional Program.

Thousands of people follow what he says and shares on LinkedIn, and once you speak with him you understand why.

He explains complex things simply, he is generous with what he knows, and he is genuinely enthusiastic about bringing new people into the field.

He is exactly the kind of person who must be part of The Water MBA’s network: a continuous source of knowledge for anyone who wants to understand how water really moves through the global economy.

Upstream, midstream, downstream: a map for the rest of us

For those of us who come from municipal water, desalination or conventional industrial treatment, oil and gas can feel like another planet. Steve gave us the map.

The industry is usually divided into three silos.

Upstream is exploration and production: everything related to bringing hydrocarbons up from the ground.

This is where Steve spends most of his time, and this is where produced water is born.

Midstream traditionally meant transport: moving product from point A to point B, mostly by pipeline.

The interesting part is that, according to Steve, in places such as the US, Argentina and Saudi Arabia, wherever unconventional (shale) production is being developed, “midstream” today increasingly means one thing: water.

An entire midstream water business was born and grew out of the US shale boom, roughly in the years just before COVID.

Downstream is refining and final processing, the part most people picture when they think about oil.

Technically, the water there is no longer “produced water,” but the volumes are phenomenal, and much of it is reused for utilities, especially in water-scarce regions.

So what exactly is produced water?

Produced water is the water that comes up from the reservoir together with oil and gas during production.

It is not added by anyone.

It is already down there, and it comes up with the hydrocarbons.

Globally, Steve estimates, with some controversy about the exact figure, that somewhere between 210 and 240 billion barrels of produced water are generated every year.

This is a water industry in its own right.

What happens to all that water?

It depends on the type of production:

• In conventional production, there is traditionally more water and much of it is reused. The most common reuse is reinjection for pressure support and secondary recovery: treated water is pumped back into the reservoir to push out more oil and gas.

• In unconventional production (shale), until recently most of that water was simply disposed of. That is changing. Treatment of fracking flowback for reuse, which would otherwise require fresh water, has gone from essentially zero to somewhere between 50% and 85% in some basins over the last ten to fifteen years, depending on volume, geology and cost.

A new boom? From waste to commodity

Not long ago, natural gas was a byproduct that was simply burned off.

It was a waste, a cost.

Produced water was treated exactly the same way: a problem nobody wanted to talk about.

Today, treated produced water is starting to be seen as a resource, in some cases even as a commodity.

For a long time, in the Permian Basin in West Texas, it was simply much cheaper to dispose of produced water in injection wells and buy fresh water.

That economic logic dominated for years.

But disposal has its own consequences, including the induced seismicity debate, and in neighbouring water-scarce areas such as New Mexico, fresh water is contested between oil and gas, cattle ranching, agriculture and people.

Add data centres looking for cheap land in the same regions, and the competition for water becomes very real.

This connected directly with my recent conversation with Paul Gagliardo about the US Southwest, the Colorado River and the water embedded in exported crops.

Different sectors, same underlying question: who gets the water, and at what cost?

Steve also reminded us that recycling produced water is not science fiction.

Places like California and critical areas in the Middle East proved decades ago that it can be treated and reused safely, even for crop-related uses.

There is also room for creativity with byproducts: sand from produced water being used for road mix or building materials, moving closer to a closed-loop, zero-liquid-discharge approach.

He believes that within five to ten years, these things will simply happen naturally, without the need to debate them.

Energy expansion, not transition

Steve never uses the term “energy transition.” He says “energy expansion.”

We are not consuming less energy; we are consuming more.

We are not replacing one thing because it was wrong; we are adding new sources to meet a massive and growing demand for both energy and water.

And much of the development of the last hundred years was made possible by what the oil and gas industry gave the world.

You may or may not agree with the framing, but for water professionals the conclusion is the same: this market is not shrinking.

If anything, water in energy is becoming more relevant.

The water itself: why is it so hard to treat?

I shared a personal memory with Steve.

Years ago I worked on a wastewater treatment plant for a Saudi Aramco project, treating spent caustic.

When I saw the water quality parameters, my first reaction was: this must be a mistake.

I had never seen anything like it.

The materials specified for the steel were, in my eyes, insane.

My experience with conventional industrial water was simply not enough to approach it reasonably.

Steve was not surprised. Produced water is very different from any industrial water most of us have seen, and it can be challenging mechanically, chemically and metallurgically, even just to move the fluid.

The traditional focus of treatment has been:

• Solids reduction, measured as total suspended solids (TSS).

• Oil and grease, reducing hydrocarbon content, both to allow reuse and to recover the hydrocarbon rather than waste it.

And then there are local nuances: mercury, NORM (naturally occurring radioactive material), water-soluble organics, and more recently PFAS, which, as Steve put it, seem to be everywhere anyway.

In high-salinity, high-temperature regions such as West Texas, Saudi Arabia and the wider Middle East, produced water can, in his words, reach salinities of almost ten times that of seawater.

For those of us who design seawater reverse osmosis plants around 35–45 g/L, that number alone explains why storage tanks can become super duplex conversations and why CAPEX estimates become so volatile.

Interestingly, Steve’s view is that over 32 years, not much has changed technically in terms of new obstacles.

The good news is that there are not many new, scary things coming.

What has changed is how organisations think about water: admitting they have it, talking about it across departments, and managing it strategically across its full life cycle.

Redundancy, safety and specifications

This was one of the questions I had in mind before the conversation, and we only touched it indirectly, so let me add my own practitioner view here.

Coming from EPC, my experience is that oil and gas water systems are specified at another level compared with conventional municipal treatment.

The metallurgy alone shows it: when your water is several times saltier than seawater, hot, and potentially carrying hydrocarbons, H₂S or radioactive material, a material selection that would be conservative in a desalination plant can be inadequate.

Specifications are driven by the operator’s own standards (and in the Gulf, the national oil companies’ standards are famously demanding), and water treatment is not a stand-alone utility: if it fails, it can constrain production.

That changes how you think about availability, spares and redundancy.

The Produced Water Society

The Produced Water Society is approaching 37 years of existence.

It is a Texas-based non-profit, historically made up mainly of oil and gas engineers, but increasingly open to business professionals and people from adjacent industries.

Membership has grown significantly in recent years, driven mainly by two regions: the Permian Basin and the Middle East.

The Society first went outside the US around eleven years ago, starting in the UAE, and now rotates across the UAE, Oman and Saudi Arabia, with regional events in Doha and an eye on Kuwait and the rest of the GCC.

New areas include the UK, with its offshore sector, and Argentina, with its shale gas and unconventional market, as well as the rest of South America.

Not long ago, young people were discouraged from entering oil and gas because of its image.

Now, he sees more of them choosing water as the place where they can make a difference inside the industry.

That is a message I want every young member of The Water MBA to hear.

The events: every region has its own story

I found the Society because of its events, and I have already added them to our Event Tracker in the Water MBA Knowledge Hub.

• Permian Basin (Midland, Texas). When we recorded, the event was starting the following Monday. The format says a lot about the culture: a field trip to recycling and reuse facilities, with local companies opening their doors to 80–100 people (a rare chance to see what others are doing); a consortium meeting; and two days of conference, workshops and exhibition. The whole world watches what the Permian does.

• Annual Conference (Houston). Held in the second week of February, this is Steve’s recommendation if you want one event: easier to reach, more global, and very well attended by water leaders.

• Middle East. UAE, Oman, Saudi Arabia and Qatar: high salinity, high temperature, water scarcity, and a long history of reuse born out of necessity.

• Argentina. Driven by shale, the unconventional market, and a growing interest from South America. I have personally started receiving questions from Argentina about industrial water reuse, which confirms that something is moving there. The event is taking place this week!

• UK. Offshore production and a European perspective.

In total, the Society now has eight events, six of them outside the US, some annual and some biennial.

And Steve left us with one request: an event in Spain.

I made a public commitment.

For the 2030 World Cup in Spain (hopefully), The Water MBA will organise its own gathering, as our members have been discussing in the Networking WhatsApp group, and there will be a space for oil and gas.

Thanks Steve!

I started this episode not knowing what produced water was.

I finished it convinced that it is one of the most underexplored opportunities for water professionals.

Treatment, reuse, midstream water infrastructure, high-TDS challenges, byproduct valorisation: every one of these is a place where our knowledge creates value.

Thank you, Steve, for your time, your generosity and your authenticity.

If you are not following him on LinkedIn yet, you should.

And if you ever see a post from him timestamped at 4 a.m., now you know why.

Key quotes as usual

On waking up at 4 a.m.

“I’m probably not naturally a morning person, more of a night person… I kind of learned this trait.”

“Waking up and getting things done between the 4 a.m. and 8 a.m. time range is a very nice way to start your day.”

“The four o’clock also keeps me very grounded mentally… regardless of what time zone you’re in or how much sleep you get.”

On sleep and water

“More sleep and more water are the two things that I do. I’m trying to do more exercise, but that doesn’t always work out so well.”

On the energy-water nexus

“There’s a really interesting intersection between water and energy, and we’re seeing this even more today with AI and data centers.”

“Water touches pretty much everything.”

On water companies in disguise

“There’s a small joke in the industry that all the oil and gas companies are really just water companies that produce some oil and gas.”

On the scale of produced water

“We’re pretty confident that there’s somewhere between 210 to 240 billion barrels per year that are generated.”

“In some cases, twenty to twenty-five times more water than oil or gas production.”

On the birth of midstream water

“When you talk about midstream, you’re really talking about almost exclusively water, produced water.”

On reinjection and reuse

“The most common reuse is for reinjection or for secondary recovery… injecting treated water back into the reservoir to produce more oil.”

“That number has really increased in the last ten, fifteen years from 0% to, in some cases, somewhere between 50 and 85% reuse.”

On waste becoming a commodity

“Not too long ago, gas was a byproduct that was just burned off. It was a waste, it was a cost, it was a nuisance. Much like water had been thought of for so long.”

“It’s always been a valuable resource. It’s just a matter of how you think of it and where you apply it.”

On mindset over technology

“A lot of what has changed really is the mindset. It really isn’t the technology… It was really just changing the way we thought about a byproduct.”

On the economics of disposal

“There was a point in time, especially in the Permian Basin in West Texas, where it was just cheaper, much cheaper, to dispose of your produced water and buy fresh water.”

On competing for water

“You’ve got oil and gas combined in with cattle, ranching and farming. So they’re really all competing, if you will, with the water demands.”

On public perception

“There’s a public perception problem with this toxic, evil, deadly produced water. But we’ve already proven out decades ago that this water can be cleaned up and reused safely.”

On closing the loop

“There’s a wide range of ways to be innovative and reuse the byproducts of oil and gas to come a little bit closer to a closed-loop system.”

“Hopefully in the next five to ten years, all these things will just happen naturally and we won’t have to debate whether it should be done.”

On energy expansion

“We are not consuming any less energy. We’re only consuming more.”

“I never use the word energy transition… I always say energy expansion, because we’re expanding on what we’re doing, not moving away from one thing and replacing it with another.”

“If you say transition, it’s like something was wrong with it.”

On treatment challenges

“Produced water can be very challenging… mechanically or chemically, or from a metallurgy standpoint, just being able to flow that fluid.”

“The main things we’ve traditionally looked at are solids reduction, total suspended solids, and then oil and grease.”

“Since it came up, you might as well capture it and benefit from that.”

On the TDS frontier

“Probably the biggest next challenge will be reducing TDS… almost ten times the salinity of seawater, which is kind of crazy when you think about it.”

On PFAS

“I feel like PFAS is everywhere anyway. So why would produced water be excluded?”

On what hasn’t changed

“The good news is there’s not a lot of new big scary things coming at us.”

“Companies are admitting basically that they have this, and being able to talk about it with different groups within their organization.”

On the Produced Water Society

“We’ve mainly been made up historically of engineers from the oil and gas space, but now we’re seeing a lot of different folks coming in from business and other industries.”

On young professionals

“When they touched on water, I think a lot of them felt a connection with water.”

“Regardless of their technical book learning, a lot of them are choosing water and choosing to focus on produced water.”

“Now we’re slowly starting to have a more positive perspective on oil and gas, and the role that young people can play in water in this arena.”

On oil and gas where you least expect it

“Sometimes I’ll be in Bali, where you don’t think of oil and gas, you think of resorts and beaches. But the reality is Indonesia has a large oil and gas market.”

On the Permian

“No doubt everybody’s looking at what the Permian is doing.”

“We don’t always get to take a peek into what others are doing, but the local companies have allowed this to happen.”

On where to start

“Probably the most accessible one for a lot of people to get to is the annual conference in Houston.”

On Spain

“Now what we need is one in Spain.”

On the people in water

“It’s always great to talk to people that are excited about water and helping push to educate others and really embrace change.”

Not in a bad way, but the pace is exponential, and every week I see another sign that the way we engineers work is about to change for good.

Last week, I spent some time improving my AI skills through two actions.

• I joined a demo from Infotiles of their Delta platform (thanks, Johny, for the invitation).

Delta applies AI to inflow and infiltration (I&I) analysis in sewer networks.

It is curious that we were talking a few months ago with Marcos (below) about how AI will allow us to operate, to talk to the agents…and then it is already here.

• I also attended the recording of the first module of our AI in Water Operations course with Sandro Hansen.

I took three pages of notes, from the first module alone. As I listened to Sandro, I could literally feel my brain rewiring itself. This is probably the best decision I’ve made over the last three years. I’m very grateful, as the content is far exceeding my expectations.

A few headlines I wrote down to discuss further:

• AI may fail before AI project begins.

• A plant that can make adjustments by itself?

• I loved the case studies exposed.

• Difference between a digital layer and an intelligence layer.

• The 5 questions behind every operational decision.

• 5 problems → 5 different approaches

Getting back to the Infotiles Demo, I’m going to explain my perspective on what I learned from this.

What I saw is that they used real data from a Norwegian municipality with about 3 million metres of pipe.

Read more

For four days, institutions, businesses, the research community and civil society from both shores of the Mediterranean discussed water as a shared resource and the choices needed for the future of the countries that border it.

A few months ago I had the chance to sit down with Alain Meyssonnier, president of the Mediterranean Water Institute (IME).

A water professional of such calibre and uniqueness that you’ll struggle to find anyone else like him in the world.

Listen to him on our podcast, and you’ll understand why.

It felt like the right moment to share some of what came out of some conversations about this event.

What came out of Rome

I talked to some of the attendees, and my notes:

• Resilience Over Infrastructure

Success can no longer be measured simply by the “kilometres” of pipes or dams built.

Large-scale engineering must be paired with Nature-based Solutions, and investments must be evaluated on the actual resilience they generate for local communities.

• The Rise of the “Water Manager”

There is a critical skills gap.

The region needs a new class of professionals capable of breaking down silos to integrate agriculture, energy, environmental protection, and digital technology across multiple government ministries.

So I guess many of those water managers will come from this community 😎

• Innovation Through Reuse

Rather than relying solely on high-energy solutions like desalination, countries need to scale up water recycling.

Examples include Egypt’s advanced quantification of drainage water reuse and Italy’s TANIT cooperation project, which channels treated wastewater from Tunisian cities into the desert to foster a “green” economy.

The 2026 Global Water Agenda

The Rome forum is just the beginning of a highly coordinated diplomatic push to integrate water security into global climate frameworks.

UN Water Conference (Abu Dhabi) on Dec 8 – 10, 2026 will be the capstone event of the year.

It will feature six thematic dialogues (focusing on people, prosperity, planet, cooperation, multilateral processes, and investment) to summarize the cycle and build upon the historic 2023 New York conference.

What the IME is

For more than 40 years, the IME has been a meeting point for water in the Mediterranean.

Its structure is unusual: three “colleges” sitting at the same table.

1. One is institutional, with ministries and regional authorities.

2. Another brings together public and private operators from around fifteen countries, from Aguas de Barcelona to Morocco’s ONEE.

3. The third gathers independent experts and academics.

That makes more than a hundred members, supported by a permanent team of just three people.

Its goal isn’t to deliver projects but something harder: to be the voice of water.

It collects what has worked and what hasn’t on each shore, and makes that experience available to the people who have to decide.

The Mediterranean’s problems

Alain argued that demography, even more than climate change, is the biggest pressure on water.

The southern and eastern Mediterranean are growing at a pace that has nothing to do with the north.

More people means more food, and agriculture already accounts for around 80% of water use in the region.

On top of that, rainfall is increasingly erratic.

It falls all at once and runs off to the sea before it can be captured, as we saw so tragically in Valencia.

Then there’s pollution: in many places there is still no wastewater treatment, and Alain reminds us that you can’t talk about reuse where there’s no treatment.

And there’s a silent bill, the networks. In a water system, he told me, the plant costs 10 and the network costs 100, and for decades nobody saved up to renew it.

The IME works on four priorities.

1. The first is to know and protect natural resources.

2. The second is sobriety in water use.

3. The third is efficiency across the whole life of infrastructure.

4. The fourth is the water mix, which includes reuse and desalination.

The need for coordination

One idea runs through everything Alain says: the problem is about conversation.

Scientists who design technologies need to talk with the operators who will have to buy and run them, which is why the IME has moved into the École Centrale de Marseille and works with universities such as Málaga.

People who criticise a dam or a desalination plant need to talk with those who understand the economic and social context behind it.

Generations need to talk too: at the Tunis forum, the conclusions were presented by a group of ten young engineers and political scientists.

Countries need to talk as well.

Why is water blue?

An anecdote. When he worked at the Marseille water company, Alain used to visit schools to talk about the water cycle.

Children would ask him things like why water is blue, questions far harder to answer than they seem.

But the one that made him think most was different: what’s the point of saving water here if it doesn’t help Algeria?

For years he answered that it was a matter of awareness.

Today his answer has changed. There is only one water cycle.

The drop that falls in Cartagena today may have been in Turkey two weeks ago.

The amount of water on the planet doesn’t change.

What changes is how it rains and how much we pollute it.

So yes, saving water in Spain helps Morocco (not sure if this is the best reference nowadays due to geopolitics concern…just kidding)

That may be the best summary of the Mediterranean.

Industry has understood the risk

One of the most interesting shifts Alain describes is in industry.

For large companies, water is no longer a line in the annual sustainability report.

It has become strategic, because a shortage threatens production itself.

His favourite example is OCP, Morocco’s phosphate group, a huge water user that also uses water to move phosphate from the mines to the port.

Over twenty years, it built its own engineering team, cut leaks in its network and then specialised in reuse and desalination.

Today roughly 30% of its water comes from treated wastewater from the three nearby mining towns and 70% from desalination.

It no longer takes a single drop from natural sources, which leaves that water for other uses.

Michelin, meanwhile, aims to cut its water consumption by two thirds by 2030, and every research project must now include water and energy savings.

Small is beautiful

Large treatment plants have solved enormous problems and aren’t going anywhere.

But Alain believes that when a city expands, the first question should be whether to treat wastewater on site rather than extend the network all the way to the central plant.

Reusing treated water within a neighbourhood is far easier and cheaper than doing it across a whole city, especially if it’s planned from the start.

In Singapore or Japan, it’s hard to imagine a building that doesn’t reuse its own greywater, which can cut consumption by 40 to 50%.

He sees an opportunity for Africa to leapfrog, just as it did with telephones.

Much of the continent skipped landlines and went straight to mobiles, and mobile payments took off in Kenya before they did in Europe.

Water could follow the same path if new projects consider these solutions from day one.

The tariff paradox

In 2008, when Alain was in charge of operations in southern France, his team organised shipments of drinking water by boat from Marseille to Barcelona.

Since then, Barcelona has made a huge effort to reduce consumption.

Today it uses around 106 litres per person per day, compared with a French average of 146.

However, this creates a paradox that few people outside the sector understand.

Between 80 and 90% of a water utility’s costs are fixed. I would need to check exactly this with my local utility.

If people consume less, revenue falls, and tariffs have to rise to keep the system balanced, whether the operator is public or private.

Add the backlog of network renewal, and Europe needs a new economic model for urban water.

For Alain, the key isn’t public versus private management but having renewal targets that are written down and actually met.

A few key quotes

On the water cycle

• “We have to stop talking about the big cycle and the small cycle of water. There is only one water cycle.”

• “The drop of water that falls in Cartagena today was maybe in Turkey fifteen days ago.”

• “Saving water in Spain helps Morocco.”

• “The amount of water on the planet is the same. What changes is how it rains, because of climate change, and pollution.”

On knowledge

• “To protect something, you have to know it. You can’t talk about things you don’t know.”

• “Many people talk badly about dams without knowing what they’re talking about.”

• “You can’t criticise something for free. You need a calm analysis.”

On consumption and use

• “Drip irrigation uses less water per hectare, but many more hectares get irrigated. We have to think beyond consumption. It’s about use: what for?”

On infrastructure and money

• “In a water system, the treatment plant costs 10 and the network costs 100.”

• “If you reduce consumption, and almost all your costs are fixed, you have to raise the tariff.”

• “The problem isn’t public or private. The problem is having objectives that are written down and met.”

• On 19th-century works still supplying a city: “If they had been told it was an investment for 150 years, they wouldn’t have argued about it for so long.”

On industry

• “It’s not about the annual environmental report anymore. It’s strategic.”

• “Reducing water reduces energy, and in the end it’s profitable.”

On reuse

• “You can only talk about reuse if there is effective treatment.”

• “Small is beautiful. It’s much easier to reuse treated wastewater in a neighbourhood than in a city.”

• “The cheapest option is to treat the water where you build the new neighbourhood.”

On desalination

• “We trust our technological capacity to find a way to avoid the pollution.”

• “We have to work on the chemistry, not only the salt but the chemicals used to clean the membranes.”

• On desalination for export agriculture: “It can seem completely absurd. But you have to look at the economic impact, at the jobs.”

On demography

• “People talk a lot about climate change, but the first impact is demography.”

• “Demography means, first of all, food.”

On operations and AI

• On treatment plants built without sewer networks: “They put grease around the motors so they don’t get damaged.”

• “Priority to operation, priority to training.”

• “AI depends on knowledge. If tomorrow only AI has the knowledge, what happens to the employees?”

On young people

• “We have to share our experience, but not take the decision. The decision has to be in the hands of the young.”

• “They are the ones who will face the next 50 or 60 years, not us.”

• “If someone isn’t interested, you can’t force them. We have to go to them.”

On priorities

• “I’m quite optimistic about our capacity. The difficulty is making it a priority.”

• “The countries that consider water a priority are the ones that develop best.”

On science and operators

• “Scientists are very good, but the ones who will buy the technology are the operators.”

On communication

• “Explain, explain, and always explain.”

• “How can television talk about one topic every day for a week and never talk about water?”

On water and peace

• “Water serves peace more than war.”

• “Water is one of the topics that can let people sit down at a table, because it’s the same water for everyone.”

On lifelong learning

• “I keep learning. That’s why I’m here.”

• “Nothing obliges you. If you do it, it’s because you like it and think sharing experience can be useful. And you always learn.”

• “And it helps keep the neurons working.”

You have a budget and a schedule — let’s say 24, 28, or 34 months…

Let’s assume your plant needs to produce 300,000 m³/day of freshwater.

To produce freshwater, you first need seawater.

So, I would divide any desalination project into two very clear phases:

before and after the day when you have seawater flowing through your intake into the intake pump station, ready to be used for the sequential testing and commissioning of all the plant’s systems.

From Day 0, you are therefore in a race against the clock to reach that date.

Let’s assume you have a project schedule of 28 months. Let’s fix that critical milestone in month 21.

And again, I would divide this 21 months race into two clear stages.

A before and an after in the day you reach what you see exactly in the picture below is a turning point.

So, today’s publication is about the key steps you will follow in every single desalination project — whether it is in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, the UK, or your own neighbourhood — from Day 0 until the moment you get seawater flowing into your intake chamber.

What matters. What does not. The key decisions you will have to make. The main pitfalls you need to avoid.

And what can make the difference between getting there on time or losing months along the way.

Last but not least, at the end of the publication, you can download completely FREE, in Excel format, the key coordination checklist I’ve used in my projects, covering the main points I need to address at each stage of this major civil infrastructure project.

Read more

They came from the Pacific side of the world, from Chile: Ignacio Rodríguez, Juan José Crocco and Carlos Rubilar Camurri.

I have spent a long time bringing people onto the podcast, and I will keep doing it.

Brilliant people, willing to share live experience as it happens.

If so many of them are already among us, why not start there?

This panel was the first answer to that question.

There will be more so that you can get to know each other and so that members take an active role in how we learn together.

📢 This essay is sponsored by… The Water MBA.

AI and Intelligent Operations in the Water Industry

Our new AI course starts on October. This first cohort gets 5 live sessions with Sandro Hansen and me. Future editions will be on-demand only.

399 €. Then the price goes up.

👉 Book your seat

Get to know the members

Ignacio Rodríguez is a lawyer by training who came from the power sector and founded Desala, a company focused on the early-stage development of seawater desalination and the trunk transport of desalinated water.

He has been there since day one. His projects serve mining, but also farmers and rural drinking water systems, which makes his work deeply multi-sector.

Juan José Crocco, also a lawyer and Ignacio’s university classmate, has dedicated his entire career to water.

He served as Secretary General of the Confederación de Canalistas de Chile, the association of the country’s canal users, and as Deputy Director of the Dirección General de Aguas (DGA) during President Piñera’s second government, where he handled the Water Code reform and its parliamentary debate.

Today he works as a strategic water consultant and helped create One Water, an alliance of companies pursuing more integrated solutions, because, as he put it, water is a multi-systemic problem and a lawyer alone only ever sees part of it.

Carlos Rubilar Camurri also knows the DGA from the inside, and today he is one of the most active voices in Chile explaining water to the public, in the media and on social networks.

Three different angles: the developer, the regulator turned strategist, and the communicator.

A market that almost nobody else has

Some time ago, Ignacio shared in our networking group that he was looking for a partner for Aguas Petorca, a project he originally founded as Desala Petorca and which is now controlled by the Chilean power company Colbún.

When I opened the PDF, I did not fully understand the business model: a developer building a desalination plant and a transmission line, and then serving many different clients along the way.

Ignacio explained a very interesting point.

In most of the world, desalinated water is municipal, regulated water.

The plants in southern Spain were financed with public capex and serve human consumption and irrigation under regulated tariffs.

In Israel, a state entity fixes the tariff under a BOT model, you build your financial model, calculate your return, and invest.

Chile has something different: a market of what he called free clients.

Miners, farmers, rural sanitation services, real estate, green hydrogen... Each pays according to the value water creates for their own activity.

“Every user has their own willingness to pay, depending on the return that water produces for them.”

A copper mine extracts far more value from each cubic metre than a vegetable grower.

Structured properly, those different willingness-to-pay levels can share one piece of infrastructure.

Ignacio went further and said he suspects Chile may be the only country in the world where geography, regulation and economics line up to make this possible, largely because copper mining sits relatively close to the coast.

He also described how the model evolved.

Mines first built desalination plants inside their own capex and carried all the risk.

Then they realised water was not their business and began tendering dedicated plants, which in some cases produced absurd situations: two plants close to each other, with two pipelines, for two different mining companies that could have shared one system.

Then came this line:

“The future is that desalinated water will end up being a commodity.”

His reasoning is that environmental permits and project finance tenors typically run around 30 years, but a desalination plant physically lasts much longer.

Once the anchor client has paid for the asset, operators will be able to sell water to many more users, more cheaply, while keeping or even improving their return.

The hard part is getting these assets born. After that, they can grow.

Reservoirs designed for rivers that no longer exist

Before I hit record, we were talking about the Punilla reservoir, I visited Chile in 2015 while tendering for this beautiful project, but it seems there has been little progress since then.

It was the kind of project every civil engineer dreams of being part of.

I remember how challenging the social acceptance was among the local community, particularly around the idea of creating a pool in their natural habitat.

Juan José brought up the Las Palmas reservoir, which is effectively stalled because the river flow it was designed for no longer exists.

The tendered works were oversized for the real hydrology, and according to him that was known from day one.

Had it been designed from the start to store half the volume, it would already be built, and it would have captured the water from the recent floods.

And that brings us to the paradox of this year. Chile has been hit by an extreme El Niño, which Carlos called, with some humour, “El Niño Godzilla,” with historic rainfall across much of the country.

Carlos summed up the lesson:

“We lack the water policies and the infrastructure to deal with surplus, and to make use of those resources.”

Save this quote:

What is missing, in his view, is planning built around climate resilience: the capacity to adapt to long periods of very little water and sudden periods of too much.

Juan José’s idea: imagine a reservoir that could also receive desalinated water during the months when nature provides nothing.

Desalination and storage stop being competing solutions and become parts of the same system.

Permits

When I worked in Chile, what struck me most were the timelines.

Feasibility, environmental studies, tenders, everything took a very long time.

So I asked Ignacio, as a developer, where exactly it hurts.

It is not simple, because there are many administrative interdependencies and many agencies with water competences.

But he sees concrete hope in the new sectoral permits law, which allows processing times for critical infrastructure to be cut by up to half.

Desalination plants and reservoirs involve many permits processed by the DGA and the Dirección de Obras Hidráulicas, and one in particular, the obra hidráulica mayor (major hydraulic works) permit, is feared by everyone for being long, expensive and engineering-heavy.

Juan José offered the view from the other side of the desk. Delays were always present, and a project slightly out of the ordinary, such as conveying desalinated water, could land you in a very grey zone with no idea how long it would take.

But he was clear that this was a problem of institutional design, not of civil servants’ attitude.

The DGA has a very marginal budget within the Ministry of Public Works, which reflects a country that for a long time simply had enough water.

Regulating after the fact

The most provocative moment of the conversation.

Juan José acknowledged that the new desalination law still leaves many grey areas, for example how desalinated water relates to water rights once it enters a water users’ organisation that distributes the resource.

And then he said something that goes against the instinct of many of us:

“I am in favour of it not being regulated, because that allows agreements between private parties that can be far better solutions than what the State could reach in a reasonable time.”

His argument is historical. Chile’s canal users’ organisations extracted and conveyed water, and private capital built much of the country’s canal infrastructure to bring water from the Andes to where it was needed.

All of that happened about a hundred years before a law regulated those organisations.

Coming from someone who wrote reforms to the Water Code, that carries weight.

And it echoes what we have been saying at The Water MBA for a while: the gap is not only one of investment. It is often a gap of knowledge and coordination between people who could already be doing business with each other.

The Antofagasta paradox

Carlos brought the conversation back to people.

Desalination is still a largely unknown world for most citizens, who often keep only the negative headlines without checking whether they are true.

His example of Antofagasta, supplied 100% by desalinated water, has the highest per-capita bottled water consumption in Chile.

The water is safe. The trust is not there. That is a communication problem, and no technology solves it on its own.

He also asked us to leave behind what he called trench politics, the habit of setting human consumption, environmental conservation and productive use against each other, when water itself can reconcile all three.

And he pointed to the coming regulations for the desalination law and the sectoral permits law as moments that must be explained well to the public.

Two practical ideas from Carlos:

1. First, small-scale desalination: we picture large plants like the ones Desala develops, but there are many smaller needs that could be served perfectly well with smaller units.

2. Second, smaller reservoirs located not at the head of the basins but in lateral valleys, which are easier to permit, more likely to actually fill, and useful in years of surplus to store water and later recharge aquifers.

The magic wand

Before Ignacio had to leave for another meeting, I asked him what he would change if he were President of the Republic.

His answer: make Chile a country open to water technology.

Israel, China and the Gulf are launching technologies quickly, and many of them are not present in Chile. His example was atmospheric water.

With all the coastal fog Chile receives, the famous camanchaca, he believes some coastal communities’ drinking water problems could be addressed quickly. His criticism was sharp and fair:

“This democratic exercise has flooded us with diagnosis, and sometimes we are diagnosing things we haven’t even tried.”

So: incentives to pilot, expedited permits, and readiness to regulate whatever works. Regulate based on technological penetration, not diagnose in a way that scares everyone away.

Juan José, describing himself as the liberal he is, agreed that the Chilean framework already allows exactly what Ignacio proposes; it just isn’t clear.

His decree would be different: put all the dispersed information held by different State agencies onto one public, reliable platform (the water MBA?😂), so that anyone can work out, for example, how much someone would pay for a cubic metre of desalinated water delivered at 5,000 metres above sea level.

Resources available, priorities defined (ecosystems, human consumption, production), and clear rules of the game.

Carlos closed the same loop.

He dreams of a public-private project that creates a single database where each user contributes information according to their profile and extracts what they need, with artificial intelligence helping to detect and correct errors in data that is often outdated, inaccurate or hard to access.

Why this matters for us

The information exists, but it is scattered, and its value depends on how it is structured, communicated and made accessible.

That is exactly why I told them about the platform we are opening for our community in October.

It is obviously not a national database, but the question is the same: how do we build the skeleton so that knowledge is organised, available to everyone, and grows over the coming years?

There will be a specific page on Chile explaining how the country’s water sector works and reflecting many of the issues discussed today.

Chile, by the way, is the fifth country by number of members in The Water MBA.

This panel was a first step.

The idea is simple: members who are active in the group and as subscribers should also have the chance to have a voice and share their views, so that we can find each other.

Our sector keeps looking for top minds on international stages, and we will keep bringing them.

But many are already here, reading the same essays and answering in the same group.

So why not start among us?

Thank you, Ignacio, Juan José and Carlos for your continuous support to our community.

A key quotes you can navigate quickly

On the free-client market

“Every user has their own willingness to pay, depending on the return that water produces for them.”
— Ignacio Rodríguez (08:00)

“Chile is probably the only country in the world with the geographic, regulatory and economic characteristics that make this kind of project possible.”
— Ignacio Rodríguez (09:00)

On mining as the market’s engine

“The mining companies realised that water is not part of their business.”
— Ignacio Rodríguez (28:30)

“Chile has seen absurd cases: two desalination plants very close to each other, for two different mining companies, where the infrastructure could perfectly well have been shared.”
— Ignacio Rodríguez (29:00)

On the long life of the asset

“The future is that desalinated water will become a commodity.”
— Ignacio Rodríguez (30:50)

On infrastructure designed for a hydrology that no longer exists

“The works that were tendered were oversized: the flow it was designed for no longer exists today.”
— Juan José Crocco (12:20)

“Imagine the reservoir built and able to receive desalinated water in the periods when you have no availability.”
— Juan José Crocco (14:04)

On drought and surplus

“We lack the water policies and the infrastructure to handle water surplus and make use of those resources.”
— Carlos Rubilar Camurri (16:00)

“We have to plan within a framework of climate resilience: knowing how to adapt to a lot of water or very little.”
— Carlos Rubilar Camurri (17:32)

On permisología

“Permisología is a half-invented word, but it’s not a simple matter: there are many administrative interdependencies and many agencies with water competences.”
— Ignacio Rodríguez (20:00)

On regulating after the fact

“I’m in favour of what isn’t regulated, because it allows private agreements that can be far better solutions than anything the State could deliver in a reasonable time.”
— Juan José Crocco (24:10)

“Chile’s regulatory framework is reactive.”
— Juan José Crocco (26:00)

On water as a multi-systemic problem

“Water is a multi-systemic problem; facing it only as a lawyer would only ever give me a partial solution.”
— Juan José Crocco (03:00)

On public perception and trust

“Antofagasta is supplied 100% by desalinated water and has the highest per-capita bottled water consumption in Chile.”
— Carlos Rubilar Camurri (33:00)

“We have to leave behind this trench politics that puts human consumption, environmental conservation and productive use at opposite ends.”
— Carlos Rubilar Camurri (33:40)

On scale

“We picture the big plants, but there are also smaller needs that could be served by small-scale desalination.”
— Carlos Rubilar Camurri (35:00)

On diagnosis versus piloting

“This democratic exercise has flooded us with diagnosis, and sometimes we’re diagnosing things we haven’t even tried.”
— Ignacio Rodríguez (38:50)

On data as infrastructure

“I’d put all that information on a public, available, reliable platform that lets you work out what someone would pay for a cubic metre of desalinated water delivered at 5,000 metres above sea level.”
— Juan José Crocco (42:40)

“You can communicate anything, but if it isn’t grounded in correct, up-to-date data, in the end you’re selling smoke.”
— Carlos Rubilar Camurri (46:00)

Last week my good friend BJ Lee** from HKA forwarded me an interesting webinar series from Pinsent Masons, named “Water Desalination Projects in a Middle East Conflict Scenario”.

**they are one of the best partners you can rely on for contract risk mitigation or claims management. Believe me, one of my best professional experiences came from working with him a few years ago.

I added it immediately to my Events/Webinar tracker in the Knowledge Hub.

I’ve written before about the movements I made when the war started earlier this year, and we’ve talked about force majeure clauses too.

Adding that I’m currently working on Middle East projects across pretty much every stage: under construction, recently signed and entering supply chain, in the gap between bid and financial close, and under bidding.

I therefore found it a great opportunity to catch up on the legal side of these projects.

So, I share below a list of 13 points you should bear in mind to understand the situation as it unfolds.

Definitely, the situation is BIG.

Watching the 1st session hosted by Gurmeet Kaur and Ash Murtha of this webinar series (you can register here for the next 4 coming up), many things clicked, for instance those projects located in “The Bid-to-Signature Gap” as conflict risk can arise before contractual protections become effective.

Specially interesting also how a force majeure clause during a Project can evolve into a full-blown financing crisis, a restructuring and project-rescue exercise.

Read more

Where are we heading? What are the opportunities? What are the growth paths?

So, our baseline remains the same: exploring and explaining the water business, bringing great knowledge to the community, and connecting professionals from around the world.

Okay, now let’s get into today’s topic.

#1 — AI

The AI thing is insane. Not just in water, but everywhere.

And I’m an analog guy. I’m a civil engineer. I sometimes feel I need to catch up.

It reminds me of when I started working in 2012. Some colleagues who were 50 or 60 at the time would say: “Excel file? No, no. I use paper. I’m too old to learn this.”

I don’t want to be that guy.

The way we work — and the way our businesses are evolving — means I need to significantly improve my knowledge of AI and digital tools.

That’s why learning AI with Sandro Hansen will be one of our major initiatives over the coming months, and probably years. This is also why Sandro has officially joined us as our international instructor.

I need to put my student hat on, take a step back, and start learning, step by step, how AI works in water and, more importantly, how this field is likely to evolve in the future.

I genuinely believe that every unit of time and every euro I invest in this learning journey will be worth it in the future.

We start in just a few days. REGISTER

#2 — Social media, communication & your digital asset

The rules of the game have changed.

Whether you are an individual or a company, creating and developing your own digital asset — your reputation, your knowledge, your network, your presence — may become one of the skills and mindset shifts that can generate much better returns in the future.

So I’m going to lead a brief course on social media & communication, based largely on my own experience over the last few years.

But I want to make it very practical and tailored to each person, because it depends enormously on the intersection between your personality, what you enjoy, what you are good at, which networks you use, and what you want to achieve in the future.

Many people simply don’t take action.

And even if you don’t like social media — I actually much prefer shaking hands and meeting people face to face — if you completely ignore this field, you are missing a lot.

You should probably consider it a kind of tax on your professional development: invest a bit of time and money consistently.

And I’ll help you understand how.

#3 — Desalination

The knowledge gap in desalination is huge. Really huge.

And the demand for practical knowledge is skyrocketing.

The return on investing in education in this field is becoming increasingly easy to see.

So, especially for those with less than 5 years of experience, professionals moving from another area of the water industry, or newcomers coming from outside water, I genuinely believe this course should be a must-have.

That gives me a very particular perspective: not just the technical knowledge, but the context around how the business actually works.

And I think I can bring that context to these different profiles in the most practical and useful way possible.

Whether you work in feasibility studies, consulting, business development, engineering, construction, or plant operation, you’ll gain a solid understanding of how desalination projects really work from a big-picture perspective.

The business won’t wait. Now is a great time to get up to speed.

#4 — Water reuse

Reuse is another major direction.

There is a lot of money and strategy flowing into this field. I naturally feel less comfortable with some of the highly technology-driven aspects, but I know how to navigate the ecosystem.

So rather than pretending to be the expert in everything, I want to do what I think The Water MBA does best: bring together the right experts.

Why?

Because I think it is extremely valuable to learn how different countries and markets approach specific cases and to get as much context as possible.

Every reuse project can be unique, particularly in industrial water.

My personal priority would be industrial water reuse, followed by agricultural schemes and indirect potable reuse, with less representation initially for direct potable reuse.

This is still at an early stage. The first step is selecting our instructors, people who share our values and genuinely understand the field and its reality.

We already have two selected, but we need more.

So this is probably a mid-to-long-term project, with an announcement for 2027.

#5 — Water stewardship & corporate water

By now, the economic impact of water in the corporate world is clear. That discussion is over.

Water has moved from being an operational cost line to being a risk, a licence to operate, and in some cases a strategic constraint on where and how companies can grow.

What is not settled yet is the how.

The frameworks, the procedures, the metrics, the actions companies are actually expected to take — all of that is still under construction.

But it is being built quickly, and I think it will consolidate into something sooner than most people expect.

That is exactly why I want to be very supportive here.

When a field is being built in real time, knowledge and education change really fast.

What was considered good practice eighteen months ago may already be outdated, and the gap between what a company thinks it should do and what it will be required to do keeps moving. I need to stay up to date. And so do you.

So I’ll apply the same logic I’m applying with reuse: rather than pretending to be the expert, I want to bring in someone who is on the front line, dealing with this on a daily basis, not someone commenting on it from the outside.

I’ll assign one official instructor as part of The Water MBA for this area — a person who lives corporate water and stewardship every day, and who can transmit that knowledge according to our values and our style: practical, honest, and grounded in what actually happens inside companies and projects.

I think these 5 pillars mentioned above are extremely important, both because of what our community is asking for and because of where the industry is moving.

#6 — The Knowledge Hub

And finally, the main introduction in the video is our Knowledge Hub.

I’ve spent around three years taking notes, researching, brainstorming, drawing conclusions, raising questions, designing, and building a place that could eventually be useful to our community.

It was, honestly, very messy.

Over the last few months, I’ve spent a lot of time cleaning it, organising it and polishing it to create a minimum viable skeleton from which I can now work systematically.

And it will finally be made available and I explain how in the video.

So, what will you find there?

The idea is not that you use it every day. Think of it more as an added layer of value for our members.

It is also my workspace, so feel free to correct me, challenge me or suggest improvements.

The bigger idea is simple:

Let me walk you through it section by section, and tell you why each one is there.

• Understanding water, the fundamentals.

Before navigating anything else, there are a few basics that any water professional — and even someone completely outside our profession — should understand. This is the first step before you start clicking around.

• The Knowledge Navigator.

This is the core of the hub, and probably where I will invest most of my time.

The structure is by fields.

You start from the top narrative — what a field is, why it is managed the way it is — and you can go all the way down to the bottom.

Desalination, then the desalination process, then pre-treatment, then DAF and filtration, pros and cons, lessons learned, the main technology providers for each piece of equipment…

Some pages have PDFs and videos embedded. You will notice the pages don’t all look the same, and that’s fine.

If you miss a specific field, it is probably inside one of these. Anyway I can change the whole thing tomorrow if required.

For instance, communication and media is in there for a reason: our business is not only technical, and understanding the media references, marketing and the creator economy is part of being prepared for what is coming.

This is also where the instructors come in. I want to bring at least one instructor per discipline, and part of their role will be helping me design and tailor these pages so the framework is properly built — not just my own notes.

• The podcast, reorganised.

All our episodes in one database: type (conversation, presentation, workshop), tags, language, direct link to the video and to the publication, and the attached files when there is a presentation or a workshop you can download and use.

Search “stewardship” for instance, and you get the episodes worth your time.

Why? Because on the website the podcast is chronological, and that is not how anyone looks for knowledge.

• Countries.

I find it fascinating that every country manages water in a completely different way — different context, regulation, culture.

So each page has key data, why water is managed as it is there, main projects, case studies and anecdotes.

There are also cross-links: in Europe, for example, you will find a link to the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, which lives in the corporate water page.

Not all countries are there. I simply haven’t had the time yet.

• Events and webinars tracker.

One of my fav. Event name, date, city, country, category and website. And when an event has already taken place, I try to add takeaways — mine if I attended, or from the community and social media if I didn’t.

Why? Because too often you find out on LinkedIn that something interesting happened three days ago.

For 2027 I want to expand this a lot, especially with webinars.

• Community feedback.

A place where anyone in the space can leave feedback, publicly or to connect with someone else.

You can also volunteer to be featured on a podcast episode — I’d like to bring at least one community member per month.

This one is not finalised, because I still need to figure out how to make it work automatically.

• Water books.

Name, author, the fields you’ll learn from it, and a summary. Some I’ve read. Some are simply noted for the future. I still love learning on paper, so this one is for people like me.

• Water companies.

A database of the companies I consider relevant in the water business.

I’m missing hundreds of them, obviously, but every time I come across one I didn’t know, it goes in.

Once a month I scroll through it and pick one to look into properly.

Startups are not here — they have their own database inside the Water Tech and Innovation page, with technology readiness level, funding status, references and the problem they are trying to solve.

• Water jobs.

Role, company, field, location, link, and the date I registered it, so you know how old it is, as I cannot track when those positions are closed.

This is not LinkedIn Jobs and it is not trying to be.

Reading what companies are actually asking for tells you a lot about where the demand is going — and that is strategic information for your own career.

• Courses tracker.

What’s coming, organised by field.

Click on AI and you’ll see the roadmap, starting with Sandro Hansen in a few days.

We are not trying to build an Udemy of water. It is not about quantity.

• Glossary of terms.

What is a BOT contract, what is a bond,…You won’t use it often, but it’s there.

• People I recommend.

Name, field, country, LinkedIn profile and key expertise.

People I’ve worked with or known for a long time and whose judgement I trust.

To be clear, they are not all official instructors of The Water MBA.

Some probably will be. But if I want to learn about any specific field, I know exactly who to call, and I’d rather share that than keep it to myself.

How to access

• Check your inbox and open the email you’ll receive.

• Create your profile in the Notion app. You can use it on your laptop or mobile phone, actually, the mobile experience is pretty good too!

• Complete the setup process — it takes less than 1 minute.

  • Skip creating a workspace when prompted...

  • Select the Free plan; no paid plan is required…

• Go to your homepage.

• Open the Knowledge Hub.

  • If it doesn’t appear directly, go back to the email and click the access link again.

• Save the Knowledge Hub as a bookmark/favourite in your browser for direct access.

• Close the sidebar for a cleaner, better experience.

• Use the navigation on the right to move between sections.

• Scroll down and explore freely through the Knowledge Hub.

This is just the foundation. Now the work is to polish and improve it, expand it and keep building the knowledge universe.

• Add at least one instructor per field where possible.

• Bring real-world business expertise into each area.

• Build and refine the learning framework around practical industry reality.

• Develop a clearer mental map of the water business as the Hub grows.

• Experiment with different formats and gradually consolidate what works best.

The idea is not to have everything perfect from day on, it is to build it, use it, learn from it, and evolve it together.

This is just the beginning.

Of course, I also have other topics very much on my radar: utility transformation, geopolitics, regulation, drinking and waste water treatment, biosolids, emerging contaminants, flood management, financing, water tech, dams, business models…

Hundreds of thousands of utilities around the world, each with their own particularities, that’s quite a field to explore and help with! 😄

So I’ll keep bringing interesting reflections throughout our journey, always looking at the water business from a wide perspective.

I’ll keep progressing as I am now, not too high, not too low.

We know what we have to do, we know how we can help, so let’s just enjoy the journey, day by day.

I’m 37. My days are spent bidding and executing physical water infrastructure: desalination plants, industrial wastewater treatment, reuse...

I enjoy that work and I’m not leaving it tomorrow.

But one question kept coming back.

Who is the elite in water? Which institutions, and which specific chairs inside them, actually shape this industry? And what would it take for someone like me to sit in one of them?

This is not about the “expected good salary.”

It’s about leverage: the power to create as much value as possible in a sector I care about.

And the thing is that you can’t decide on a Monday that you want it and have it by Friday. If I want real options at 50, I need to start moving at 37.

So I ran the exercise properly. I mapped the institutions, the roles, the entry doors and the constraints.

I talked to people who have sat in some of those chairs. And I reached a conclusion that I think applies to you too. Yes, you, the reader.

A small preview of what came out of it: one of the paths I analysed leads to a position paying more than €300,000 a year, requiring moving abroad with the family.

Another leads to one paying around €50,000, one lets me walk to the office.

Read more

The answer was hell yeah — and increasingly more.

Think about the problems that will be waiting for you at the office on Monday.

• A project that isn’t getting signed because investors are hesitating over a country they no longer feel comfortable with.

• A contract manager suddenly rediscovering the force majeure clause due to war scenario and reading it out loud in every meeting.

• Energy costs climbing for operators until the business model that closed the financing no longer holds.

• Equipment you have to purchase now, knowing perfectly well that in a few months it may be 15% cheaper — that’s what they say — but your schedule doesn’t wait, so you commit anyway.

• Logistics are their own theatre. A container that cost 3,000 last year costs 9,000 today, and it lands on a budget line you priced eighteen months ago.

• Cost estimation itself is now sustained by volatility, which means the moment before signature has become the most uncomfortable moment of the whole project.

• High-level business plans in large companies get disrupted by factors nobody in the room controls.

• A tender being prepared in a country facing elections in the coming months might simply be cancelled — not because it was a bad project, but because the government that wanted it is no longer there.

• Water scarcity in a region that can unlock economic disruption and become a national security matter.

• Your neighbour is building dams upstream on the river you depend on.

• Transboundary treaties written in another era are under pressure.

Geopolitics shapes our lives.

And that’s how I met Nick Kraft, leading water coverage at Eurasia Group, a world top-class political and geopolitical risk advisory firm founded by Ian Bremmer, headquartered in New York with offices around the world.

I wanted to understand the water–geopolitics nexus from the other side of the table, from the desk where investors and multinationals go to ask whether a country is worth the risk.

For those of you who like to know where you’re going before you start:

• Why Eurasia Group is scaling up its water coverage, and how water moved from a background stressor to an explicit strategic axis

• “The water weapon” — water as risk number ten in Eurasia Group’s 2026 Top Risks report, and what that framing actually means

• Real-world flashpoints: attacks on desalination infrastructure, cyberattacks on critical water systems in the US, Mexico–US tensions, India–China dam building, Egypt–Ethiopia..

• Who actually buys geopolitical intelligence on water — and why

• Why governance is the weakest link, in an era where multilateral coordination is at its hardest

• The commitment-to-execution gap: why big announcements don’t become projects

• Winners and losers from Eurasia Group’s Water Outlook — and where our sector sits

• Where Nick is optimistic and where he isn’t, ahead of the UN Water Conference

• Why Nick wrote to me interested in knowing more about water credit market space?

If you’re in New York over the next few days for Climate Week, reach out and meet Nick in person, either through LinkedIn or our Networking WhatsApp Group. Great guy, as you can tell from the interview!

By the way, this is a great example of how serendipity works—and how a positive domino effect can come from building good relationships and investing time and effort without knowing exactly what you’ll get back, or when.

You may remember that I attended the Rethinking Water Conference in New York exactly one year ago.

During my breakout session, one of the audience members was Jennifer Sara, former Global Director of the Water Global Practice and Climate Change at the World Bank. She later joined our community and became actively involved.

At some point, she asked me if I knew someone with expertise in AI and water, as she was helping organise a webinar for IWRA (International Water Resources Association).

I suggested Dragan Savic, and Gabriel Eickstein, the immediate former President of IWRA, mentioned also a few other potential panelists and candidates to contact. One of them was Nick.

That happened at a time when my brain was going crazy with geopolitics back in March, and I was looking for the best references and people to learn from.

So it’s fascinating to see how these stories develop. One conversation leads to another, one relationship creates another opportunity, and after months of work and conversations, I can finally bring you this today.

You never really know where a conversation, a connection, or an investment of time will take you. That’s the beauty of serendipity—and of communities like this one.

From background stressor to explicit strategic axis

Every January, Eurasia Group publishes its flagship Top Risks report: ten risks the firm considers most likely to define the year ahead.

Water appeared on that list in 2023, and it’s back in 2026 as “the water weapon.”

The 2023 entry was about stress.

The point was that water stress isn’t only a physical risk, it’s a macro-political one.

It dictates policy at national and local level, and it travels across borders.

The 2026 entry is a graduation of that idea.

Nick described the underlying logic:

That’s the difference between the two entries. Three years ago the argument was this matters. Today the argument is this is now combustible.

For a long time — not everywhere, but in most places where our industry sells its services — water was publicly understood as effectively infinite.

It appears in the tap. Nobody asks where from, or how fast it’s being depleted or replenished.

That mental model is now breaking. The UN has argued this year that terms like “water stress” and “water scarcity” are no longer adequate; they’re too light, they don’t carry the urgency.

Countries like Mexico are explicitly reclassifying water as a matter of national security and a human right, to be tightly controlled and tightly looked after.

Nick expects that trend to keep spreading — across Latin America and well beyond it.

For those of us who build and operate infrastructure, that reclassification changes permitting, concession terms, who signs, and how fast…

The water weapon in practice

Desalination infrastructure has been targeted directly, with obvious implications for potable supply in regions that have very little redundancy.

In the US, there’s been heavy reporting on cybersecurity attacks against critical water infrastructure.

I told Nick about my own version of this. When I was building desalination plants in the Middle East, friends would ask whether the situation was affecting us.

Yes — bombs falling four hundred metres away, because our plant sat inside a power complex under a public-private partnership structure.

The target may well have been the power plant. But when the desal is inside the complex, the distinction stops mattering very quickly.

Beyond open conflict, the pattern shows up in quieter forms:

• Sub-Saharan Africa, where controlling water at local level is used as a tactic to control groups of people, layered onto agricultural and livestock needs

• Mexico and the US, where water sharing has escalated to the presidential level, with both leaders exchanging blows publicly over allocation

• India and China, where dam building on the border is a permanent source of friction

• Egypt and Ethiopia, the textbook case of upstream construction reshaping downstream leverage

The structural framing here is upper versus lower riparian states — the countries sitting at the top of the river flow versus those living with whatever the upstream neighbour decides to release.

Who pays for this, and why it should interest you

I wanted to understand the demand side. Who actually buys geopolitical intelligence on water?

Nick simplified it into two buckets.

Financial institutions — asset owners, asset managers, funds allocating capital globally…

Multinational corporations — companies with operations spanning countries and regions, trying to understand the politics of water in a given market: what’s permitted, what isn’t, what counts as good or bad practice, and what a local population will actually accept. That last variable changes drastically depending on where you are.

The questions they’re now asking their geopolitical advisors are the same questions that will land on your desk six months later as a change in tender conditions, a delayed financial close, or a country suddenly moving off the target list.

Governance: the weakest link

Water is a flowing, transboundary resource. Which means governance is, unavoidably, a question of multilateral coordination.

A majority of transboundary water agreements are relatively weak and not necessarily enforceable.

Some countries refuse to share transboundary water data at all, which makes it close to impossible to plan around river flows changing in real time.

Meanwhile the underlying stress isn’t going anywhere — if anything it’s getting worse.

This is where I connect it back to my own work on the Knowledge Hub. One of the things that becomes obvious the moment you start mapping water governance country by country is that there is no global standard.

Each country, each region, each basin operates on its own logic. That fragmentation is itself a geopolitical fact, not just an administrative one.

The gap between announcements and projects

Here is the frustration I hear constantly from members across the globe: the announcements are enormous, and the implementation is slow.

Nick’s diagnosis has three parts.

Capacity. Permitting, planning, implementation capacity. The money can be committed long before anyone can actually deliver.

Price. There’s a historical, baked-in mentality that water is cheap — that it’s simply there. The economics of water suggest the price is chronically too low relative to the cost of getting water to homes. Nobody is campaigning for higher bills, but that mentality quietly justifies not spending billions on infrastructure.

Urgency. Frankly, it hasn’t been there. The silver lining — and Nick was explicit that this is his optimist hat — is that as the problem worsens, urgency will arrive, and urgency sparks action. The obvious risk is that it arrives too late.

And this isn’t a regional issue. Across continents, the same question keeps coming back: where did the money actually go, how fast is it moving, and when do these projects become real?

Winners and losers

Eurasia Group publishes an annual Water Outlook, and I’d picked up its expected winners and losers list.

Winners

1. desalination developers,

2. reuse

3. irrigation efficiency providers

It tells you the direction of travel: toward alternative sources that haven’t been drawn on before, and toward maximising efficiency in agriculture, the single largest water-using industry there is.

There's a fourth winner that is expected on 2027 outlook report: the professionals who keep learning.

Nick agreed when I raised it, and I don't think it's a throwaway. Every item on that winners-and-losers list is a decision someone has to make under uncertainty — which technology, which market, which counterparty.

Nobody makes those decisions well from a standing start.

The people who spent the previous two years building context are the ones who will move quickly when the urgency finally arrives.

Losers:

1. leaky utilities and

2. hydro-reliant grids.

On leaky utilities, the examples write themselves — the fight over Thames Water in the UK, and Tehran as the extreme case, where poor planning and leaking infrastructure produced a genuine crisis.

Cities in South Africa and Mexico have come close to day-zero events. We know how bad it can get.

On hydro-reliant grids, add drought and La Niña and you get something bigger than the way we traditionally think about water.

It stops being only about consumption and business operations and becomes an energy security question.

Layer AI and data centre demand on top — a topic rising fast in political salience — and water is no longer a sector. It’s an input to everything else.

Optimist or pessimist?

Nick describes himself as an optimist by nature, and as someone deliberately careful not to let that optimism take up more space than the analysis can support.

His optimism comes from the conversations.

Private sector, public sector, academia, nonprofit — everyone is talking, and increasingly talking across silos rather than within them. The interest in translating discussion into real projects, real policy advocacy, real efficiency work, is genuinely there.

His pessimism comes from the same place the whole conversation started: geopolitics. Moving the needle on water requires a very healthy dose of coordination and collaboration.

Without it, the hill gets steeper — and the hill was steep enough already.

The UN Water Conference in December, hosted by the UAE with Senegal, is the obvious test. Nick will be there, along with Climate Week in New York and the various COPs.

If you’re attending any of them, he’s open to connecting as described at the beginning of this publication.

The credit markets nobody has figured out yet?

A few weeks before we recorded, Nick sent me a message mentioning that he’d been looking closely at water and biodiversity credit markets, trying to understand how these relatively new mechanisms actually work.

I personally recommended him to my colleagues at Aqua Positive, as I know part of the team behind it, and I firmly believe they have great knowledge and valuable insights into what’s happening in this space and, more importantly, how they can genuinely help address these challenges.

It caught my attention because it’s one of those corners of the sector where I can see a lot of movement.

So I asked him why he was spending time there.

He’s studying them because he’s scanning far and wide for the kinds of mechanisms and solutions that different stakeholders are inventing when a physical resource starts becoming scarce. Credits are one specimen in that collection.

The finding, in a nutshell: they are very, very nascent. Nothing is perfect at this stage. It’s all very new.

Carbon credits were nascent once too. And the degree to which carbon credits have become polarizing is a telling sign for how future credit markets may or may not unfold, and for the kind of pushback and criticism they can expect.

The carbon analogy cuts both ways. It proves the path exists. It also shows you exactly where the path leads if the integrity questions aren’t answered early.

What Nick found interesting was the growing body of stakeholders now asking the questions underneath them: what can we invest in, what can we hedge our operations with, how should we be thinking about this resource.

That’s the real signal.

The alarm bells about water not being an infinite resource have been ringing for a long time.

What’s changed is that people with capital are finally treating it as something that has to be meticulously planned and gamed out across scenarios, rather than drawn on indefinitely.

What I took away

Geopolitical intelligence isn’t a luxury layer for people who read foreign policy for fun.

It’s becoming a standard input into cost estimation, into tender go/no-go decisions, into where you deploy your business development effort, into how you write a force majeure clause. If water is moving from background stressor to explicit strategic axis, then the people building, financing and operating water infrastructure need to be reading the political map with the same seriousness they read a hydraulic one.

We can’t control the geopolitical shifts. We can be as prepared as possible for them. That, more or less, is the job.

(And for the record: Nick has been invited to the first Water MBA event in Seville, Spain in 2030. World Cup year, to witness our local irrigation techniques by day, and — with any luck — a second consecutive trophy by night.)

Key quotes

On the risk framing

“If you have extreme water stress or extreme water scarcity, it’s almost like the gas has already been lit or is already running, and all you need is just a spark for something to explode into a wider conflict.”

On how water is classified

“In the past, water was kind of publicly understood to be almost this infinite resource. It kind of magically appears in your sink, in your shower. There’s not a ton of thought around where is it coming from and how quickly, if at all, is it being depleted or replenished. That is starting to change.”

“Phrases like water stress, water scarcity are actually no longer adequate. They’re too light, they don’t capture the urgency enough.”

On the direction of travel

“As water continues to be seen as a very, very important, very critical, and increasingly scarce resource, the desire to control it will only grow.”

On governance

“We’re not really in an era where coordination and collaboration is at the top of the agenda. It’s kind of the opposite.”

“A majority of transboundary water agreements are not necessarily enforceable, they’re relatively weak. There are countries that will refuse to share transboundary water data, which makes it very challenging to plan out and understand how river flows are changing in real time.”

“That underlying water stress is not going anywhere. If anything, it’s getting worse — which means our governance systems need to get better to catch up to that.”

On the price of water

“There’s a historical, baked-in mentality about water that it’s cheap. The cost to get water to homes is chronically low, and it’s developed a mentality of, water’s cheap and we shouldn’t be spending billions of dollars improving infrastructure.”

On commitments versus execution

“The lack of execution has a lot to do with things like permitting, things like planning, things like implementation capacity.”

“Questions remain on: okay, well, where did that money go? How quickly is that money moving? And when are these projects actually going to become ready?”

On urgency

“One of the silver linings of a growing risk and a growing major problem in water stress and water scarcity is that the sense of urgency will come. I would obviously rather it not come too late.”

On credit markets

“They’re very, very nascent. But then again, so were carbon credits at one point.”

On optimism

“The amount of interest and the amount of interesting conversations that I’m having right now is vastly optimistic. It’s extremely rewarding.”

On pessimism

“You need a very, very healthy dose of coordination and collaboration to actually move the needle on all things water. Without that, it’s a steeper hill to climb — and the hill is steep enough already as it is.”

Nick Kraft is Senior Analyst leading water coverage at Eurasia Group. For a general introduction to geopolitics, he recommends the podcasts of Eurasia Group founder and president Ian Bremmer.

My colleague Ravi Kurani sat down with Tom Ferguson, managing partner at Burnt Island Ventures (BIV), one of the few venture firms that has spent years looking at water full-time.

I enjoyed it very much, and a few points stuck with me strongly enough that I wanted to write them down before the week swallowed them.

1. Why is water igniting now?

2. What is the S-curve, and where are we on it?

3. What does it mean to say water is inevitable?

4. And how is AI reshaping the sector?

On why water is igniting now

Ravi asked water is a $1.6 trillion industry, humans have managed it for millennia, so why does it suddenly feel like the sector is catching fire?

Tom’s first answer was: “I don’t know, I really don’t know.”

I loved that.

It is rare to hear an investor admit uncertainty on the one question everyone expects them to have nailed.

But he then laid out a hypothesis built on five forces converging at roughly the same time.

The first is a shift in how talent thinks about careers. More capable professionals are moving up Maslow’s hierarchy and deliberately choosing work that does measurable good, rather than defaulting to the standard corporate track.

The second is climate change breaking the engineering bounds. Around 2020, droughts and floods pushed water availability outside the historical ranges our infrastructure was designed for.

The third is high-visibility crises. Flint in 2014 and the California drought in 2016 put water on front pages, and Tom noted that these moments directly pushed individual founders to start water companies.

The fourth is infrastructure reaching its 40-year end of life. Major public capital spending on U.S. water systems dropped sharply after the late 1970s. Assets built with typical 40-year design lives started failing around 2020, and someone has to replace them.

What I take from this is that no single factor explains the moment; the convergence does.

The ignition is global, but the spark is local.

On the S-curve

Tom used the S-curve to describe where water sits today. In venture and market development, it traces how a technology, or an entire category, moves from obscurity to broad adoption. It has three periods.

The activation period is when the raw ingredients come together: entrepreneurial talent, foundational data, early proof points, and initial capital, until they reach critical mass.

The growth period is the steep part of the curve. Awareness ignites, the light bulbs come on, and capital and talent start recycling back into the space as people realise the category is commercially real.

The acceptance period is maturity, where activity flattens onto a higher plateau once adoption is widespread.

Tom’s read is that the last several years were water’s activation period, a phase spent assembling specialised data, technology rails, and strong founding teams.

What I am more confident about is which ingredient was scarcest during activation. It was not capital. It was people who understand both the technology and the messy reality of how water systems are procured, built, and operated.

That is the knowledge gap I keep coming back to on The Water MBA, and I suspect it will determine how steep the growth phase actually gets.

On the inevitability of water

The phrase that stayed with me most was the idea that water’s modernisation is not a hype cycle but an inevitable, long-term trajectory spanning 10 to 30 years.

A $1.6 trillion market growing at 5–8% a year simply cannot be rebuilt overnight.

Tom framed it as two massive tasks happening at once.

The developed world has to replace infrastructure that has reached the end of its useful life, while much of the world still needs primary infrastructure, with the figures cited in the conversation being around 2.5 billion people without sanitation and 750 million without clean drinking water.

Layer accelerating climate events on top, and water stops being a static asset class and becomes an ongoing operational priority.

For capital, this means resilience.

For talent, it means purpose and scope. Tom stressed that execution, not ideas, is the real bottleneck, so there is growing demand for skilled in both startups and incumbents trying to modernise their software, sensing, and hardware.

On AI

Tom described AI’s influence on water across five areas, and they fit together better than I expected.

AI puts a target on traditional hardware, software, and consulting models. Work that once required expensive consultants or manual effort, such as reviewing and labelling sewer inspection footage, is increasingly automated.

At the same time, instrumentation is finally creating data lakes. Water has always been under-instrumented, but sensors, IoT devices, earth observation, and satellite communications are generating the inputs AI needs to be useful.

The physical buildout of AI is itself a water story. Semiconductor fabs, power plants, and data centres are major drivers of industrial water treatment demand and investment.

This changes how investors think about moats. If a software lead can be replicated quickly with AI, then defensibility has to come from somewhere else.

What I’m taking with me

If I compress the episode into one thought, it is this: water is igniting because several slow-moving pressures finally converged, the sector is crossing from activation into growth, and AI is rewarding exactly the things that are hardest to do in the physical world.

I highly recommend listening to the full conversation. Thank you to Ravi and Tom for an hour well spent.

Now over to you: which of Tom’s five forces do you see most clearly in your own market? And is your corner of the water sector still in activation, or has the curve already started to bend upward? Let me know in the comments. I read every on