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

Fair question. What began as a few posts has grown into a podcast, a networking chat, weekly publications, a Knowledge Hub, and a growing catalogue of courses. So here’s the map.

You don’t need to do everything. Pick the door that fits you today and walk in.

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Listen wherever suits you:

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This is where the community talks every day. Ask a question, share an opportunity, react to the news, or simply meet peers from utilities, EPC contractors, technology companies, consultancies, and finance.

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My advice: go annual. Learning and education compound, just like interest. Give yourself one year. You’ll notice.

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If you remember only one thing from this post, make it this one.

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Contribute. Talk. Help. Comment. Share. Correct. Suggest improvements. Show up.

Our sector doesn’t only have an investment gap; it has a knowledge gap. And that gap won’t be closed from the top down.

It closes when someone shares the lesson they learned the hard way so others don’t have to.

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In short

🎙️ Listen to the podcast 💬 Join the chat 📩 Subscribe for free 🔓 Upgrade for full access and the Knowledge Hub 🎓 Learn with our courses 🤝 Make it yours 📣 Share it on LinkedIn

Wherever you start, welcome. We’re glad you’re here.

See you inside,

Ramón The Water MBA

And then this comment arrived on LinkedIn:

“Is there a way to access this article other than paid subscription?”

I’ll be back later to this comment, but this reminded me of the fact that over the last few years, working inside water corporations and alongside hundreds of water professionals, I have noticed something that is incredibly easy to feel.

They are competent, they care and work hard. They are in one of the most fascinating businesses in the world.

And yet they go home exhausted, frustrated, sometimes questioning whether they are good enough or whether the effort is actually worth it.

Why?

Read more

One of the first things I found was The Water Entrepreneur.

I’ve said this publicly more than once, and I’ll say it again here: it remains one of my favourite podcasts in this sector.

Because it is pure, unedited authenticity. At a time when so much of what reaches us feels… you know… too superficial, too sponsored, too polished, too politically correct, and too much like AI slop… this feels real,…Paul’s podcast is a breath of fresh air.

So having Paul Gagliardo on our show felt, to me, like touching the sky!

Who is Paul Gagliardo

He deflected the question “We don’t have that much time to go through all that”.

The short version: almost forty years in the water business.

The City of San Diego. American Water, where he ran a research centre and served as innovation director.

Which meant, for a long stretch of his career, sitting across from technology companies and listening.

What’s interesting is what he says he was actually listening for.

I spent a lot of time talking to new technology companies, which I find fascinating. One, to hear what technologies people are trying to develop, but also it’s interesting to understand what problems people are trying to solve. That gives me a very good insight into the business.

I confess I kind of embrace this. Listening to colleagues, gathering feedback, following interests, and paying attention to community comments, it feels like I can almost read the business instinctively. It has become embedded in who I am, and it takes less and less effort to understand what people need, where the opportunities are, and where things are heading.

He describes the sector as a triangle, and he’s spent his career standing in the middle of it.

On one side, the technology companies — who, in his words, think their baby is beautiful and believe they have the perfect solution…many of you reading this are at this stage too, you know exactly what we mean :)

On another, the actual problems, which may or may not be the ones anyone is solving.

On the third, the money: what venture capital and private equity think is important, what they think will make money.

The evolution nobody announced

When I first started listening, I was there for the founder stories.

I built a water tech to solve this problem, here are my challenges. For someone coming from the EPC side, it was a new world, and I learned a great deal.

Then the episodes started widening. Money. Policy. And lately…congressmen!!

I put it to him that he’s practically in politics now. He didn’t disagree.

In the United States there’s probably almost a hundred times more money being allocated for roads and bridges versus water and wastewater projects.

Paul’s argument is that he has already mapped the solutions and the problems, he knows what’s out there. The unsolved piece is the decision layer.

Why do elected officials fund what they fund? What actually moves a policy decision?

Work top-down with the officials, and bottom-up by educating the consumer, so that pressure arrives from both directions at once.

That’s kind of the next piece of the puzzle that I feel like needs to be addressed. From inside the industry.

Is he still enjoying it?

A year ago, when I was a guest on his show, I asked him why he does this.

His answer was simply that he enjoys it, which, off the record, I took as the real answer to how long it would last.

So I asked again. And I told him what I’d observed: that in the recent videos he looks happier than ever, recording from an Italian volcano, from everywhere…

We’re still having a great time. I guess I can’t really stay or sit still. I always like to evolve.

It’s a lot of work, but it’s a lot of fun. I get to meet many, many interesting people, hear interesting stories, and I guess that keeps me young.

Then, almost as an aside: we’ve got some bigger plans in the works.

I recognise the feeling he described, because I have it too. It is a lot of work.

But every month the surface area of what you might actually be able to change gets a little larger, and that’s what keeps you at it.

The docuseries

Here’s what the bigger plans look like.

The evolution so far: audio podcast, then what he calls Wednesday Water — one-minute editorial video pieces, because short-form video is currently the best way to attract engagement. Fine. Necessary, even.

But short form is not a destination.

Paul’s real ambition is long form: a half-hour or hour format, a television show, a docuseries.

Stories complicated enough to require the runtime, told well enough to be entertaining.

One of the things I found is we in the water business tend to talk a lot to our peers. I think it’s really important to kind of break out of that a bit and get more to a general public audience.

He illustrated it with something small and perfect.

Friends of his install whole-house water filters and ask him whether that’s better for them.

His honest answer is maybe — he’s not sure of the value proposition, and if it makes them feel better, fine.

But the exchange reveals how little the public actually has to work with, an absence of factual knowledge on which to base a judgement.

Alongside the film work, there’s a Washington DC track: press conferences and media events, one held in April, another in September, all aimed at raising the industry’s profile with elected officials and using that platform to explain to the public what’s going on and what they can do about it.

And I agree with him on the format question, more than he probably knows.

Short form buys visibility. But transformation tends to happen in long form — a book, an essay written by an actual human being, a film…

That’s where storytelling can build the mental journey. Doing it for water professionals is hard, but in my case I can handle.

Doing it for everyone else is harder still, I would not be that good so far in my opinion.

It’s a very good idea, and it deserves to exist.

The first subject they’re planning is the Colorado River.

A very brief journey through Colorado River story

For the better part of a century, the expansion of the American Southwest was predicated on the myth of “cheap, reliable water.”

That era has reached a definitive end.

As the 1,400-mile river system faces unprecedented hydrological insolvency, the physical decline of its reservoirs is forcing a recalculation of the cost of life in the West.

One of the threats is the approaching “power pool” elevation at Lake Powell. Unlike “dead pool” (where water can no longer flow downstream), reaching the power pool limit represents an energy crisis.

Below this level, the reservoir lacks the pressure to drive the turbines that generate hydropower for major Western cities.

This shift moves the crisis beyond water security into the realm of regional grid instability and energy insecurity.

The Geography of the Basin

The management of the Colorado River is bifurcated by the 1922 Compact into two distinct administrative regions: the Upper Basin and the Lower Basin.

The system’s viability is tethered to the Rocky Mountains, where winter snowpack historically generates 50% to 70% of the surface water for the entire region.

This reliance has become a liability due to a catastrophic shift in climate patterns.

Recent data highlights a dual-threat event: the lowest snowpack on record followed by an anomalous March heatwave.

This triggered an abrupt, early snowmelt that bypassed existing capture infrastructure, essentially wasting the primary water “bank” before it could be effectively managed for the summer irrigation season.

The Legal Hierarchy: Seniority and the Imperial Valley

The Colorado River supports $1.4 trillion in annual economic activity and provides a livelihood for 16 million Americans.

Protecting this economic engine requires navigating a dense legal hierarchy governed by “Prior Appropriation”—the principle of “first in line, first in right.”

At the apex of this hierarchy sits California’s Imperial Valley.

Their water claims are not merely administrative allocations but adjudicated property rights that have been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.

This legal seniority gives the Imperial Valley immense leverage; it serves as the nation’s winter breadbasket, producing the vast majority of the country’s winter food supply.

Stakeholders in the valley argue that if these rights are ignored, the very concept of property rights in the United States is undermined.

Where’s all the water gone?

Start in Wyoming at the headwaters and work down the whole length to the Gulf of California, asking one question the entire way:

I asked Paul to explain the situation in a few plain words so we could understand easily. He gave me considerably more than a few, and it’s the most valuable stretch of the conversation.

It was over-allocated from the start. The river was divided up in the 1920s, and the volume everyone agreed to share was measured during an unusually wet period.

The long-term availability of the river was overestimated at the moment of division.

Every dispute since has been downstream of that founding error.

Climate made a bad estimate worse.

Less snowpack, less water coming through, a shrinking total volume.

Habit hardened around the wrong number.

Through the eighties, nineties and two-thousands, users got comfortable fully consuming their allotment.

And the governance is genuinely hard.

Seven states plus Mexico hold a piece of the river.

The federal government is the watermaster, through the Bureau of Reclamation and the Interior Secretary — that’s where the rules are made.

Upper basin, lower basin, and inside the lower basin a hierarchy: California holds the largest rights allocation and uses the most, while Arizona sits on lower-priority rights.

It’s a very interesting idea because you really can’t create water except on the coast (in related to main Desal you know…)

The plant is an interstate water-rights trade — coastal capacity converted into inland entitlement.

Paul thinks it has real potential to change how the river is used.

Then the uncomfortable part:

So we’re essentially exporting water, if you want to look at it that way.

I’ve spent years working in the Gulf building plants to manufacture water in one of the driest places on earth.

Learning that the same region imports embedded water from the driest corner of the United States puts the geopolitics** of the whole thing in a different frame.

Paul is careful here. The farmers would say this is the highest and best use, they hold the rights, it’s their choice, and that’s a legitimate position.

His objection isn’t to the farmers.

It’s to the logic of everyone maximising their individual entitlement:

What happens to it if people just continue to take their allotment and it sucks it dry and then nobody has anything?

I live in San Diego. Half of my water comes from the Colorado River. And I don’t want my taps to run dry.

One last image, from a guest on his own three-part Colorado series — episodes 110, 111 and 112, covering the law of the river, the hydrology, and the usage.

At the end of the river, where Arizona meets California and Mexico, sits a small city called Yuma.

Yuma is the Cairo of the Colorado. Like the Nile, the water comes from far upland; by the time it arrives there’s no rain, and that’s precisely where it all gets used.

Less historically significant, geographically identical.

That’s the kind of line a documentary is built on.

The funniest thing he said

So I asked the obvious question. To make this, you need to raise money. How do you go about it?

“I was thinking — I always ask the startups, how do you find it raising money? And they always have interesting stories. And now I’m in that position now. I should probably go back and listen to some of the episodes and see what their suggestions were.”

I laughed. He admitted he’s figuring it out.

What he’s actually doing: talking to networks, and using early interest as leverage to attract funding.

He has individual sponsors who’ve helped get certain things off the ground.

But the emphasis now is on high-net-worth individuals — impact investors, people looking to make a difference — and philanthropic organisations focused on environmental issues, approached directly.

What he needs first: a pilot.

Something concrete enough to take to a streaming service or public television. They already have a trailer and a sizzle reel, which they’re tweaking to reflect the current thinking.

What it comes down to, in his words:

And then it just depends on how good of a salesman I am.

If you’re reading this and you fund environmental storytelling — impact investor, foundation, network, or a company that would rather sponsor something real than another logo on a conference lanyard — this is a genuinely good use of money.

I told Paul I don’t have much money, but I can help disseminate. I meant it, and I’ll say why.

I recently listened to an interview with Alexander Loucopoulos of Sciens Water in Bloomberg and thought: this is already excellent conversation, already made, and almost nobody in our community has seen it…

So I wrote about it. The response was immediate and positive. People loved it!

We spend a lot of energy creating and not nearly enough getting good work in front of a wider audience.

So: whatever The Water MBA can do to put this in front of people, it’s yours.

The rest of the conversation, briefly

Two other things worth carrying away.

On PFAS, and the power of branding. Paul made an argument I found bracing.

There’s a finite pool of public money. Someone once put it to him that it doesn’t much matter how clean the water is if the pipes can’t deliver it.

So — and he flagged this as controversial — should the federal government be spending what it’s spending on PFAS while a quarter to a third of treated water leaks out of the ground?

I firmly believe that without that branding, we would not be spending as much money on PFAS as we are today.

A professor at the Harvard School of Public Health branded them forever chemicals, and Paul believes the name did more work than the science.

Microplastics are next in line, he says, and the same dynamic will apply.

His own priority is unglamorous and, I suspect, correct: aging infrastructure, especially pipelines, is the biggest problem facing the water business.

In Los Angeles, three major pipeline failures in two weeks. One of the pipes was a hundred and ten years old…

On New Mexico, and states that get ahead of the game.

He’s been working with the state’s environment department, which passed a 2050 water action plan on the expectation of twenty-five percent less available water by 2050.

Eight or nine hundred very small utilities, so consolidation is on the table for economies of scale.

Leak detection too — one estimate puts leakage as high as forty percent, which makes repair the cheapest new supply available.

And in many systems the pipelines aren’t digitised at all; there’s no GIS, so nobody is certain where the pipes are.

To be able to manage a system, you need to know what you’ve got.

What he applauds is that the state is front-funding the diagnostic work rather than leaving it to tiny utilities with no money and a handful of customers. One of the few he knows of doing it that way.

The water business is thirsty for professionals like Paul. It is also thirsty for the people who make the work possible without ever appearing on the recording, so thank you, Anna Gagliardo, for the enormous effort behind this fantastic podcast.

A few great quotes!

On What He’s Actually Listening For

It’s interesting to understand what problems people are trying to solve. That gives me a very good insight into the business.

They think their baby is beautiful, and they think that they have the perfect solution for some problem. And then there’s the problem.

On Where the Money Goes

There’s probably almost a hundred times more money being allocated for roads and bridges versus water and wastewater projects.

On Why He Moved Toward Policy

I’ve seen all the solutions and the problems and kind of know what all those are. Now we’re trying to get to the place where we are impacting the decision makers.

That’s kind of the next piece of the puzzle that I feel like needs to be addressed. From inside the industry.

On Still Enjoying It

We’re still having a great time. I guess I can’t really stay or sit still. I always like to evolve.

It’s a lot of work, but it’s a lot of fun. I get to meet many, many interesting people, hear interesting stories, and I guess that keeps me young.

On Talking to Ourselves

We in the water business tend to talk a lot to our peers. I think it’s really important to kind of break out of that a bit and get more to a general public audience.

We just want to get factual knowledge to the general public so that they can make some decisions.

On the Colorado River

They allocated a certain amount of volume, and that was in a very wet year. So they kind of overestimated long term how much water would be available.

The question is: within the laws of the river, how do you cut back? What is the formula for cutting back?

It’s a very interesting idea because you really can’t create water except on the coast.

More than a quarter of the river is being used to grow alfalfa and hay to feed cattle to produce beef.

So we’re essentially exporting water, if you want to look at it that way.

What happens to it if people just continue to take their allotment and it sucks it dry and then nobody has anything?

I live in San Diego. Half of my water comes from the Colorado River. And I don’t want my taps to run dry.

On Raising the Money

I always ask the startups, how do you find it raising money? And now I’m in that position now. I should probably go back and listen to some of the episodes and see what their suggestions were.

And then it just depends on how good of a salesman I am.

On Branding

I firmly believe that without that branding, we would not be spending as much money on PFOS as we are today.

Branding is very, very important. I think it’s almost more important than the problem itself.

On the Unglamorous Problem

It really doesn’t matter how clean the water is if the pipelines to get it to you are leaking and you can’t get the water.

To be able to manage a system, you need to know what you’ve got.

On Rewriting the Rules

That solution worked then, it doesn’t work now.

Somebody needs to take the lead to create the new reality. And I’m optimistic. That’s why I’m pushing hard.

“Good morning sir, hopefully you are doing well. Any news about upcoming projects for us?”

“Hi sir, this is Muhammad from X. I’m getting out of the NEOM projects. Is there anything on the table where we could help you?”

Back then I was doing the chasing. I was the one struggling to find people and subcontractors for work in the region, and the answer I kept getting was some version of the same sentence:

“We’re overloaded with NEOM. We have a backlog for years.”

Well. It seems that is not the case anymore.

So what happened?

Read more

We arrived, dropped the bags, and my wife drank a glass of tap water and told me it tasted strange.

I gave her the typical answer every “every city tastes different, that does not mean it is bad, and I would bet it is very good quality…”

Then I did what every water engineer actually wants to do, which is go and look.

That is an occupational hazard in this business. You cannot spend thirteen years and then walk past a river without reading it.

But Soria rewarded the habit more than most places would.

It is a province of 90,000 people on the headwaters of one of the most important river in Europe.

Let me set the scene before I get technical.

The province that stopped growing

We often talk about population growth as a challenge for water systems.

Soria is the least populated province in Spain: 90,000 spread over 10,300 km².

That is a density of roughly 8.7 inhabitants per km² — not just the lowest in Spain, but one of the lowest in the European Union.

For context, the Duero catchment basin as a whole sits around 28 hab/km², and Spain around 95.

Soria capital holds about 41,000 people, which means nearly half the province lives in a single town.

This is not the residue of a place that was always empty.

The province peaked at 161,182 inhabitants in 1950 and then lost nearly half of them in a single generation of emigration between 1950 and 1975.

Six per cent of its residents are now over 85 years old.

Here’s some context on this river basin, together with another major one: the Ebro.

The river you underestimate

The Duero is 897 km long, o run through Spain, as international border as shown in the below picture, and Portugal.

Its basin covers around 98,000 km², the largest in the Iberian Peninsula.

And here is the number that people get wrong. At the Porto gauging station, before it reaches the Atlantic, the Duero discharges between 650 and 675 m³/s.

At the Spanish–Portuguese border it is already carrying about 570 m³/s.

That makes it the highest-discharge river of the peninsula at its mouth, ahead of every other headline name:

River Approx. mean discharge at mouth Duero (Porto) 650–675 m³/s Ebro (Delta) ~600 m³/s Tajo (Lisbon) ~440 m³/s Miño ~340 m³/s Guadalquivir (Sanlúcar) ~160 m³/s Guadiana ~78 m³/s

The Duero’s specific discharge is modest — about 6.6–6.7 L/s per km². It is not an especially wet river.

It is a very large catchment.

Volume comes from area, not from abundance.

In Soria, of course, you see none of that. The Duero through the capital is a river you could throw a stone across.

Standing in a flood zone without knowing it

First day we walked the river in the city itself, the stretch below the medieval bridge and the Monastery of San Juan de Duero, along the path towards the hermitage of San Saturio.

We had lunch at Soto Playa, a restaurant on the left bank in the green corridor. It is a good place.

It is also, I said to my wife somewhere between the torreznos and the grill, sitting in what looks unmistakably like a floodplain.

The February 2026 flood episode was the longest and most intense the Duero basin has seen in a decade.

It ran from 26 January to 24 February.

The Confederación Hidrográfica del Duero (CHD) issued 2,780 flood warnings across 124 gauging stations and 52 river reaches, of which 511 were red-level, the category that means generalised overbank flooding.

At the Garray–Soria gauge just upstream of the city, the Duero peaked at 194 m³/s.

Soria did not lose a city to that flood.

The green corridor along the Duero — the wooden walkways, the meadows, the footbridges — flooded, and that is exactly what it is for.

The city built amenity on top of conveyance.

When the flood came, the flood plain did its job, the water went where the hydraulics said it would go, and the built city was untouched.

The one exception is a permanent building sitting inside that same envelope.

The reservoir and the price of regulation

Thirty-odd kilometres north-west, at Vinuesa.

Cuerda del Pozo was inaugurated on 9 September 1941.

It is a gravity dam, 40.25 m high, 425 m along the crest, impounding 248.8 hm³ over 2,289 hectares from a catchment of only 548 km².

La Muedra village was drowned during its construction.

The population — around 340 people — was expropriated and largely resettled in Vinuesa a few kilometres away.

The church bell tower still stands above the waterline, and in drought years you can walk on the cracked ground where the houses were.

When we visited, the reservoir was at 65.6% (163 hm³).

The high-water marks were clearly visible on the banks, the reservoir touched nearly 90% in the equivalent of the previous year.

This is where I found myself explaining reservoir operation to my family, so let me put it here too, because it is the single most misunderstood thing about dams.

A reservoir that is full is not a reservoir that is working.

A reservoir at 100% in November is not a success story, it is an operator with no options haha I know one friend who, in 2024, after many years of severe drought in Spain, were suddenly faced with a flood season unlike anything they had experienced in their lifetime. And I can tell you, he could barely sleep at night.

The professionals responsible for dam safety and dam operations are incredibly valuable. They carry a huge responsibility on their shoulders, especially when extreme events can change so quickly from drought to floods.

I took the picture in this direction.

In late August 2022, at the depth of the drought, it was down at 39%. The picture would look like very different!

Why Soria has the water but not the turbines

Cuerda del Pozo is the largest reservoir in Soria province and sits around sixth by capacity in the whole Duero basin.

And yet the Duero basin generates close to 25% of Spain’s hydroelectric energy — around 180 plants, 3,787 MW installed and an average producible output of some 7,600 GWh/year.

Aldeadávila alone, at about 1,140–1,240 MW, is the most productive hydroelectric plant in the country and accounts for roughly 8.5–10% of national hydro generation on its own.

None of that is in Soria.

The reason is the one that governs all hydropower and that anyone sizing a pump already knows in their bones: power is head x flow.

Soria has the flow’s origin but almost no head — the Duero drops gently across the meseta for hundreds of kilometres.

The Arribes del Duero, on the Portuguese border, has around 400 m of drop concentrated into a granite canyon.

Fourteen reservoirs there are dedicated exclusively to hydropower and hold 4,457 hm³ between them, about 80% of the basin’s installed hydro capacity.

Where the Duero is born

At around 2,160 m. The water comes from two mechanisms.

Infiltration through the sandstones and conglomerates of the Sistema Ibérico feeds a baseflow, and snowmelt from the Urbión massif adds a strong spring pulse.

One honest correction to my own first instinct, though, and I think it matters for anyone using Soria as a teaching case: the Duero is mainly snow-influenced at its birth.

By the time it passes Soria city it is already behaving as a pluvial river typical of a continental Mediterranean climate. The snow signal is real but it is local, not basin-wide.

Which means the Colorado River analogy people reach for — where a bad snowpack year in the Rockies is a reliable early-warning signal for water scarcity all the way down to Mexico — only partly applies.

In the Colorado, snowpack is the reservoir.

In the Duero, snowpack is one input among many into a system whose real regulating capacity is 7,600 hm³ of concrete.

That is a different risk profile, and worth being precise about, because “we have a snowpack problem” and “we have a reservoir operation problem” call for entirely different investments.

A little bit of hydrogeology

Impressive visiting the origin of one of the rivers feeding the main one Duero.

An aquifer pops up in kind of a small lake and subsequently a river shown in the below picture.

How Soria drinks

Simple:

1. Storage and regulation. Cuerda del Pozo dam releases a controlled flow into the Duero — a few m³/s in normal conditions, rising through the irrigation season, and 116 m³/s when it is passing a flood.

2. Abstraction. Roughly 20 km downstream the dam, the Azud de Campillo de Buitrago — a small weir 75 m long and 7.8 m high, owned and operated by the riber basin authority (not the water utility) — creates the head needed to divert supply.

A DN800 steel main passes through a bore in the right abutment and carries raw water to the drinking water treatment plant (ETAP in Spanish).

3. Treatment. The main runs to the municipal Drinking Water Treatment Plant.

The Soria drinking water treatment plant has been operating since 1991.

After more than three decades of operation, the facility has undergone several modernization investments and is now entering a new phase focused on digitalization, automation and potentially the expansion and refurbishment of its treatment line.

By the way, it’s worth highlighting that this city is home to two of Spain’s most famous athletes.

Walking through the city centre, I happened to come across one of them, Abel Antón, who won the World Marathon Championships twice, in 1997 and 1999.

Born in 1962, he has spent his entire life drinking water from an old-fashioned drinking water treatment plant, one that historically struggled to cope with turbidity and organic matter, particularly during the rainy season.

So, a funny question around a beer came: are we maybe over-treating our water today? We’ve not won any marathon again…!

4. Distribution. Treated water is pumped and gravity-fed into the network and the service reservoirs.

Who runs it

This is the part I find most interesting from a sector-structure point of view, because Soria did something “unusual”.

In 2013–14 the municipality re-tendered its integrated water cycle — supply, sewerage and treatment — not as a straight concession but as a mixed-economy company.

The result is Agua de Soria S.L, a public–private vehicle in which the City Council retains ownership alongside a private partner (Sacyr), on a 25-year term.

• 🏛️ City of Soria: 26%

• 🏢 Private partner: 74%

That is neither the fully municipalised model nor the fully privatised concession.

It is the middle path: the municipality keeps a seat inside the operating company, sees the books from the inside, and shares in the upside, while importing operational capability and investment capacity it does not have in-house.

The deal included a €12.6 million canon payment to the city and around €30 million in planned hydraulic investments over 25 years.

Where it ends, the waste water treatment plant

Soria’s wastewater is now treated at the WWTP of Sinova, in the municipality of Los Rábanos, a few kilometres downstream of the city.

It was built by ACUAES, commissioned at the end of January 2025 and officially inaugurated on 10 February 2025, replacing an ageing plant inside the city which is now being demolished as part of a river-restoration programme.

The headline figures:

• 135,000 population equivalent, expandable to 180,000

• 24,000 m³/day average flow, 48,000 m³/day peak

• Total investment around €85 M for the plant, ~€100 M including the emissary tunnel, collectors and environmental works

• Funded roughly 56% from EU funds, 21% Junta de Castilla y León, 21% Ayuntamiento de Soria

• A 5 km emissary tunnel connecting the city and Los Rábanos discharge points to the plant

For a city of 41,000 to build a plant sized at 135,000 p.e. deserves comment, but not sure if part of it is industrial load or it is deliberate headroom…

Before the new Sinova WWTP, Soria was served by an older WWTP.

Emissary and storm management.

The 5 km tunnel doubles as a storm tank, storing up to 8,000 m³ per rainfall event.

In its first 100 days of operation — with nine days exceeding 10 L/m² and one reaching 35 L/m² — it eliminated untreated discharges to the Los Rábanos reservoir for the first time.

It also carried the plant through the 28 April 2025 Iberian blackout: the EDAR was without power for ten hours and still did not spill untreated flow to the river.

That is what resilience looks like in practice.

Pretreatment. Screening, grit and grease removal.

Primary treatment and storm treatment, designed for 1.7 m³/s — six times average dry-weather flow, or 144,000 m³/day.

Sizing the primary line at 6× average is what allows the plant to take a wet-weather peak into full treatment rather than bypassing it.

Secondary: SBR with nutrient removal. A sequencing batch reactor biological process at an average 1,000 m³/h, with biological nitrogen and phosphorus removal.

This is not optional: the receiving water is a declared sensitive zone under Directive 91/271/EEC.

SBR is a sensible fit here, it handles variable load in a batch cycle without needing separate clarifiers, which suits a plant whose incoming flow swings hard between seasons.

Sludge line: anaerobic digestion with cogeneration.

Digestion with a gas engine recovering biogas as energy.

The plant did not have an untroubled birth, construction of the tunnel punctured an aquifer and generated turbidity discharges into the Duero that drew a CHD enforcement file, and the works ran roughly a year late. That is worth recording too.

Next

Well, this was my week of vacation with the family.

Tomorrow, I’m heading to Disneyland Paris. I’ll probably analyze how Mickey drinks his water… or maybe not! 😄

Because next Sunday, we’re starting a new series of publications where you’ll learn much more about water, starting with the Colorado River.

Thanks, as always, for reading, engaging, and being part of the journey!

The most important point is that, during feasibility studies and infrastructure planning, you should always evaluate multiple alternatives.

For this exercise, think of the desalination plant as a black box (seawater flows in, and product water flows out).

Then, place this black box in different locations and analyse how the surrounding conditions affect the project.

Let's assume one thing is already fixed: the plant must produce 60,000 m³/day of potable water. That is the required output.

Read more

Among the finalists was also one of our community members, Alexander from SeaQual, who ultimately won the award, you’ll get to know him soon…!

I had the chance to meet Craig in person and talk with him.

As usual, Craig performed a great pitch.

In one of the questions share to all candidates, he replied something interesting…

This is one of the best analogies for why innovation often struggles to scale, as I explain later.

A few months ago, this workshop was shared within our community in the old format, so I take the opportunity to share above now fully open.

One of our fellow members, Guadalupe, asked me if this innovation is deployed in seawater, beyond the brackish water and Craig told me on Marrakech they are working on it and we may see soon results.

This member also shared with me a video in which one of the most experienced professionals in this field makes a reference to Aqua Membranes, explaining that 3D printed spacers once consolidated may mean the new frontier, dissapearing probably the current mesh spacing.

I share the link at the end of the essay in case you wanna watch.

So I think it is a good timing for many of you to take a look and share your thoughts or questions through our networking chat.

Chicken egg problem mentioned by Craig

Here’s the cycle:

• Customers say: “We’ll buy it once it has been proven elsewhere.”

• Investors say: “We’ll invest once customers start buying it.”

• Partners say: “We’ll support it once there’s funding.”

• Regulators say: “We’ll adapt once the technology is deployed.”

Everyone is waiting for someone else to move first.

The result is a classic coordination failure. The technology may be technically superior, but adoption stalls because each stakeholder minimizes their own risk.

This is particularly visible in the water sector. Without someone willing to absorb the first risk, nothing happens.

This is why many breakthrough technologies lose because they never escape the first few deployments.

A useful way to frame it is:

Innovation rarely fails because of technology. It fails because trust arrives too late.

Or:

Everyone wants proof before committing. But proof only exists after someone commits.

The companies that eventually scale usually solve this paradox by finding a stakeholder willing to break the loop:

• an early adopter willing to take calculated risk,

• a government providing demonstration funding,

• an investor betting on potential instead of traction,

• or a visionary customer who values first-mover advantage.

In many ways, scaling innovation is about orchestrating trust.

What they actually do

Aqua Membranes does not manufacture the membrane.

They buy commodity flat sheet from DuPont, LG Chem, Toray, Nitto Denko — and then compete with those same companies for the end-user sale.

It’s one of those strange supplier-competitor relationships that only exist in industries where one layer has been perfected and another has been ignored.

The layer they attack is the feed spacer: the extruded polypropylene mesh that sits between the membrane wraps and channels water across the membrane surface.

In a standard element it’s just that, mesh.

They rips it out and, using an additive manufacturing process, prints a pattern directly onto the membrane surface instead.

When the element is rolled into its final form, that printed geometry decides how the water travels down its length: with a designed level of turbulence and mixing, and not a joule more than needed.

That’s it.

The flat-sheet membrane, he said, has been engineered close to its theoretical limits over thirty or forty years — rejection, flux, fouling resistance, all of it.

But how you flow water over that membrane has never really been improved.

Think about what that means.

For four decades the industry poured its optimization energy into the glamorous layer — the one with the physics and the Nobel-adjacent chemistry — and left the plumbing as a piece of extruded plastic nobody had rethought since the beginning.

If you want to find the next step change in a mature process, don’t stare at the component that’s already been polished a thousand times. You may look at the boring part next to it.

The superpower

They put more membrane area in every element — 505 square feet where the standard is 400 — and runs it at lower operating pressure.

Every process engineer I know would tell you that’s impossible.

More membrane in the same shell means a tighter channel, and a tighter channel means more pressure drop and more energy.

And they’d be right — if the channel geometry were fixed. It isn’t.

Once you can design the flow path, you can decouple area from energy cost. That decoupling is the entire trick.

The numbers back it up.

In a two-train installation at a Micron fab, they pulled membranes from both sides at the same time back in April 2023 and have been running the comparison ever since.

Their side draws meaningfully less pressure than the competitor’s meshed element, up to a 29% energy reduction at the top end — which is essentially the theoretical floor of the process.

The differential pressure across the system tells the same story: it starts far lower, and where the competitor’s line climbs as the elements scale, theirs stays flat.

Less scaling, fewer cleanings, fewer chemicals discharged.

The kind of secondary benefit that shows up on nobody’s spec sheet and everybody’s operating budget.

A reality check for those of us in desal

That 29% is the ceiling, and it lives in high-pressure industrial reuse.

In seawater desalination the honest number is 4 to 5%, because we’ve already squeezed the process to the bone with energy recovery devices and high-efficiency pumps.

But anyone who listened to our episode with Rolando Bosleman fom energy recovery (below), knows exactly what 4 to 5% means at scale.

We fought for years to break 3 kWh/m³.

We win and lose contracts on half-percentages, because a fraction of a point on a plant that runs for 25 years is millions of dollars — money that ultimately belongs to everyone connected to that network.

A component that looks incremental in isolation but moves the entire market, because of where it sits and how much water flows through it.

The uncomfortable part

Their elements cost more. More area, a harder manufacturing process — of course they cost more upfront.

And the EPC reflex, the one our procurement processes are built to reward, is to optimize the purchase price.

Craig put the counterargument plainly: a membrane element in a high-pressure application will consume four to five times its purchase price in electricity over its life.

We win on capex and on guarantees. The party carrying the 25-year O&M responsibility is the one with a real incentive to try something like this — and that party is usually not the one submitting the lowest-capex bid.

This is the same misalignment I keep circling back to in almost everything I write: the value is real, but it lands on a different line of a different party’s ledger than the one making the decision.

It’s a contract-structure problem, and it belongs to us.

Why the retrofit model

Their entry point is an existing plant at the end of its membrane life — the moment the replacement budget already exists.

Same housings, swap the elements, adjust setpoints that can be reverted.

If you don’t like it, put the old membranes back at the next cycle. No hardware changes, nothing burned, nothing you can’t undo.

Compare that to every innovation that dies in pilot purgatory because trialing it means going all-in with no way back.

They retrofitted more active area into the same footprint, got roughly 30% more water out of it, and ran a full year without a single cleaning.

The part that made me think

The printed pattern is digital. You upload an image; you print it.

Behind it sits CFD modeling and machine learning trading off exactly the mixing you need against the energy you waste getting it — marshmallow, column, barbell, triangle, aspect ratio after aspect ratio.

Today it’s a couple dozen installations. Craig sees hundreds, then thousands, each streaming back feedwater chemistry, temperatures, pressures.

Once that dataset is big enough for AI to chew on, the pattern stops being a fixed product and becomes something you tune.

A different geometry for a mine in Argentina than for a fab in Austin. Bespoke membrane elements.

Where the trick is

So I’ll go back to my office and ask my commissioning guys where the catch is.

Half the problem, he admitted, is just getting people to pay attention for thirty minutes.

He’s right, and it’s the entire reason this community exists. The best design in the world dies in obscurity if nobody sits still long enough to understand it.

When they finally do, the reaction is always the same: oh — that makes sense.

It’s an old layer nobody bothered to optimize, printed instead of extruded, sold into the replacement cycle at almost no risk.

I’d rather try it than assume it’s too good to be true. So far, Craig tells me, nobody has sent the membranes back.

Here the video I mentioned at the beginning:

A few quotes as usual

On landing in water

“I often tell people I ended up in the water business kind of by mistake. But I’ve loved it, because the water business is kind of every business — it literally drives economies.”

On complexity

“One of our CEOs came over from the aircraft engine business assuming water would be simpler. After a couple of months he said, my gosh, water is so much more complex — in jet engines you have fuel and air, that’s it. In water you have countless inputs and outputs to manage.”

On the layer nobody optimized

“The membrane’s been engineered close to its theoretical limits over the last thirty, forty years. But how you take that membrane and put water over it and through it has never really been improved.”

On the superpower

“This is our superpower: we put more area in every membrane element and lower its operating cost — because we can engineer that flow channel.”

On ‘too good to be true’

“People say that’s too good to be true, it doesn’t pass a reasonability test. So we just point at our installations and say — if you don’t believe us, try it. If it doesn’t work, we’ll take them back. We haven’t taken any back yet.”

On desalination

“You’re not going to get anywhere near 29% in seawater desal — it’s already so optimized. We’ll be happy with four to five percent. But that’s a really big number for people who design and build seawater plants. They’re engineering for half a percent.”

On small percentages (the ERI lesson)

“A small percentage, especially in big design plants, can play a huge difference.”
— Ramón

On lifecycle cost

“This isn’t about lowering cost. It’s about improving performance and lowering lifecycle cost. Over an eight-year life, that membrane element consumes four to five times in electricity what you paid for it upfront. Trying to save twenty or fifty dollars on the buy is not how you should be thinking.”

On putting everything on the table

“Everything has to be on the table, big or small — because a benefit is a benefit.”
— Ramón

On low-risk adoption

“We don’t change anything on the existing system. If you want to go back to what you used before, just take ours out next time and put the others back in again.”

On what Micron said

“You made the same quality, the same quantity, and saved us enormous energy.”
— quoting the customer

On bespoke membranes

“We’ve started to use the term bespoke membrane elements. How many patterns can we make? It’s infinite — it’s digital. We literally upload an image and print it down.”

On AI and data

“We don’t have a big dataset yet for AI to chew on. But as soon as we do, we see some interesting opportunities to iterate and optimize those patterns with big data.”

On the ERI parallel

“I love that energy recovery idea. And I think we’re right on the heels of that next big step change — the one that gets really close to the theoretical limit.”

On the real bottleneck

“Half of the problem is just getting people’s attention. When they actually sit down and understand what it is, they’re like — oh yeah, that makes sense.”

On the mission

“Our vision is to become the standard. Even though we’re still a small player in a big industry — we want to become the standard, because it’s just a better design.

Sometimes I find myself wondering…

Or is it simply that I’m now paying attention to things I never noticed before?

I’ve been thinking about this in relation to the M&A activity in the water sector.

Recently one of our posts about the Arcadis–WSP recent story had a relevant feedback, with interesting comments that made me think such as:

Read more

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How long will the datacenter water hype last?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The island principle

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The closed box

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

One grid, and a plan that runs to 2075

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

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

The payoff is operational flexibility.

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

In wetter years the balance flows the other way.

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

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

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

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

Scarcity, it turns out, is a discipline.

Reuse: a strategic choice, not a by-product

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is no single “cost of reused water.”

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

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

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

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

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

Distance is a hidden variable in every reuse business case.

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

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

Then there’s the sea.

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

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

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

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

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

We’re selling independence from the sky.

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

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

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

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

The innovator’s paradox

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

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

He frames it as three circles.

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

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

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

Two kinds of water, two kinds of money

Ravid splits water innovation into two sub-sectors.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Plumbers with a degree

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

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

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

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

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

A key quotes

On necessity as the engine

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

On planning as an island

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

On water as public domain

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

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

On the closed economy

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

On long-term planning

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

On efficiency

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

On the reuse strategy

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

On why geography decides reuse

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

On desalinated water quality

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

On resilience

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

On Israel as a preview

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

On physical vs. digital water

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

On measurement

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

On the sector as a safe bet

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

On the profession

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read more

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

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

Reflecting on that legacy:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He got into water almost by accident

Curiously, Walid did not choose water.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three companies, three competencies, one career.

The Desalytics thesis: capital and proximity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Our best-selling product is our people”

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

He refused the premise.

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

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

Nobody needs a distributor to be a catalogue.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Exhibitions

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

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

Conferences

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The gap is adoption.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From scarcity to abundance

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

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

The bottleneck is not physical.

And here he named the typical structural problem:

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

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

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

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

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

What he would tell a young engineer

I asked him for advice for someone starting now.

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

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

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

Then the word that closed the conversation:

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

Walid, in his own words

As usual, a brief journey through the talk:

On how he got into water

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

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

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

On Africa

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

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

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

On the partnership model

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

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

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

On people, not products

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

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

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

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

On events

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

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

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

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

On meetings and AI agents

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

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

On innovation versus adoption

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

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

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

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

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

On political will

“That’s the elephant in the room.”

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

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

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

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

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

On the next twenty years

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

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

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

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

On building a career

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

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

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

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

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

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

On staying grounded

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. A short story about drum screens...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The man, and why I wanted to talk to him

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A brief history of an alphabet soup

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

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

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

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

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

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

The politicised utility

That was the mandate.

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

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

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

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

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

Out of politics because it actually matters.

The one-cent coin

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

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

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

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

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

The numbers, since we are being economists about it

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

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

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

• Accumulated investment deficit: €4.485 billion.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nobody.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are efficient public companies and inefficient ones.

Efficient private companies and inefficient ones.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So whose fault is it?

Back to the question that titles this essay.

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

Water service is, ultimately, a municipal competence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What we can actually do

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nobody is going to change that.

The demand for what we do is not in question.

Quotes worth keeping

On the price of water

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

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

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

On investment and infrastructure

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

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

On regulation without financing

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

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

On contract structure as a financing tool

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

On politics

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

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

On public vs private

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

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

On procurement

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

On governance and responsibility

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

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

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

On what professionals should do

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

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

On the job

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Refer friends to The Water MBA sharing this link.

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

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

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

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

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