Dams, Storage & Conveyance

Between the source and the tap sits the least glamorous, most capital-hungry part of the water sector. It is dams, conveyors, pumping stations and thousands of kilometres of pipe. In the MENA region this plumbing does extraordinary things. It will lift desalinated water about 700 metres towards Amman. It moves fossil water 325 km across Jordan’s desert, and it carries a river’s worth of water beneath Libya’s Sahara.^1 2 3 It is also where the region loses the most: Jordan’s kingdom-wide non-revenue water was 50.0% in 2022, and 68.8% in Mafraq governorate.⁴

The stakes of dam design and upkeep were written in Derna in September 2023. Two 1970s dams failed above the city during Storm Daniel. The engineering post-mortem found the number of fully damaged buildings about twenty times higher than in a dam-free scenario, and attributed the failure to inadequate design rather than to mechanical malfunction: a flood of some 39 million cubic metres against upstream storage of about 22 million.⁵ The rainfall’s return period, the same study found, was only a few decades.

The stock is impressive and stressed at the same time. Mega-conveyors knit surplus to deficit: Disi, Libya’s Great Man-Made River, Jordan’s coming Aqaba to Amman carrier, Morocco’s north-south water highway. But networks lose much of what they carry, and dam safety, Mosul above all, remains a live engineering concern.

The asset classes, and how each is failing or changing

Dams: storage on the register

The register this site compiles from FAO’s regional inventories, with the corrections noted on each country page, holds 1,307 large dams with a published design capacity, totalling about 568 km³. Read it as a register, not a census: it lists 73 Saudi dams against the 574 the kingdom’s own procurement agency counts, and 581 Turkish dams for all purposes against the 75 drinking-water dams and reservoirs Türkiye says it built over the last 23 years.^6 7

Storage figures flatter, and 2026 showed why. Iraqi live storage rose from about 3.5 to 20 billion cubic metres over the 2025 to 2026 winter, which the United Nations calculates as about a quarter of the 56 billion lost since 2020, and it warned that higher evaporation means storage figures overstate the net hydrological benefit.⁸ Even then, Iraq’s reservoir capacity exceeds 100 billion cubic metres, so a good winter left the system under a fifth full.⁸ At Mosul, the repair contract covering the grout curtain and the bottom outlet was worth €273 million, with holes drilled to 200 metres.⁹

Long-distance conveyance: the region’s signature engineering

Disi moves 100 million cubic metres a year 325 km to Amman from 55 wells, built between 2009 and 2013 on a 25-year build-operate-transfer contract, and meets about 30% of the capital’s needs.² Libya’s Great Man-Made River runs about 4,500 km and supplies more than 70% of Libyan cities; by December 2024 its board had committed to a fifth and final phase costing US$7 billion over six years, and the project had cost roughly US$25 billion to date. Its fifth river alone is about 1,500 km of new pipe and more than 2.5 million cubic metres a day from 320 wells south of Kufra.³

Jordan’s Aqaba to Amman carrier is the next of them, and its profile explains the cost: according to the project’s 2025 environmental assessment, about 438 km of buried steel up to 2.3 metres in diameter, lifting water about 700 metres to a first regulating tank, then pumping it over about 102 km to a high-point reservoir at roughly 1,085 metres before it flows about 250 km by gravity to a final pumping station for supply to Amman, carrying 300 million cubic metres a year, of which 250 million goes to the capital. Steel was chosen over ductile iron, which would have needed two parallel lines, and over glass-reinforced plastic and prestressed concrete cylinder pipe. Construction runs about 48 months from the second quarter of 2026, for commissioning in 2030.¹ Morocco’s water highway is a smaller version of the same idea: a 67 km transfer from the Sebou to the Bouregreg, on which US$728 million had been spent by March 2025, which had moved more than 700 million cubic metres by March 2025 for about 12 million people.¹⁰

Transmission as a procured asset class

The newest development is that pipelines are tendered the way plants were. Saudi Arabia named a preferred bidder in December 2025 for the 859 km Riyadh to Qassim line at SAR 2.627 a cubic metre, against a reserve bid of SAR 3.262, on a 35-year build-own-operate-transfer term with commercial operation in the second quarter of 2030. The same procurement carries six strategic tanks in Riyadh holding 1.02 million cubic metres.¹¹

It is not three pipelines but seven: 2,846 km and 4.42 million cubic metres a day, of which one is operational, two are being built and four are in procurement (one with a preferred bidder), those four accounting for 2,066 km and 2.64 million cubic metres a day.^6 11 Iraq is building the same kind of asset at smaller scale: 240 km of pipeline, a main pumping station and nine receiving stations for the Basra scheme, under a US$1.32 billion construction contract awarded to a PowerChina subsidiary.^12 13

Distribution: where the water is actually lost

Reported loss figures vary widely: Jordan’s non-revenue water was 50.0% kingdom-wide in 2022;⁴ Nama Water Services in Oman reported water losses of about 33% in 2024 to 2025, against 47% in 2021;¹⁴ Saudi Arabia reported 33% in 2025 with a target of 15% by 2031;⁶ one Tunisian expert estimated 20 to 25% in 2026;¹⁵ and Dubai reported 4.4% in 2025, against 42.5% in 1989.¹⁶ Bahrain’s updated plan sets a 23% water-loss target by 2032, while the earlier 15% target is being reassessed.¹⁷

Read those percentages carefully, because they are not measured the same way. Jordan counts water put into the distribution system less water billed. Palestine’s authority, in an undated draft strategy with a 2020 target, includes non-payment while noting that it is strictly speaking not non-revenue water, and reports an estimate of 38% of supply, or 285 litres per property a day.^18 19 Intermittent supply changes the arithmetic again: Jordan’s utilities use intermittent supply regimes nationwide, and its policy lists supply duration and operating pressure among the indicators to be monitored.⁴

Storage that is not a dam

Qatar raised its reserve from 1.3 days in 2010 to 5.2 days in 2024. Its mega-reservoir project, commissioned by the end of 2018, consists of 15 concrete reservoirs, each about 300 by 150 by 12 metres, with a combined capacity of 1,500 million imperial gallons; total storage later reached 2,417 million gallons.²⁰ Saudi Arabia held 25.1 million cubic metres in 2025, reported as 1.2 days of urban demand, and plans 70.52 million by 2031, reported as 5.6 days, with Juranah at 2.50 million cubic metres under construction and Dammam at 3.13 million and Al Ahsa at 1.39 million in tender.⁶

The 2026 strikes on Gulf desalination plants made this the live question. Saudi Arabia’s published plan, issued in March 2026, adds 45.42 million cubic metres by 2031. Its own strategy requires emergency storage to rise from 2.7 days in 2024 to 3.7 by 2030, while a seven-day standard in 2031 would need 126.11 million cubic metres, nearly twice what is planned.⁶

One case in this sector, examined in full.

Storage remains one of the region’s most consequential water technologies. A dam decides how much of a flood year survives into a dry one. On shared rivers it also decides who controls the timing of the flow, which is why the largest reservoirs here are engineering assets and standing diplomatic facts at the same time.

Three caveats matter commercially. First, published capacity is design capacity, and silt eats into it: by 2000, silt had cut the initial capacity of Algeria’s 48 dams by more than 25%.²¹ Second, evaporation from open reservoirs in this climate is punishing: higher evaporation, the United Nations warns, means storage figures overstate the net hydrological benefit.⁸ Third, this is a register rather than a census: it counts large dams with a published design capacity, so national totals are higher, and two Iraqi entries, Tharthar and Raza Dyke, are regulated depressions rather than river dams.

Storage on the register

Large dams with a published capacity, ranked by total design storage.

Every dam we hold with coordinates appears on the country maps and in the Region Atlas.

Major tracked infrastructure works: dams, conveyors and bulk systems. Hover a marker for the project and its status. Cancelled schemes are left off.

The tracked projects in this sector and the structured procurements coming next, straight from our databases.

Projects

In procurement

Delivery models split by asset class. Dams and most trunk conveyance are EPC with sovereign or development-bank finance, though Saudi Arabia now procures its transmission lines as PPPs.⁶ Bulk-supply schemes increasingly use BOT concessions; Disi was delivered by a developer under one that runs 25 years. In distribution, performance-based contracts, in which a contractor is paid against measured leakage reduction, are being piloted in Jordan and prioritised in Oman.^4 14 Three references:

• District metered areas and pressure management for physical-loss reduction; Jordan's NRW policy prioritises apparent-loss reduction through metering, billing and customer services ahead of cost-intensive rehabilitation and restructuring⁴
• Trenchless rehabilitation (CIPP lining, pipe bursting) for old urban mains
• Large-diameter steel transmission, chosen at Aqaba to Amman over ductile iron, GRP and prestressed concrete cylinder pipe
• Dam safety instrumentation and grouting, as in Mosul's continuous programme
• Pump-station efficiency: a mix of fixed- and variable-speed pumps is designed into the three Aqaba to Amman booster stations¹
• SCADA and integrated real-time monitoring platforms for network-wide operation¹⁴

Two measured results are worth more than any product list. In Grand Sfax, a SONEDE programme with JICA cut non-revenue water in the medina pilot zone from 50% to 26% and inspected nearly 180 km of network in 2025, against an initial target of 100 km a year.²⁶ In Algiers and Tipaza, about 24,000 leak repairs saved nearly 8 million cubic metres in 2024, while SEAAL mobilised 387 million cubic metres.²⁷ Neither needed a new source of water.

Reference frameworks used across the region’s projects:

Non-revenue water is the sector’s best business case. Recovering leakage in Amman avoids producing water at Aqaba and lifting it 700 metres. Jordan puts the cost of persistent losses at more than JOD 350 million a year to its water authority and the three public companies, and has committed over JOD 774 million to loss reduction for 2021 to 2030, against JOD 63 million in the whole of 2000 to 2010.⁴ Palestine values a three-point cut, from 38% to 35%, at US$40 million of revenue over ten years.¹⁹ The measured baseline is the one to work from: kingdom-wide non-revenue water stood at 50.0% in 2022 on the central unit’s official figures, against 68.8% in Mafraq and 32.9% in Karak.⁴

Energy is the other half of the arithmetic. In Jordan the water sector is the country’s largest single energy consumer, and electricity accounts for half of water utilities’ operating costs.¹⁸ Conveyance used about 7.11 kWh a cubic metre in 2015, against 0.5 for treatment, and is projected to reach approximately 3,172 GWh by 2050 in all modelled scenarios.³³ The Aqaba-Amman project includes a solar photovoltaic plant for the desalination plant and the pump stations in Aqaba Governorate.¹

Mega-conveyance still lives on sovereign balance sheets and development-bank loans, and the binding constraint is often disbursement rather than finance. Baghdad’s World Bank water project, a US$210 million loan approved in January 2018, had disbursed only 19% by April 2023, when the 380 km network-replacement target was cut to 137 km because further projects went unapproved.³⁴ By December 2024 the loan had been reduced to US$150 million, US$84.02 million (56%) had been disbursed, and the five water-network sub-projects were complete, rehabilitating 134 km.³⁵ Capital is not the scarce input everywhere it is assumed to be.

The bodies that commission, regulate or deliver in this sector, and the names that recur across its tenders.

• Sharakat (Saudi Water Partnership Company)PPP procurer · Saudi Arabia
• Ministry of Water Resources (MoWR)Ministry · Iraq
• Ministry of Water & Irrigation (MWI)Ministry · Jordan
• Qatar General Electricity & Water Corp. (Kahramaa)Utility · Qatar
• Public Works Authority (Ashghal)Drainage and sewerage infrastructure · Qatar
• Orascom ConstructionEPC & technology · Egypt

Mandates, procurement routes and the rest of the region’s institutions are in the decision-maker directory.

Where the near-term money is:

The region’s next decade of infrastructure is already visible: carriers from the coasts inland, networks rebuilt around measured performance, and storage operated for droughts that arrive more often. A UN Water Task Force brief estimates that extreme droughts of the types experienced in Iraq in 2023 are now 25 times more likely, while temperatures are projected to rise 1.6 to 2.4 °C by 2041 to 2060.⁸

The quieter change is institutional, as utilities that once built assets learn to sweat them. Three numbers make the case better than any strategy: Oman’s Nama Water Services runs 416 district metered areas and manages more than 2,400 operational assets; Saudi Arabia intends to cut urban demand per person from 345 to 300 litres a day, mainly through leak reduction; and Egypt reports 98% clean-water coverage against 65% sanitation coverage.^14 6 36

Standing references for this sector.

• Sharakat, 7 Year Statement 2025–2031 (March 2026), for transmission and storage as procured asset classes rather than public works. sharakat.com.sa
• FAO AQUASTAT, the standing database of national water resources, withdrawals and irrigated area. The denominator behind most figures on this site. fao.org
• Smart Water Magazine, a trade record for conveyance, storage and treatment awards across the region. smartwatermagazine.com