In March 1953 Sheikh Abdullah Al-Salem, then ruler of Kuwait, stood at a tap in Shuwaikh, opened it, and drank the first seawater distilled by a government plant. The British political agent and the US consul general were there, and the ruler’s secretary, Abdullah Al-Mulla, gave a speech about how the project had been built.
Before the tap
Kuwait’s drinking water had come from two places: wells, and the sailing boats that carried it down from the Shatt al-Arab, which we wrote about in the water boats of the Shatt al-Arab. Both depended on the weather, the sea and what happened beyond the border.
From Ahmadi to Shuwaikh
According to the historical overview of Kuwait’s Ministry of Electricity and Water, the Kuwait Oil Company set up a small seawater distillation unit at Mina Al-Ahmadi in 1951, producing 80,000 gallons a day by the submerged-tube method: boil seawater, condense the steam. It was expensive and produced little.
In 1952 the government, having taken over the electricity service, built Kuwait’s first steam power station at Shuwaikh, by the shore. Its three small units, 750 kilowatts each, also fed steam to the first seawater desalination plant next door. Kuwait’s electricity and water came out of the same place from the start.
A million gallons a day
The Shuwaikh plant started in 1953 at a million gallons a day. The ministry says a foreign company then developed a new method based on flash evaporation, and that Kuwait was the first country to adopt it. The site grew to ten distillation units with a combined 32 million gallons a day.
It showed up at home: each resident’s share of fresh water was 4,604 gallons a year in 1959 and 21,589 in 1988, by the ministry’s own figures.
Photo: a desalination plant on the coast of Ras Al Khaimah, UAE, in 2007; it is not the Shuwaikh plant. By Octal, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: “Historical overview” on the website of Kuwait’s Ministry of Electricity, Water and Renewable Energy (mew.gov.kw), read on 12 October 2026, and Youssef Al-Shehab’s article on the first distillation plant in Al-Qabas, 19 August 2018.
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