Boosting Efforts to Find Solutions to Water Shortages in Oman

Omanis are being trained to conduct research in a bid to find solutions to the country’s scarcity of fresh water

The lack of fresh water has triggered a cause for concern in the Middle East, where solutions to providing clean, reusable water to supply the population’s daily needs have been proposed and studied.

Chaired by Sayyid Badr bin Hamad Al Busaidi, Secretary General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Middle East Desalination Research Center (MEDRC) offers a hub where experts cooperate to find solutions to seeking out fresh water by supporting research, training, knowledge exchanges and capacity building.

It also serves as a viable and transferable model for governments seeking a mechanism to address the significant regional and trans-boundary environmental issues.

“Since 1996, MEDRC has supported 200 water research projects which involved bringing the best regional and global expertise together, along with regional researchers from 34 countries, to help find solutions to the challenge of scarce fresh water supplies in the region,” said Perla Abi Farah, Marketing and Communications Manager. MEDRC’s research programme is based on several research goals, which include reducing the cost of desalination, developing sustainable desalination technologies and maximising technology transfers, among others.

MEDRC also contributes to Omanisation through training programmes for students who wish to enter the desalination industry, as well as for desalination employees who wish to strengthen their knowledge and expertise. High-standard specialised training is offered to engineers, researchers, academics and professional technicians who work, or will be working, in desalination plants. The research centre provides students with a pilot desalination plant on site, laboratories and classrooms for theoretical work, in addition to solar plants for solar desalination, and a library containing over 300 published water research studies.

Riadh Dridi, Project and Training Manager said, “MEDRC’s Continued Professional Education & Training in Water programme starts at the initiation stage and provides a theoretical and practical understanding of reverse osmosis process operations carried out in its state of the art

reverse osmosis pilot plant, the only one in Oman”

Students will go through four days of training, where they will have to complete three levels of course work. Training can be done either on MEDRC’s premises or at the client site.

Source: Times of Oman

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