What I Found Underground in Abu Dhabi While Reading About Iran's Attacks on Gulf Desalination Plants

Personal analysis. Not investment advice. Geopolitical data from Wikipedia, Al Jazeera, Xinhua. Infrastructure data from DEWA, ADSSC, WaterWorld, MEED. March 2026.

On February 28, 2026, the US and Israel launched strikes against Iran.

From the start, the conflict went in an unexpected direction. Targets were not just military sites — desalination plants started getting hit. On March 7, a plant on Iran's Qeshm Island was attacked (Iran blamed the US; the US and Israel denied it). The next day, an Iranian drone struck a desalination facility in Bahrain. In Fujairah, UAE, the port and oil storage facilities took direct hits, triggering fires and suspending oil operations.

One researcher put it plainly: “Oil built the Persian Gulf. Desalinated water keeps it alive.” That infrastructure is now part of the conflict.

The “Dubai loses water in one strike” claim

Social media has been circulating a story that Dubai is one attack away from a water crisis, because everything depends on Jebel Ali.

The concern is not completely unfounded. Jebel Ali holds a Guinness World Record as the world's largest single-site desalination facility, producing 490 million imperial gallons of water per day. It covers most of Dubai's water and electricity supply.

But “one strike and it's over” is an exaggeration.

Jebel Ali is actually made up of 43 MSF (Multi-Stage Flash) distillation units plus 2 reverse osmosis plants, spread across stations D, E, G, K, L, and M. A single explosion cannot take all of them down simultaneously. Dubai also has additional smaller plants, and there is a wider water transmission grid across the UAE that allows inter-emirate supply in emergencies.

On top of that, DEWA had been working toward a 90-day emergency underground water reserve at Jebel Ali, targeting a storage capacity of 6,000 million imperial gallons when complete.

There is real risk here. But it is not a single point of failure.

What I actually wanted to write about: Abu Dhabi's infrastructure

While going through all of this, I ended up down a rabbit hole about Abu Dhabi's water and sanitation systems — and found some things I had not expected.

I invest in property on Al Reem Island, so I have walked past various utility buildings and facilities there without thinking much about them. I had no idea what was actually inside them, or what was happening underneath.

Why does Abu Dhabi flood when it rains?

Abu Dhabi gets rain maybe once or twice a year. When it does, roads stay flooded for half a day. For one of the wealthiest cities in the world, the drainage seems oddly inadequate.

The reasoning is straightforward: cost versus frequency.

Building a billion-dollar stormwater drainage network for rain that comes two days a year makes no economic sense. In a desert environment, drainage pipes also face constant problems — sand clogging and salt corrosion make maintenance expensive. So roads temporarily flooding is accepted as a minor inconvenience.

What is not accepted as an inconvenience is the water supply failing. That is treated as an existential problem, and the spending reflects it.

The Liwa underground water reserve

About 160 km southwest of Abu Dhabi city, beneath the Liwa sand dunes, sits the world's largest desalinated water Aquifer Storage and Recovery (ASR) project.

The concept: pump surplus desalinated water into the underground sand aquifer during periods of high production, then recover it when needed. Abu Dhabi started feasibility studies in 2001, ran pilots from 2003 to 2009, built the full facility from 2009 to 2016, and has been running large-scale injection since 2015. Total investment was around $350 million.

Storage capacity is approximately 26 million cubic meters, with recovery efficiency of 85–95%. The target: supply the entire city of Abu Dhabi for 90 days from this reserve alone.

This is not something you see mentioned in real estate brochures. But it is sitting under the desert.

A sewer tunnel that goes 105 meters underground

This is the part I found most surprising.

Abu Dhabi has a deep gravity sewer system called STEP — the Strategic Tunnel Enhancement Programme. Total cost: approximately $1.9 billion. The main tunnel runs 41 km from Abu Dhabi island through the mainland to a treatment facility at Al Wathba. An additional 43 km of link sewers feed into it, making the total network around 84 km.

The depth is what stands out.

The tunnel starts at around 27 meters below ground on Abu Dhabi island. As it reaches the mainland it descends to 80 meters. At the deepest point — the Al Wathba pumping station — it reaches 105 meters underground.

The reason for going that deep is straightforward engineering: the system runs on gravity alone for nearly its entire length. To move wastewater by gravity over 35+ km without intermediate pumping stations, you need a continuous downward slope, which means digging deeper as you go. This design eliminated 35 existing pump stations across the network, removing a significant number of failure points.

The treated output does not go to waste. Wastewater collected through STEP is 100% recycled and used for irrigation — the parks, grass, and trees you see around Abu Dhabi are kept green with reclaimed water that traveled 105 meters underground before being cleaned and distributed.

One detail worth noting: in some areas of Al Reem Island, vacuum trucks still collect sewage the old way. The deep tunnel infrastructure and the vacuum truck coexist. That gap is a reasonable picture of where the city's infrastructure priorities sit.

The cooling risk that doesn't get talked about

Al Reem Island has its own water supply and district cooling infrastructure — including a 57,000-refrigerant-ton cooling plant serving the Shams development.

District cooling is the dominant air conditioning model across the UAE. Instead of individual outdoor units on each building, a central plant produces chilled water and distributes it through underground pipes to connected buildings. It is more energy-efficient and makes sense at urban scale.

For Al Reem, this means the island has a degree of self-sufficiency. Even if cut off from the mainland, it can continue producing cooling, at least while the island's plants are running.

But here is the structural weak point.

Water can be piped over long distances. Chilled water cannot. Heat loss over long pipe runs makes it impractical to supply district cooling from far away. If the cooling plant on the island were damaged or shut down, there is no quick way to route cooling from the Abu Dhabi mainland.

In a city where summer temperatures exceed 50°C, losing air conditioning is not just uncomfortable. It makes a building uninhabitable within hours. By that measure, the real infrastructure vulnerability in the UAE is not water — it's cooling supply continuity.

What actually determines a city's asset value

In a world where physical infrastructure attacks are no longer hypothetical, I think what determines the long-term value of urban real estate is what you cannot see from the street.

Not the towers. Not the mall. Not the view.

• A sewer tunnel buried 105 meters underground, built to last 100 years
• 90 days of emergency drinking water stored in an aquifer 160 km away
• Nine geographically distributed desalination plants connected by 3,500 km of pipelines
• An island-level cooling system that can run independently if needed

These are the things a national government spends billions on over decades, quietly, without much fanfare.

“How impressive does it look from above” is a reasonable thing to evaluate. But “how robust is what's below” is probably more relevant when you're thinking about what happens if things get difficult.

Personal analysis. Related: UAE Solar Is Cheaper Than Qatar's Gas.