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 hit a desalination facility in Bahrain. In Fujairah, UAE, the port and oil storage facilities took direct hits, starting fires and stopping oil operations.

One researcher said it simply: “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 spreading a story that Dubai is one attack away from a water crisis, because everything depends on Jebel Ali.

The concern is not completely wrong. 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 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. One explosion cannot take all of them out at once. Dubai also has smaller plants, and there is a wider water grid across the UAE that lets emirates share supply in emergencies.

On top of that, DEWA has been building a 90-day emergency underground water reserve at Jebel Ali, with a target storage of 6,000 million imperial gallons when complete.

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

What's Actually Under Al Reem Island

While going through all of this, I went deep into Abu Dhabi's water and sanitation systems — and found things I did not expect.

I invest in property on Al Reem Island. I have walked past utility buildings and facilities there many times without thinking about them. I had no idea what was 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 weak.

The reason is simple: 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, drainage pipes also face constant problems — sand clogging and salt damage make maintenance expensive. So roads flooding temporarily is accepted as a small inconvenience.

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

The Liwa underground water reserve

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

The idea: pump extra desalinated water into the underground sand aquifer when production is high, then pull it out when needed. Abu Dhabi started 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 is about 26 million cubic meters, with recovery efficiency of 85–95%. The goal: supply the entire city of Abu Dhabi for 90 days from this reserve alone.

You will not see this 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: around $1.9 billion. The main tunnel runs 41 km from Abu Dhabi island through the mainland to a treatment facility at Al Wathba. Another 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 goes down to 80 meters. At the deepest point — the Al Wathba pumping station — it reaches 105 meters underground.

The reason for going that deep is simple engineering: the system runs on gravity alone for almost its full length. To move wastewater by gravity over 35+ km without pumping stations in between, you need a continuous downward slope, which means digging deeper as you go. This design removed 35 existing pump stations, cutting the number of things that could fail.

The treated water does not go to waste. Wastewater from STEP is 100% recycled and used for irrigation — the parks, grass, and trees you see around Abu Dhabi stay green using reclaimed water that traveled 105 meters underground before being cleaned and sent out.

One detail: in some parts of Al Reem Island, vacuum trucks still collect sewage the old way. The deep tunnel and the vacuum truck coexist. That gap shows where the city's infrastructure priorities actually are.

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 main air conditioning model across the UAE. Instead of individual outdoor units on each building, a central plant makes chilled water and sends it through underground pipes to connected buildings. It uses less energy and works well at city scale.

For Al Reem, this means the island can work on its own to some degree. Even if cut off from the mainland, it can keep producing cooling, as long as the island's plants are running.

But here is the weak point.

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

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

What You Can't See from the Street

Physical infrastructure attacks are no longer theoretical. I think what sets 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 spread-out desalination plants connected by 3,500 km of pipelines
• An island-level cooling system that can run on its own if needed

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

“How impressive does it look from above” is a fair thing to check. But “how strong is what's below” is probably more important when you are thinking about what happens if things get hard.

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