Morocco – absolute water stress.
Faced with intensifying climate-driven droughts and mounting resource pressure, Morocco is undergoing a strategic hydrological shift to stave off “absolute water stress”—a threshold defined by having less than 500 cubic meters of water per capita per year. With dam reservoirs plummeting below 25% capacity in 2024, the nation has moved beyond traditional rainfall reliance to embrace large-scale desalination as a cornerstone of its sovereignty.
A key driver in this transition is OCP Group, whose Jorf Lasfar complex has pioneered industrial desalination since 2015. In 2025, with 200 million m³ of seawater desalinated per year, Jorf Lasfar is now the largest facility of its kind in Morocco. This capacity contributes to the drinking water supply of South Casablanca and El Jadida, it also ensures the water autonomy of the local OCP industrial complex. By 2030 OCP intends to produce 630 million m³ of desalinated water per year.
This corporate leadership mirrors an ambitious national roadmap. As of 2023, Morocco operated 12 desalination plants with a collective capacity of 179 million m³ per year, but the government has since moved to a massive expansion phase. Under Morocco’s updated national water strategy, the country now aims to reach a combined (including OCP) staggering annual capacity of 1.7 billion m³ by 2030. This initiative is designed to balance the nation’s needs by allocating 53% of this capacity to sustain the population, 23% to revitalize agriculture, and 24% for industrial use.
As this massive volume of non-conventional water is brought online, the demand for high-quality infrastructure becomes critical.
water storage.
To ensure the long-term viability of these water projects, generizon provides through its partner Henze-Harvestor custom-engineered storage solutions featuring individual tank capacities of up to 25,000 m³. These bolted glass-fused-to-steel and stainless steel tanks are tailored to precise specifications, boasting a designed service life of up to 60 years. Because the materials are resistant to corrosion and degradation, they remain virtually maintenance-free, offering a highly reliable and cost-effective infrastructure for Morocco’s growing desalination network.
In addition, generizon provides high-performance reverse osmosis equipment through its partner Rotreat, tailored for treatment of salty and dirty water to meet domestic, industrial, or agricultural needs.generizon also provides a number of high precision pressure and temperature switches through its partner Beta, as well as air and CO2 flow meters through its partner Binder, equipment that is regularly used in water desalination processes.
desalination tech – a technical overview.
Desalination is the process of removing salts and minerals from saline water (seawater or brackish water) to produce water suitable for human consumption or irrigation.
The most common methods include reverse osmosis, distillation and electrodialysis (for brackish water).
- Reverse osmosis, the most widely used technique, applies pressure to the water to filter it through semi-permeable membranes, effectively separating water from salt. This technology offers significant economic and energy advantages, it can be easily scaled with modular units.
- Thermal distillation is the boil and condense method which takes much more energy input.
- Electrodialysis also uses membranes to separate water and salt, but relies on an electric field to promote ion transfer.
- An overlooked problem is brine management and returning this brine to the ocean in a way that minimizes environmental impact on marine life.
