MALÉ – The Maldives’ state-owned water utility expects to begin work by the middle of next year on a desalination plant that will sit 500 meters beneath the surface of the sea, in what would be one of the first commercial deployments of the technology anywhere in the world.
Hussain Fahmy, Managing Director of Malé Water and Sewerage Company (MWSC), said the company had already signed an agreement with a Norwegian partner and was now running feasibility, technical and environmental studies. He was speaking on “Ahaashey Bunaanan”, a programme produced jointly by Dhivehi Raajjeyge Adu and Television Maldives.
Fahmy said the first hurdle is money. Before anything is built, MWSC is testing whether the numbers work, how much capital the scheme demands, and whether the water it produces can compete on cost with the diesel-hungry plants the country runs today.
The economics turns on depth. At 500 meters, the weight of the water overhead supplies much of the pressure that a conventional reverse osmosis plant must generate with banks of electric pumps. Fahmy said seawater drawn at that depth is markedly cleaner than water pulled from coastal boreholes and carries lower levels of organic material and metals, cutting the pre-treatment burden. Brine, the salty reject stream that plagues shoreline plants, can be released back into deep water rather than into shallow lagoons where reefs and fisheries sit.
Land is the other constraint. Malé is one of the most densely populated cities on earth, and every square meter committed to industrial plant is a square meter unavailable for housing. Fahmy said moving production offshore removes that trade-off entirely, and called the Maldives subsea desalination project a significant step for an island nation with almost no ground to spare.
MWSC plans to send a technical team to Norway to study the technology in operation before committing. Fahmy said the initiative could grow into a major undertaking and set an example for others.
The Norwegian Template
MWSC signed a memorandum of understanding in 2024 with Flocean, an Oslo-based company that has since brought the world’s first commercial subsea desalination unit online at Mongstad, on Norway’s west coast. That machine sits at the same 500-meter depth and produces roughly a million liters of drinking water a day. Flocean says the approach cuts energy use by 30 to 50 percent against conventional seawater reverse osmosis.
In May, Flocean signed a separate development agreement with WaterConnect, a project developer backed by the US non-profit Water.org, to structure an investment-ready scheme supplying Malé and Hulhumalé, with MWSC coordinating as the intended offtaker. The Maldives subsea desalination project is the most advanced of more than a dozen Flocean has in development globally.
Neither MWSC nor its partners have disclosed a capital cost or a target production capacity.
Pipes Across the Bridge
Alongside the offshore work, MWSC is moving on a second scheme to bind the water networks of the capital region together.
Fahmy said the company has decided to lay water pipelines along the Thilamalé Bridge, the crossing under construction between Malé, Vilimalé, Gulhifalhu and Thilafushi. Under the plan, MWSC would build bulk storage on either Thilafushi or Gulhifalhu and pipe treated water from there to Malé and Hulhumalé.
That would give the capital a single interconnected supply rather than a set of island systems each exposed to its own point of failure, a vulnerability the country learnt the hard way in December 2014, when a fire at the MWSC plant left Malé without running water for days.
The network will not be cheap. Fahmy said the cost is substantial and that MWSC is in talks with the government on financing, with the aim of starting construction so the pipes are in place by the time the bridge itself is finished.
Taken together, the two schemes point to a shift in how the Maldives plans to secure fresh water: away from land it does not have, and toward the ocean that surrounds it. Whether the Maldives subsea desalination project clears its financial review will determine how far that shift goes.