Dow Chemical and Saudi Arabia’s KAUST University Vow To Clean Up Environment
Monday, November 30th, 2009
Dow Chemical Company, a worldwide leader in the global chemical industry, and sponsor of the 2010 Dow Live Earth Run for Water, has entered into agreements with the new Saudi Arabian King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) for developing cleaner, new routes for producing chemical derivatives.
The two are also looking into ways for carbon capture –a method which proposes to suck up and store greenhouse gas emissions.
Although many of the chemicals produced by the American chemical giant are used in the petroleum distilling and petrochemical industries, with much of the company’s “raw material” is coming from Saudi Arabia.

It sits in the middle of a harsh, barren desert, sweltering in searing heat. It has no clean water, its sea is polluted and there is no topsoil, just a covering of sand. It is also the biggest per capita consumer of fuel, massively reliant on cars, power-hungry desalination and air-conditioning. And with all this, can the United Arab Emirate state of Abu Dhabi really succeed in building a new “green city” in the Middle East?
However, current desalination methods can be expensive and energy inefficient.
Chris Tobias recently wrote about
The NATO Science for Peace Program and the Middle East Desalination Research Center (MEDRC) recently awarded grants to researchers at Ben Gurion University of the Negev to continue working on a novel desalination method. In a region where potable water sources are so scarce, these methods are crucial to water independence and reducing reliance upon imported water sources (which require a lot of fossil fuels).


