Für die New York Times unterwegs in der unwirtlichen:
LIWA OASIS, ABU DHABI - Georg Koziorowski, a German hydrogeologist, eyes masked by his Ray-Ban sunglasses, points at a white water tank and tries to speak. But the wind, whipping the palm trees and stirring fine sand into pirouettes along the desert highway, carries his voice away.
Mr. Koziorowski is in the middle of the Liwa Oasis in Abu Dhabi, about 150 kilometers, or 90 miles, southwest of the glittering coastal capital. This is the edge of the inhospitable Rub al-Khali desert, which stretches across neighboring Saudi Arabia into Oman and Yemen.
Surrendering to the sandstorm, Mr. Koziorowski retreats into a silver S.U.V., where he unfolds a map to present his plan for a project that would cost Abu Dhabi hundreds of millions of dollars and, ideally, would never be used.
Abu Dhabi has enormous oil reserves, and its sovereign wealth fund invests billions of dollars around the world to buy shares of foreign companies. Lacking natural water supplies, the emirate has invested heavily in desalination plants on the coast of the Gulf; these produce about 800,000 cubic meters, or 210 million gallons, of drinking water every day for its 1.2 million residents.
Abu Dhabi may be a desert country, but its daily water consumption per person is higher than that in most places in the world, at about 650 liters, or 170 gallons. In the United States, for example, daily consumption is 300 liters per person, and in many European countries, it is less than half that. The desalinated water is used for golf courses, agriculture and car washes. As much as half is used to water public spaces.
But all this conspicuous consumption is based on a shaky foundation: If something - an attack, a natural disaster or a major oil spill in the Gulf - should put the desalination plants out of operation, the emirate's reserves, now stored in above-ground water tanks, would be exhausted within 48 hours. "That would be a disaster," said Mohamed Dawoud of the water resources department at the Abu Dhabi Environment Agency, acknowledging the emirate's weak spot.
Should an emergency occur, the plan is to separate Abu Dhabi into different sectors, Mr. Dawoud said. Reserve water supplies would be switched from sector to sector, for six hours each, until they ran out, after two days and nights.
To give the emirate a longer lease on emergency life, Mr. Koziorowski and colleagues from GTZ International Services, the business division of GTZ, the German development aid organization, have been working for more than 10 years on a proposal for a gigantic underground water storage project.
To add to its problems, Abu Dhabi suffers from increasing salinity and scarcity of groundwater. In some areas, the concentration of salt is now eight times as high as that in seawater. But a team of geologists has found that natural freshwater reservoir formations beneath Liwa Oasis are big enough to hold additional supplies.
Any day now, German and emirate officials say, the government is expected to award a contract for a gigantic aquifer storage project. By 2013, at an estimated construction cost of $500 million, an emergency water supply will be built under the desert sands, holding water pumped in from the coastal desalination plants and extending the emirate's water reserves to 90 days.
The tradition of aquifer storage goes back a long way. About 400 years ago, the inhabitants of the Cape Verde Islands let water seep into the ground for later recovery, Mr. Koziorowski said. Projects have also been tested in neighboring member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council. But even if the concept is not new, the scale of the project in the arid environment of Abu Dhabi is unprecedented.
Over a period of two years, 26 million cubic meters of desalinated water would be pumped through a pipeline bridging the 100 kilometers from the coast to the oasis. Tanks five meters, or 16 feet, deep, filled with gravel, would allow the water to seep into the ground.
"The desalinated water will trickle into the aquifer, which is similar to a sponge, until it hits a layer of silty sands and clay that doesn't let the water through," Mr. Koziorowski said. There it will stay until it is needed.
GTZ is playing an advisory role in the process. The contract is expected to be awarded to a local company.
In an emergency, 16 million cubic meters could be pumped up through hundreds of wells, providing each resident with about 150 liters of drinking water a day over a three-month period.
Despite the mammoth costs and effort involved, the hope is that the reserve drawdown would never be called into action, Mr. Koziorowski noted, "because implementation means crisis."
Neighboring countries have been carefully following the progress of what could become a model for the region, for all face similar problems.
In fact, when the geologists presented the idea of aquifer storage to the rulers of Abu Dhabi, their first concern was to make sure that Saudi Arabia, next door, could not draw off water from the replenished underground reserves.
All the member countries of the Gulf council rely on desalinated water as a main source for domestic supplies. Reserves in Qatar and Bahrain would last no longer than those of Abu Dhabi; Saudi Arabia could cope for three days, Kuwait for five.
Yet, even the construction of additional emergency supply capacity may provide only breathing space.
Abu Dhabi's environment agency says the rising salinity of the desert is matched by a similar phenomenon offshore, largely caused by the very plants used to provide fresh water.
The Gulf is a closed system with little freshwater inflow. By excessively desalinating seawater, the Gulf states are killing off their main supply. The concentration of salt in Gulf seawater now stands at 45 grams per liter, above the 40-gram level at which desalination works efficiently, Mr. Dawoud said.
To meet rising demand, Abu Dhabi plans almost to double its desalination output. Even as the government acts to secure water supplies, it may also be putting them in long-term jeopardy, he said.
Benjamin Dierks is a political correspondent of The Financial Times Deutschland.