By John — Desalination News
Jamaica is taking a fresh look at seawater desalination as recurring droughts, intensified by El Niño weather patterns, put growing strain on the island’s water supply, according to a report in the Jamaica Observer.
Water Minister Matthew Samuda confirmed that feasibility studies are already underway at sites in the parishes of St. Thomas and Clarendon, with an engineering phase targeted for 2027 and procurement expected to follow in 2028. Samuda is weighing a solar-powered desalination system paired with pumped hydro storage to run reverse osmosis (RO) equipment, rather than more energy-intensive thermal processes. He cautioned, however, that a nationwide rollout of desalination “would significantly change” household water tariffs, given the technology’s heavy power demands.
The debate has split officials. Duane Rowe, director of Jamaica’s Office of Utilities Regulation, argues in favor of desalination, drawing on 15 years of experience working in the Middle East, where the technology underpins water security across much of the Gulf. Rowe stressed that Jamaica must first bring down its electricity costs to make desalination economically viable — a recurring theme on an island where power prices rank among the highest in the Caribbean.
Dr. Phillipa Campbell-Francis, acting vice president of operations at Jamaica’s National Water Commission (NWC), took the opposite view, calling desalination currently uneconomical given its energy intensity. She also raised environmental concerns around brine disposal, which can deplete oxygen levels in coastal waters, and argued the NWC’s immediate priority should instead be its roughly 70% non-revenue water loss rate — water that is produced but never billed, lost to leaks, theft, and faulty metering before it reaches customers.
Jamaica’s Meteorological Service director, Evan Thompson, urged the government to seriously weigh desalination among its climate resilience options as drought conditions grow more frequent and severe.
The debate is not happening in a vacuum. In December 2025, a Bahamas-funded pilot RO plant in Falmouth, Trelawny parish, began producing roughly 1,000 gallons of fresh water an hour — a small-scale proof of concept for the technology on Jamaican soil. Separately, a 2024 grant of $61 million from the U.S. Trade and Development Agency funded environmental impact studies across 13 potential coastal sites nationwide, groundwork that could feed directly into the current feasibility push. Cost estimates for a full-scale system now under discussion run as high as $10.49 million a year, depending on the configuration ultimately chosen.
Jamaica is not alone in confronting this trade-off. Across the Caribbean, several islands have already moved further down the desalination path, from Bahamas-funded RO units to neighboring territories that rely on desalinated water for the bulk of their supply. Jamaica’s larger population and more diversified existing water infrastructure make its transition more complex, but the same energy-cost arithmetic that governs desalination economics in the Gulf applies just as directly here: without cheaper power, large-scale desalination remains a costly last resort rather than a mainstream water source.
For now, Jamaica’s path forward rests on the outcome of the St. Thomas and Clarendon feasibility studies and on whether the government can make meaningful progress on electricity costs in parallel. Both will likely determine whether desalination moves from study to construction before the end of the decade.
(Source: Jamaica Observer)