Large-Scale Water Storage in Aquifers: Enhancing Qatar's Groundwater Resources

Qatar's water resource has been largely overexploited, leading to the severe depletion of its aquifers and degradation of water quality due to saline intrusions. Qatar envisions employing regional aquifers to store water via forced injection of desalinated water and thus increase available from a few days to two months. A strategy for the implementation of forced injections is proposed based on a spatially distributed model of groundwater flow at the scale of the whole country. The model is based on calibration under steady-state flow conditions and for a two-dimensional single regional aquifer due to the lack of data. Injection scenarios include various mean injection rates at the scale of the whole system and are interpreted under the assumption that the additional storage should feed 2.7 M inhabitants for two months at a rate of 100 L/person/day. When this water supply stock is reached, the model is run to define the infiltration rate, which allows the stock to remain constant over time as a result of an even balance between infiltrations, withdrawals and also leaks or inlets through the boundary conditions of the system.