The long-term goal of the initiative is to have a facility operating at commercial scale by 2020.

Middle Eastern and North African countries are home to 6.3 percent of the world’s population, but the region contains only 1.4 percent of the world’s fresh water. The Gulf region in particular has the highest water scarcity levels in the world, according to the World Bank.

With limited surface water and depleting ground water resources, desalination is the key to meeting the inexorable rise in demand for water resulting from economic growth and expanding populations.

Already, more than half of all the world’s desalination capacity is located in the Arab countries.

Yet, in the United Arab Emirates, to take just one example, seawater desalination requires about 10 times more energy than pumping water from wells. Costs are projected to increase by 300 percent between 2010 and 2016 according to Masdar’s estimates.

The energy needed for desalination is usually generated by fossil fuels. The production of drinking water — often to be supplied at subsidized rates — uses 7 percent of global energy, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. So, in effect, large amounts of oil and gas are being used to generate cheap water supplies instead of earning export revenue.

“The Middle East is still in the process of addressing its long-term sustainable water access and security,” Corrado Sommariva, president of the International Desalination Association, said this month at the International Water Summit in Abu Dhabi. “By bridging the gap between research and development and commercialization, Masdar can provide an opportunity for scale-up of technologies that address water access.”

A handful of other projects in the region also have started to explore the use of renewable energy sources to produce drinking water, but they are costly, few in number and mostly still at the early testing stage.

Last June, Eole Water, a French start-up founded in 2008, began field trials in Abu Dhabi of wind turbines designed to produce drinking water from the condensation of atmospheric humidity.