Abdulla Alshehhi

Abdulla Alshehhi did not set out to be the iceberg guy. He is an electrical and electronics engineer who graduated from the University of Huddersfield in the UK in 2001, then went home to Abu Dhabi to a long career inside the Gulf's gas industry at GASCO, an ADNOC group company. So the man proposing to drag a chunk of Antarctica across the planet is, by day, a very conventional energy engineer, and that contrast is most of what makes the story interesting.

Abdulla Alshehhi's idea started with a book. Back in 2013 he began writing Filling the Empty Quarter, a collection of out-of-the-box schemes for getting fresh water into the Rub' al Khali, the Empty Quarter, which is the second-largest sand desert in the world, and turning it green. While researching it he stumbled on a 1970s proposal by French engineer Georges Mougin to tow an iceberg to Saudi Arabia, a venture that raised serious money but stalled in 1977 on the technology of the day. Alshehhi's read was simple: the tugboats are stronger now, the patents are new, so the thing that killed it in the 1970s no longer holds, which is how a desert-greening book turned into the UAE Iceberg Project.

Here is the logic, because at first it sounds slightly mad. Every year, more fresh water breaks off Antarctica as icebergs than the entire human population drinks, and most of it simply drifts north and melts into the sea, wasted. Meanwhile the Gulf leans almost entirely on desalination, which Alshehhi is blunt about: it is energy-hungry and it dumps enormous volumes of hyper-salty brine straight back into a sea that cannot take much more of it. His pitch is to go and grab freshwater that is already melting and already wasted before it disappears, and his target landing point is a deep-water spot about three kilometres off Fujairah, on the UAE's Arabian Sea coast, precisely because the Saudis in the 1970s could not get a 150-metre-deep iceberg into their shallow Red Sea.

Abdulla Alshehhi has been careful not to over-promise on the engineering. The technology he patented through the UK Intellectual Property Office is a heat-insulated towing reservoir that uses renewable energy and wind guidance to slow the melt rate and cut fuel use across a journey that could run nine months or more. The plan is deliberately staged: a pilot tow of a smaller iceberg to Perth or Cape Town first, three to four months out, to prove the method and retire the risk, and only then the full haul to the UAE. A single iceberg, by his numbers, holds enough fresh water for roughly a million people for five years, which is why he keeps insisting the economics land at or below the cost of desalination.

Abdulla Alshehhi is honest about the part he cannot prove, and that honesty is why he is worth listening to rather than dismissing. When the project went public in 2017, researchers told him a parked iceberg, sitting as a cold body in the warm Arabian Sea, might pull in clouds and trigger its own little rain-making microclimate, and he repeats the idea while flatly admitting he is not a meteorologist and that it needs real study. He was invited to present the project to the UN in Stockholm in 2019 as an unconventional water resource, and for him the whole thing is less about being first than about a genuinely humanitarian and environmental goal:

“Whoever did it first, for me personally, is not an important issue. I see it from a humanitarian point of view and from an environmental point of view. We need to find a new water resource for humanity. The population is increasing and the global warming is not helping us at all. We need to make the Earth green again.”

Whether or not an iceberg ever reaches Fujairah, Abdulla Alshehhi has done the harder half of any moonshot, which is to make a genuinely outlandish idea sound technically arguable, and you can hear him do exactly that in his (don’t) Waste Water interview below. Everything on this page is anchored to what he said on the microphone and to public sources, the way I source every profile in my methodology.