We turn on the tap here, we get hot and cold running water. Fresh water.

Since it’s been through the salination plant, that is.

Practically the entire water supply for the United Arab Emirates (of which Abu Dhabi is the biggest, most populous and wealthiest) comes from the seawater of the Gulf.

It is a strange concept to be drinking water that was, a day or two ago, still in the quite salty Gulf. I still think about it every time I turn on the tap.

We had heard that desalinated water can be fairly nasty, even here. But I haven’t noticed it yet. It’s drinkable, for sure. Not that many of us actually do.

Bottled water is just about all we drink. And not because the taste of the desalinated water is bad. I think it’s just because most of us (and that includes the locals, as well as expats, across the spectrum) apparently are not keen about drinking former seawater.

We are led to believe that the desalination plants in some parts of the UAE are not as effective as those serving Abu Dhabi. The tap water in Sharjah, for example, apparently is nasty. Haven’t tried it yet, though.

Bottled water is cheap and readily available. At restaurants, it is assumed you are going to buy bottled, and since it’s about 54 cents for a liter, it’s not an issue. And a big segment of all groceries, even in the poorer neighborhoods, are devoted to various brands of bottled. (It’s not clear if, like in the States, we are spending money on bottled that is little better than our tap water, but we do it.)

The most popular bottled brand seems to be spring water from an inland city named Al Ain, which sits just high enough to get a bit more rain than we do here on the coast. It also has wells that reach down to aquifers.

We drink seawater because there are no rivers here, no mountain runoff and almost no rain. The Mojave Desert is well-watered, compared to Abu Dhabi, which gets about three inches of rain a year, almost all of it in January. A population of 700,000 couldn’t possibly live on the natural water resources available here.

Hence, the UAE is the No. 2 producer of desalinated water in the world, behind only Saudi Arabia, which is next door and just as dry.

There are far more desalination plants in the world than I realized — more than 14,000, according to a story in my paper, The National. A story I edited last week. And plants are going up, globally, at a record pace.

This part of the world has been dependent on desalinated water for a long time, and apparently its plants are older and less efficient than many of the new ones. The process used here is, basically, heating large amounts of water until it turns into steam, and then letting it condense apart from the minerals left behind.

This system creates some problems. First is the air pollution from the significant amount of power needed to generate all that heat. The second is the massively salty brine that is returned to the Gulf, after the desalination process.

Experts are convinced the Gulf is getting saltier every year, mostly as a result of all the desalination going on along its shores. Water out, solubles pumped back.

Eventually, an unchecked rise in saltiness will kill most (all?) marine life in the Gulf — which had its own issues in the first place. Water cycles through the Gulf very slowly because the only entry way for fresh sea water is through the narrow Strait of Hormuz.

So, yes. Drinking water from the sea not only is a little strange, it isn’t a good thing, long-term, for the local environment. Processes now exist to make desalination a more energy efficient process, but returning the brine to the Gulf seems an insoluble problem, short-term.

Meanwhile, we don’t actually drink much seawater. But we certainly use it, perhaps profligately, when it comes to bathing, plumbing, cooking and watering the tracts of green in the city that maybe shouldn’t exist. Even if they do provide a welcome visual relief from the drabness of the desert.