To help ease water shortages in southern Hormozgan Province, supply of desalinated water to small towns will increase by almost 30% or 40,000 cubic meters per day to reach 170,000 cm/d in October, managing director of the provincial Water and Wastewater Company said.
"Desalination plants in the province, which annually produce 46 million cubic meters of potable water, meet 26% of the region’s total demand. Wells and dams account for the majority 74%," Amin Qasami was quoted as saying by the Energy Ministry news portal.
Work on the Bandar Abbas Desalination Plant is over and it will become operational by the end of the month, Qasami said.
The new facility will daily produce 200,000 cubic meters of drinking water, of which 40,000 cubic meters will be piped to rural areas. The rest will be sent to Kerman and Yazd via a 300-km pipeline and seven pumping stations.
“As the water crisis worsens in the desert region, negotiations are underway with the National Water and Wastewater Engineering Company of Iran (Abfa) to raise the province’s share of desalinated water.”
Qasami reiterated that like other provinces, underground resources are drying up rapidly in Hormozgan and tapping into unconventional water resources, namely saline water, has become a compulsion.
Referring to water plans for the region, he noted that work on the second phase of Sirik desalination unit, off the Sea of Oman, has been undertaken by Abfa. When ready, the current desalination capacity (2,000 cubic meters per day) will double.
Moreover, a water desalination unit was completed in the village of Ziarat in the central district of Bandar Lengeh. Using reverse osmosis technology, the plant went on stream in August and purifies 3,000 cubic meters of water a day.
Migration Concerns
Several villages in the area have been abandoned. Expanding Bandar Abbas desalination infrastructure can help curb migration and contribute to sustainable rural development in the dry regions, he recalled, echoing the concerns of prominent experts that the water crisis has rendered many dry regions uninhabitable.
Hormozgan has a population of 1.6 million and 1.1 million are covered by services of the provincial water company. There are 17 desalination units in the coastal province that produce 130,000 cubic meters of water a day.
Currently, 20 desalination units are in varying stages of construction. It is projected that by 2022 use of underground water resources will be cut to 40% and share of purified water will rise to 60%.
Experts including Energy Minister Reza Ardakanian say the fledgling domestic desalination industry can and should meet the needs for potable water in the Persian Gulf littoral provinces.
Iran (with the desalination units) produces 420,000 cubic meters of freshwater per day, or 153 million cubic meters per annum.
Nonetheless, climatologists and water experts say the transfer of sea water to the dry regions is “a band-aid solution” with the potential to do more harm than help.
According to Shahin Pakrouh, a deputy at Abfa, 62 desalination units with the capacity to produce 420,000 cubic meters of fresh water per day are operating and comprehensive studies have been conducted to meet the needs of people living along the 100km border in Sistan-Baluchestan, Khuzestan and Bushehr provinces entirely with seawater.
Although Iran is located in an arid and semi-arid area, access to vast resources of saltwater in the north (Caspian Sea) and south (Sea of Oman and the Persian Gulf) is seen as a potential plus points.
Persian Gulf Arab states’ demand for desalinating water has increased at a rate of 9-11% in recent years, according to Frost & Sullivan, a business consulting firm involved in market research and analysis.
Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, Qatar and Bahrain meet a large part of their needs for drinking water from the strategic Persian Gulf waterway. By desalinating a large amount of water for farming and industrial use can be produced.
