The first phase of an $800 million project to supply water from the Persian Gulf to Kerman and Yazd provinces went on stream last week.
Senior officials, namely the Minister of Industries Reza Rahmani and Energy Minister Reza Ardakanian have gone overboard to say that the apparently controversial project will have a profound positive effect on economic development and create jobs.
The 305-km pipeline will annually transfer 180 million cubic meters of desalinated water from a Bandar Abbas desalination plant in southern Hormozgan Province to Gol-Gohar Mining and Industrial Complex in Sirjan and Sarcheshmeh Copper Mine in Rafsanjan County, both in the parched Kerman Province, and to Chadormalu Mining and Industrial Company in the Yazd desert, ISNA reported.
It merits mention that the three industrial behemoths invested $400 million in the mega project.
Iran (the world’s 10th steelmaker) wants to become the world’s sixth largest 2025 and development plans to this effect are underway across the country, one of which was diverting seawater from the Persian Gulf that was completed in about four years.
Nonetheless, what policy and decision makers are seemingly obvious to is the conventional wisdom that water-intensive copper and steel plants like Chadormalu, Mobarakeh and Gol-e-Gohar are located in the most arid provinces namely Yazd, Isfahan and Kerman and as such create a limited number of jobs compared to farming, industry and tourism.
Economic experts, academia and environmentalists, namely Parviz Kardavani, Ehsan Soltani and Mohammad Darvish are convinced that developing steel and other water intensive industries in the middle of the desert is a recipe for disaster even if water is transferred all the way from the Persian Gulf.
They argue that those who build and expand steel mills far from coastal areas are in fact doing a disservice to the country because in addition to being prohibitive in cost, mega water transfer schemes have hardly yielded the desired results in Iran.
“To address the worsening water crisis (in Kerman and Yazd), water is being diverted from the Persian Gulf, a plan that is doomed as similar plans in the past have never delivered. This latest policy too was not well thought out,” Kardavani said.
The veteran eremologist pointed to the water transfer from Kouhrang County in Chaharmahal-Bakhtiari Province to Isfahan and Yazd, which temporarily alleviate water stress but ultimately exacerbated the problem. Studies later showed that the groundwater reserves had depleted significantly.
The attitude of “developing industries at all cost” will lead to irreparable loss, the authority on environmental issues warned.
Unsustainable Development
According to Mohammad Darvish, environmentalist and director of the Public Participation Office at the Department of Environment, the consensus is that transferring water from the Persian Gulf is largely in the interest of steel industry owners rather than the people and the farming community.
“Experience has it that water transferred from faraway places is rarely distributed fairly among different sectors, despite advocates of such schemes claiming otherwise,” he said.
He complained that Kerman and Yazd officials “are preoccupied with industrializing the province” without taking time to consider the harmful impacts and implications of their decisions. They want to “develop industries come what may.”
“We’re not saying industrialization should stop at the behest of the environment. What we are pushing for is sustainable development,” he said, adding that it is “only in Iran” that one sees water-intensive industries being set up in deserts like Yazd, Isfahan and Kerman.
These types of industries should be built in the coastal regions with easy access to seawater. If officials really care about life and welfare in Yazd, they need to focus on less water-intensive industries, he said. Darvish called for a complete overhaul of industrial policies, namely those related to, and dependent on, water like the expansion of the petrochemical and steel industries.
The provincial capital Yazd is believed to be the hottest region north of the Persian Gulf and is Iran’s driest metropolis with meager annual rainfall of 60 millimeters. Prior to the industrialization era people in the forever parched region survived because they relied on qanats to meet their basic water needs.
Economic expert Ehsan Soltani believes that water-deficit countries like Iran need to rely more on non-conventional resources to partly alleviate the worsening water problem.
Questioning ineffective and old methods of farming in the desert regions, namely drilling wells, Soltani said in a country where a large volume (35%) of drinking water is lost due to seepage and rusting pipelines, spending $800 million in the middle of a desert does not make economic sense. “The money could and should have been spent on preventing the huge water waste that is around 700 million cubic meters per annum.”
Water experts have often said that half of the water infrastructure in cities and small towns is old and should be replaced to reduce water loss as the nation continues to struggle with the worsening water crisis as declining rainfall, global warning and climate change emerge as an overgrowing challenge.
