The first phase of a desalination plant in Nimruz County, Sistan-Baluchestan Province, was launched on Monday to help supply drinking water to the urban and rural areas of the region from the third deep water well drilled in the province, managing director of the provincial Water and Wastewater Company said.
“The desalination plant has started operating with a capacity of 1,000 cubic meters per day,” Alireza Qasemi was also quoted as saying by IRNA.
With the completion of the second phase of the plant by the end of the current Iranian year (March 2023), its capacity will reach 2,500 cubic meters per day, he added.
According to the official, the project will be completed with a total investment of $2 million.
The drilling of seven more deep water wells is on the agenda of the provincial authority for supplying drinking water to cities and villages of the underdeveloped province.
Other than digging deep wells, water supply to several cities of the southeastern province will be made possible through other initiatives, including collecting water from Chah-Nimeh water reservoirs and desalination, and transfer of water from the Oman Sea.
Chah-Nimeh reservoirs are three natural and big cavities in the southern Sistan Plain, 50 kilometers from Zabol. Surplus water from Hirmand River flows into it via a canal. The reservoirs, with a capacity of 700 million cubic meters, constitute one-seventh of Hamoun Wetland.
Extracting water from deep wells will augment sustainable supplies to the water-stressed province. Lab tests in and outside Iran show the water extracted from the deep well is safe and can be used for drinking.
Perpetual drought has been accompanied by a dangerous decline in rainfall, worsening the water crisis in Sistan-Baluchestan.
Although experts strongly oppose inter-basin water transfers as environmentally hazardous and destructive, the government has said the costly water transfer from the Oman Sea is the last resort. Such initiatives, however, are highly costly and take years while drilling deep wells are less expensive and take much less time.
The first two deep water wells drilled at 3,000 meters in the region are an artesian well and water from such wells flow without pumping. Moving water from the Oman Sea needs desalination units costing $1.6 billion and at least three years for completion.
Deprived of Water Right
In the past, Hirmand (also known as Helmand) River in Afghanistan) supplied water to the eastern regions. But after building dams over the river, the Kabul government stopped the water flow to Iran.
The outcome is that people in the southeastern regions have been grappling with water and food problems, as their livelihood depended largely on farming and animal husbandry for centuries. With long and severe water shortages, unusually large numbers lost their jobs and started migrating to bigger cities.
Iran and Afghanistan signed a treaty in 1973, which says Iran's share from Helmand is 22 cubic meters per second.
Reportedly, the treaty was to the detriment of Iran because not only did it recognize all dams and canals that the Afghans built on the shared basin, it also reduced Iran’s annual water right to as low as 800 million cubic meters (less than 10% of the river’s annual water flow).
The result has been that in the past two decades, the part of Helmand River inside Iran is dry for almost 10 months of the year.
