To help transfer more reclaimed wastewater to Urmia Lake, the third phase of the sewage treatment plant in Urmia, West Azarbaijan Province, will become operational in June, director of the provincial water and wastewater company said.
“The new phase will help raise the annual inflow of treated wastewater to the troubled Urmia Lake by 52 million cubic meters,” Latif Khoshsirat was also quoted as saying by the Energy Ministry’s news service.
Several wastewater processing units are at varying stages of construction in the East and West Azarbaijan provinces and will significantly raise the effluent processing capacity after completion, he added.
According to the official, he said a wastewater development project in Tabriz, East Azarbaijan Province, will also offer a ray of hope to revive the troubled lake.
“The second phase of the wastewater treatment plant will help raise the annual inflow of treated wastewater to Urmia Lake by 125%, as it will transfer 75 million cubic meters of reclaimed sewage to the lake per year,” he said.
An estimated 60 mcm of reclaimed wastewater enter Urmia Lake every year, part of which is from treatment plants in Naqadeh, Urmia, Mahabad, Miandoab, Salmas and Boukan in the northwestern province.
The project, launched in 2015, was supposed to go on stream in January but financial constraints delayed it. Nevertheless, the pilot phase of the project is underway and once it’s successful, treatment plants will divert 75 mcm of processed effluent to the lake in December.
“Estimates had shown that the project would cost less than $10 million, but due to forex market volatility, more than $35 million have been spent but it still needs more funding,” he said.
The project will collect and reclaim sewage produced by at least 1 million people in Tabriz and the output will be directly transferred to the lake.
Massive Salt Lake
Located between the provinces of East and West Azarbaijan, Urmia Lake — a massive salt lake in Iran’s northwest and a sister to Utah’s Great Salt Lake — has lost nearly 95% of its volume over the last two decades.
As water levels drop, salinity spikes, threatening the lake’s brine shrimp population and the flamingos and other bird species that depend on the shrimp for food. The lake’s water levels are so low that at some coastal resorts, tourism boats must be pulled a kilometer from shore by tractor before reaching suitable depths.
According to Somayeh Sima, an assistant professor at Tehran’s Tarbiat Modares University, Iranian researchers and Utah State University have synthesized 40 years of experimental, field, satellite and model data for Urmia Lake to define new restoration objectives not only to lower salinity, sustain artemia and flamingo populations and reduce lakebed dust, but also to improve recreational access from resort beaches.
The ongoing study (started in 2018) has found that increasing the water level alone cannot help revive the lake unless other important variables, namely lake evaporation, salt dissolution, climate change impacts and socioeconomic factors are taken into account.
