A desalination unit in Sirik County, off the coast of Sea of Oman in the southern Hormozgan Province, was launched on Thursday.
The facility provides 8,000 people with potable water, ISNA reported.
The unit, with a capacity of producing 3,000 cubic meters of drinking water from sea water, is an undertaking of the private sector and was completed at a cost of $600,000.
It includes 6km of pipeline, construction of 2 tanks each with 1,500 cubic meters capacity and a pumping station producing 90 liters of water per second.
To tackle the worsening water crisis across continents, desalination is becoming a viable option to produce water from saline water. In the coastal regions where salt-water is in abundance, large and semi-large desalination plants are preferred.
According to the managing director of Hormozgan Water and Wastewater Company, the amount of water required for the county (including Sirik and Garuk cities) is 2,500 cubic meters a day.
“With the launch of the new unit, the amount of water produced is greater than demand,” Amin Qasami said.
Water desalination plants provide a considerable amount of potable water in the northern and southern coastal region in Iran.
At present, there are 73 desalination plants in the country with a capacity to produce 420,000 cubic meters of water per day, and 148 million cubic meters per annum. Plans call for increasing daily desalination capacity to 600,000 cubic meters a day by 2021.
