South Africa Partners With Iran On Desalination
By Peak Johnson
Though it has been experiencing what seems like a never-ending drought, South Africa may be finally getting a well-deserved reprieve.
To provide water in response to the ongoing drought, Reuters has reported that South Africa will partner with Iran to develop a series of desalination facilities along all coastal communities to boost water supplies.
South Africa last year record its lowest annual rainfall levels since records began in 1904 as an El Niño-driven drought tore through the region.
"Now with the partnership that we have entered into through the binational commission between South Africa and Iran we want to go full steam," Nomvula Mokonyane, South Africa’s minister of water affairs and sanitation, told Reuters.
Mokonyane added that the first investment meeting with Iran, where President Jacob Zuma visited last month, takes place in June and that there were no indicative costs for the plant at the moment.
The largest desalination plant in South Africa, which converts salty sea water to drinkable water, is situated in Mossel Bay along the Western Cape where it has helped supply water to state oil company PetroSA's gas-to-fuel refinery.
"We have been over-dependent on surface water," Mokonyane said.
However, not everyone is welcoming of South Africa’s new partnership. According to Environment 360, critics of the idea have noted that the announcement ignored the reality of the plants’ many billions of dollars in costs.
“There are significant difficulties from this drought,” Dhesigen Naidoo, chief executive of the National Water Commission, told Environment 360. “The drought cannot be managed the way previous droughts have been managed. In previous droughts we hadn’t factored in climate change. We are convinced that this drought is not part of a normal drought cycle that we’ve had in the past. This one is quite different. So we regard this as a drought in the climate change scenario, and our planning is working around that.”
To read more about desalination projects around the world visit Water Online’s Desalination Solutions Center.