Fars News Agency in an article titled “Analysis of Water Transfer Projects” points out that the project to transfer water from the Sea of Oman to Mashhad costs an amount equivalent to one year of the country’s total development budget and lacks economic justification.
- The Idea of Water Transfer
Although the idea of transferring water from the Persian Gulf to central Iran dates back to the presidency of Hashemi Rafsanjani following the revolution, it was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who formally announced in 2012: “Preliminary studies for the water transfer project from the Persian Gulf have been conducted and concluded that this initiative has begun for Kerman and Yazd provinces and we are pursuing its implementation for Isfahan as well.”
He subsequently announced the plan to transfer water from the Caspian Sea to the Kavir Desert and central Iranian desert regions.
On November 6, 2020, the first phase of the water transfer project to the Sirjan region in Kerman Province was inaugurated by Hassan Rouhani, the president at the time.
At that time, Faridan Hamti, the Hormozgan governor, stated the total cost of desalination and the water transfer line to Sirjan as 163 billion rials.
Then on March 15, 2021, the national water transfer project to the central plateau and eastern regions of the country was inaugurated by Hassan Rouhani via video conference. Regarding the general framework of this plan, it was stated that the project, through pipelines spanning 3,700 kilometers, would deliver water from the Persian Gulf and Sea of Oman to seven provinces including Hormozgan, Kerman, South Khorasan, Razavi Khorasan, Yazd, Isfahan, and Sistan and Baluchestan.
- Water Transfer, Destructive and Without Economic Justification
Dr. Mehrdad Filizadeh, Assistant Professor at the School of Chemical, Petroleum and Gas Engineering at Shiraz University, said in a specialized seminar on coping with the water crisis: “The final cost of desalination and transferring each cubic meter of fresh water to Shiraz will be at least 30,500 tomans, which is 22 times the urban water tariff. If ordinary agricultural products are cultivated with it, the cost of water consumption far exceeds the price of the product.”
Dariush Mokhtari, Senior Expert in Water Resources Management, told ISNA: “Fortunately, the implementation of this project has many opponents among various specialists. Apart from the question of whether sustainably desalinating one billion cubic meters of water is possible or not, the lack of even minimal financial and economic justification for this measure is very dangerous and unsustainable.” He added: “With these projects that have no technical and economic justification, not only will the country’s water problem not be solved, but it will plunge Iran’s geography into a great disaster, danger and pitfall.”
Nasser Hajian, Faculty Member of Azad University, said: “With the mismanagement of the water crisis that has been created in the country, now we want to transfer water, which has no economic justification for any of the uses in drinking, industry, and agriculture. We should refrain from implementing such projects.”
Filizadeh said: “Desalinating seawater and transferring it to central regions of the country entails various destructive environmental impacts, such as increased salinity of seawater, entry of heavy metals and chemicals into the sea, ecosystem change and destruction of aquatic life, and increased air pollution.”
- Silence and Ambiguity in the Project
World of Economics has written: The company “Persian Gulf Water Supply and Transfer” which was responsible for the first phase of this project published a book titled “Founders and Supporters of the Water Supply and Transfer Plan,” but has provided no answers to the numerous questions raised. Questions such as: How successful has the first phase been? How much has it affected the final cost of products for each consumer? Compared to a similar project implemented in Persian Gulf littoral countries, how successful has it been? What is the actual cost and investment of this project?
Mohammad Darvish, Head of the Environmental Committee at UNESCO, told Mehr News Agency: “There are far more economical and cost-effective methods compared to water transfer in the country. While Iran’s central plateau faces water scarcity and water wastage, a phenomenon called ‘water recycling’ is not welcome in these areas. No effort is being made to treat waste and sewage.”
On the other hand, Fars, while pointing to the defects of the tender held for the implementation of this project, added that insistence on implementing this project comes at a time when the amount of water transferred through these projects has no correlation with the amount of water needed in the three drinking, industrial, and agricultural sectors of the target areas. With less than these expenses, other solutions to the country’s water crisis can be found. And it concluded that “it appears that the benefit of certain individuals from this project is the reason for pressure to use this tool in solving the country’s water problem.”
Source: Voice of America
