JORDAN Amman approves its desalination plant in the Red Sea (and files one with Israel)

The desalination plant will be built in collaboration with a French group and will provide 300 million cubic meters of drinking water. It will be the largest infrastructure in the country and will serve three million citizens; four years to complete. It will replace a previous project studied with Israel that was to connect the Dead Sea and the Red Sea.

Amman () – Jordanian authorities have signed an agreement with a French group for the construction of a mega desalination plant in the Red Sea, worth a total of five billion dollars and capable of supplying more than 300 million cubic meters of drinking water. A project of strategic importance in a nation that is among the driest in the world and suffers from a chronic lack of water resources, even more essential after the recent cancellation of a similar joint plan with Israel, Amman’s main supplier to date.

The official Petra news agency described it as the country’s largest project, valued at more than five billion, as Prime Minister Jafar Hassan himself noted when addressing Parliament. The French company Meridiam, specialized in infrastructure, is directing the works, which are carried out in collaboration with large companies in the sector such as Suez, Orascom Construction and Vinci Construction Grands Projets.

According to a note published on its website, Meridiam states that it will supply more than 300 million cubic meters of drinking water to Amman, serving more than three million citizens of the Hashemite kingdom. The project includes a seawater harvesting system from the Gulf of Aqaba, a state-of-the-art desalination plant, a 450-kilometer pipeline for transportation, and renewable energy components to power the system. “This project,” the statement continues, “will increase the annual supply of domestic water available” to households by almost 60% and will also include “approximately 445 km of pipelines to transport properly desalinated water from the Red Sea.”

Jordanian Minister of Water and Irrigation, Raed Abu al-Saud, highlighted the “transformative potential” of the project, noting that it “will mark a significant change in Jordan’s water security landscape.” It will take at least four years to complete the megaplant, which will also replace the project studied with Israel – later abandoned by Amman – aimed at connecting the Dead Sea and the Red Sea with a series of pipelines through Jordan. In 2013, Israel, Jordan and Palestine had signed a memorandum of understanding, which also included the construction of a desalination plant in the Red Sea.

Israel supplies Jordan with 50 million cubic meters of water annually from the Sea of ​​Galilee through the King Abdullah Canal, as part of the 1994 peace treaty. In 2021, an additional agreement allowed for the purchase of 50 million cubic meters under the Wadi Araba peace plan. However, popular anger among Jordanians over the stagnation of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process had led the then Minister of Water, Mohammad al-Najjar, to call the Red Sea-Dead Sea connection a “thing of the past” in June 2021. ». This opposition, increasingly shared, turned into frontal rejection after the conflict launched by the army of the Jewish State against Hamas in Gaza, which resulted in the death of tens of thousands of Palestinians in the Strip.