Amman approves its desalination plant on the Red Sea (and shelves one with Israel)

The water plant will be built in cooperation with a French group and will provide 300 million cubic metres of drinking water. It will be the country's largest infrastructure serving three million citizens; four years to completion. It will replace an earlier project studied with Israel that was supposed to connect the Dead Sea and the Red Sea.

Amman (AsiaNews) - The Jordanian authorities have signed an agreement with a French group for the construction of a mega-desalination plant on the Red Sea worth a total of five billion dollars and capable of supplying over 300 million cubic metres 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 largest project in the country, valued at over five billion, as Prime Minister Jafar Hassan himself pointed out when addressing parliament.

The French company Meridiam, specialised in infrastructure, is leading the work, which is being carried out in collaboration with major companies in the sector including Suez, Orascom Construction and Vinci Construction Grands Projets.

According to a note posted on its website, Meridiam says it will supply more than 300 million cubic metres of drinking water to Amman, providing service to more than three million citizens of the Hashemite kingdom.

The project includes a seawater intake system from the Gulf of Aqaba, a state-of-the-art desalination plant, a 450-kilometre pipeline for transportation, and renewable energy components to power the system.

‘This project,’ the statement continues, “will increase the annual domestic water supply available” to households by almost 60 per cent and will also include ’approximately 445 km of pipeline to transport the appropriately desalinated water from the Red Sea.

Jordanian Minister of Water and Irrigation Raed Abu al-Saud emphasised 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 mega-plant, which will also replace the project studied with Israel - later abandoned by Amman - aimed at connecting the Dead Sea and Red Sea with a series of pipelines across Jordan. In 2013, Israel, Jordan and Palestine had signed a memorandum of understanding, which also included the construction of a desalination plant on the Red Sea.

Israel supplies Jordan with 50 million cubic metres of water per year 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 metres under the terms of the Wadi Araba peace plan. However, popular anger among Jordanians over the stagnation of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process had prompted the then Minister of Water Mohammad al-Najjar in June 2021 to call the Red Sea-Dead Sea connection a ‘thing of the past’.

This increasingly shared opposition turned into outright rejection after the conflict launched by the Jewish state army against Hamas in Gaza, which resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians in the Strip.