Tuesday 24 August 2021
Last update on Tuesday, August 24, 2021 At 9:44 AM
Like many African countries, Egypt faces a significant risk of declining water resources. While this issue is a real challenge in a context of increasing needs, the authorities have for several years focused on the desalination of seawater.
In Egypt, the government wants to mobilize, thanks to the private sector, an envelope of $ 2.5 billion in order to build by 2025, 17 seawater desalination units. These installations will be supplied with renewable energies such as solar energy. and will produce a total of 2.8 million cubic meters of drinking water per day.
They will be built, owned and operated by the Egyptian Sovereign Fund in partnership with local and international private investors. This project is part of the executive’s program to secure access to water in the desert country which depends on the Nile for more than 80% of its supply in the precious liquid.
It is also part of a context where Egypt has to face a reduction in the flow of the river on the one hand due to the increase in evaporation linked to global warming and on the other hand, the Ethiopian dam of the great renaissance (GERD) erected on the Blue Nile, the main tributary of the Nile.
The government roadmap with a total cost of 134 billion pounds ($ 8.5 billion) provides in particular to achieve a production capacity of 6.4 million cubic meters per day of drinking water by 2050.
In the land of the Pharaohs, more than 70 desalination units are currently operating mainly in the governorates of the Red Sea, Sinai (North and South), Suez and Ismailia. They cover less than 1% of national water consumption estimated annually at over 100 billion cubic meters per year.
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