The Kingdom’s ability to develop the most significant seawater desalination projects was highlighted by the environmental media AbudhabiEnv.ae.
Under the headline “Morocco Launches Largest Seawater Desalination Plant With An Area Of Around 275,000 Cubic Meters,” AbudhabiEnv.ae praises the Kingdom’s capabilities to develop megaprojects in light of the major changes that knows the world with the high level of needs for the most important natural resources, first and foremost water.
Faced with the growing demand for this fundamental and vital substance and its scarcity in certain regions of Morocco, the Kingdom has resorted to seawater desalination technology, in order to secure the needs for drinking water and irrigation. . Among these projects, the seawater desalination plant project on the outskirts of the city of Agadir, which is ranked among the largest projects in Africa and the Mediterranean basin.
The capacity of the plant, which should come into service very soon, is 275,000 meters 150,000 for food consumption and 125,000 to irrigate the 13,600 hectares of plantations located near Agadir cubic per day during the first phase, with the prospect that this capacity could reach 400,000 cubic meters of desalinated water per day in the long term. The Spanish company Abengoa will take care of the development, construction and maintenance of the plant for at least 27 years.
While awaiting the announcement of the official inauguration date of the new station, the UAE media still tells us, a video clip recently released on social networks, documents the moment when Moroccan engineers and workers celebrated the success of the phase test related to this huge project. This project, with a total cost of 4.41 billion Moroccan dirhams (approximately 493 million US dollars), is in line with the objectives of the Moroccan plan to diversify water supply sources and ensure security, as part of the National Drinking Water Supply and Irrigation Program 2020-2027.
The new station aims to provide more than 6,600,000 people with drinking water. The new factory, which covers an area of 20 hectares, will also help strengthen agricultural activity in the agricultural areas of the Souss-Massa region and its capital, Agadir, especially the Chtouka plain, by providing it with irrigation water, to fill the deficit resulting from the deficit recorded in the level of the water table, which is estimated at 90 million cubic meters per year.
The “Chtouka Ait Baha” region of the Souss-Massa region, which is one of the areas to be covered by the program to supply irrigation water from the new station, is one of the most agricultural areas. of Morocco, because it alone produces 65% of Moroccan exports of vegetables and fruits, over an area of up to 15,000 hectares, which required the search for new water resources to keep the agricultural sector in the region.
In January 2020, Morocco launched a national drinking water and irrigation water supply program 2020-2027, which aims to support and diversify water sources and develop water supply, including by building more dams and reusing wastewater for irrigation, in addition to exploring groundwater and setting up desalination plants.
The Kingdom currently has four seawater desalination plants in the cities of Laâyoune, Boujdour, Tan-Tan and Sidi Ifni, to which will soon be added the new Agadir plant (144 million cubic meters of water per year ) and Al Hoceima (with a capacity of 6 million cubic meters of water per year), while other desalination plants should be completed in the cities of Casablanca (2027), Safi and Dakhla. It is also planned in the future to build a new plant in Dakhla and to increase the capacity of the existing desalination plants in Laâyoune, Tan-Tan and Sidi Ifni.
The Moroccan government plans to set up a seawater desalination plant with a capacity of 300 million cubic meters in the economic capital Casablanca, by 2027, according to the national water supply development plan for country. The Executive will invest 9.5 billion dirhams in the project, and the station will be built in partnership between the public and private sectors.
In addition, by 2050, Morocco intends to reach a total capacity of 1 billion cubic meters of desalinated seawater and reuse up to 345 million cubic meters of wastewater per year (currently 40 to 50 million cubic meters are reused).
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