WATER / DESALINATION
Easing Jordan’ s water stress
Jordan is among the world’ s most waterstressed countries. Renewable freshwater availability is below 100 m 3 per person per year, far beneath the 500 m 3 threshold normally used to define severe water scarcity. Existing resources are under pressure from population growth, climate change, groundwater depletion and the additional demands created by refugee populations. Water supply is consequently intermittent in much of the country. The Green Climate Fund 1( GCF) reports that most households currently receive network water for less than 48 hours per week. At full capacity, the project should provide around 40 % of Jordan’ s municipal water requirements by 2030, rising to approximately 45 % by 2040 according to the GCF.
SWRO desalination plant
The centrepiece of Aqaba-Amman will be a huge seawater reverse-osmosis plant near Aqaba on the Gulf of Aqaba. Lead EPC company SUEZ describes the facility as having a design capacity of approximately 851,000 m 3 / day, making it one of the world’ s largest SWRO plants. 2 Seawater will be drawn through a marine intake before undergoing pretreatment and reverse osmosis. The permeate then undergoes post-treatment to produce potable water. The marine works are particularly sensitive because the Gulf of Aqaba contains important coral and other marine ecosystems. The proposed intake has been designed to minimise the entrainment of marine organisms, while the outfall will disperse concentrated brine rapidly.
EIB modelling found that salinity should be only around 1 % above ambient levels 20 metres from the discharge, becoming effectively undetectable beyond 50-100m away. Process wastewater will also be treated rather than simply discharged with desalination chemicals into the Gulf. 3
440 km water-transfer system
Producing the water is only half the engineering challenge; it then has to be transported from Aqaba in southern Jordan to the country’ s principal population centre around Amman. The ~ 440 km underground conveyance system will broadly follow the existing Disi water conveyor. Around 250 million m 3 / year of water is intended to travel north towards Amman, while approximately 50 million m 3 / year will remain available for
Aqaba and potentially communities along the conveyance corridor. The pumping challenge is enormous. Aqaba lies close to sea level, and the route climbs from the Red Sea coast towards the Amman plateau, creating a substantial high-head pumping requirement. The project therefore requires major pumping stations, reservoirs and associated hydraulic infrastructure. This combination of high flow rates, longdistance pumping and major elevation gain makes energy consumption a crucial component in the project’ s economics. To reduce both operating costs and the carbon footprint of desalination and pumping, renewable electricity has been incorporated into the project in the form of a 281 MWp solar photovoltaic facility 4 which will supply around 27 % of the project’ s total energy requirements. GCF