Doosan Heavy Industries has landed a $185.9 million desalination deal in Iran. The South Korean company won the contract from Iran’s Sazeh Sazan Company, to build a seawater reverse osmosis plant in the country.[1] According to Doosan, the deal is “the first SWRO procurement a foreign company clinched from Iran since international sanctions were lifted early this year.”[2]
The city of Bandar Abbas, the capital of Iran’s Hormozgan Province, will house the project. In October 2018, once construction is completed, the plant will desalinate approximately 200,000 cubic metres of water per day that will be supplied to the region’s mines.
The Iranian desalination market is expected to reach $2 billion by 2018. South Korea’s President, Park Geun Hye, visited Iran in April to facilitate the deal, and has since said that Doosan expects to maintain a strong position in this growing Middle Eastern market.[3]
In Rockland County New York, officials announced legal action against Suez Water New York, to protect the company’s ratepayers from paying for a desalination plant that existed only on paper—and never on land.[4] Suez Water New York and two state agencies planned to build the desalination plant along the Hudson River in Haverstraw; and now, Suez is attempting to recover $54 million that it claims to have spent on the plant through an $8.17 per month increase (half of which would recover these costs). The Public Service Commission would have to approve this rate increase in order for them to go into effect in February 2017.
The Rockland County legal suit claims that the state Department of Public Service did not verify all of Suez’s expenditures related to the nearly $40 million the company says it spent pursuing the plant; and County Executive, Ed Day, states that his constituents are being “asked to pay millions for a desalination plant that will never be built.”
In 2014, the Public Service Commission “rejected the plant…as unnecessary and then denied Suez reimbursement of its costs, saying one reason was no construction had commenced.” However, this past February, during a second hearing, the Commission decided that the water company was “eligible to recover expenses”; after reviewing paperwork from Suez that consisted of “9,532 pages of schedules and heavily redacted invoices for legal and non-legal costs.” The commission thus approved the company’s intent to collect $39 million dollars from customers; and it is also reviewing an additional $15 million dollars of potential reimbursement.
Credit: ING Image/ Jerusalem Post
In Israel, officials are planning the construction of a new desalination plant.[5] Spokesman for the Israel Water Authority, Uri Schor, has stated that the need for the plant is connected to three years of diminished rainfall in northern Israel. According to Schor, the country’s Interior Ministry investigated 20 potential locations for a potential plant—which it has now narrowed down two potential locations between Acre and Nhariya. Major details about the plant, including its size and cost, have yet to be determined.
Local residents and legislators have protested the Interior Ministry’s planned placement for the facility. Last week, members of Israel’s national legislature, the Knesset, joined protestors at a rally. Haim Yellin, a representative of the centrist Yesh Atid Party, has endorsed the concern that the prospective plant location would produce intense ecological damage to the “rapidly-disappearing pastoral area” of Galilee.[6] It remains to be seen whether the government will respond to constituents’ concerns and seek out a new location, before proceeding with construction.