Namibia is pressing ahead with the construction of a new desalination plant in the central coastal Erongo region to meet demand for water from uranium mines and other users.
A feasibility study for the plant, which will produce 70,000 cubic meters (2.5 million cubic feet) of water a day, has been finalized and a site has been acquired, Agriculture, Water and Land Reform Minister Calle Schlettwein said in an emailed statement.
Arrangements are now being made to extract sea water and secure the required power, while the government is talking to private investors about partnering it in developing the plant, he said.
Positioned between the Namib and Kalahari deserts, Namibia has sub-Saharan Africa’s most arid climate and has unpredictable rainfall and high evaporation rates, resulting in a water deficit that’s intermittently compounded by drought.
Perennial rivers that run along the country’s northern and southern borders are far away from Windhoek, the capital, and most of the other main towns, while challenges in distributing limited and unreliable supplies of ground water are exacerbated by the fact that the sparse population is widely spread out.
Erongo is expected to need 36,500 megaliters of water a year by 2030, of which only about a third can be supplied from existing sources. Besides some of the world’s biggest uranium mines, the region has tourism and fishing industries concentrated around the coastal towns of Walvis Bay and Swakopmund.
The government has previously said the new desalination plant could cost it N$2 billion.
German has already ruled out providing funding towards the construction of a second desalination plant.
And it was generally expected that the Germany government, through its development agency KfW, would be roped in to provide the much-needed funding, which could run into billions, having initially funded the feasibility study of the project.
The Namibian government has over the past few years indicated its intention to construct a desalination plant at the coast, which will be the second in the country after the Orano-owned plant constructed for the French uranium mining company Areva and commissioned a decade ago.
Namibia has also been weighing its options to buy the Orano desalination plant at the coast after the company offered to sell the plant to the government for a reported US$200 million.
Desalination involves the removal of salt from seawater and the purification of the water so it can be fit for human consumption.-The Brief/Moneyweb
