Red-Dead project to still go on despite Israeli procrastination — Razzaz

AMMAN — The Red Sea-Dead Sea Water Conveyance Project is still on the agenda, despite Israeli procrastination, Prime Minister Omar Razzaz said on Thursday.

Despite technological advancements that undermined the economic viability of producing power from the envisioned project, the Red-Dead project still exists on both the technical and diplomatic level, the premier said during a meeting held with the Senate’s Financial Committee, the Jordan News Agency, Petra, said. 

Razzaz noted that the National Water Carrier Project, an expansive 600km pipeline that connects water projects in the south to those in the central and northern regions, is not an alternative to the Red-Dead project, as the latter comes to fulfil the country’s water needs through desalinating seawater and directly pumping it from Aqaba to supply areas suffering from water shortages. 

Jordan signed a memorandum of understanding with Israel and Palestine in December 2013 to implement the first phase of the Red-Dead project.

Under the first phase, a total of 300 million cubic metres (mcm) of water would be pumped each year. In its following phases, the Red-Dead project will see up to 2 billion cubic metres of seawater transferred from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea annually, according to the Water Ministry.

The Red-Dead project’s main components are a seawater intake structure; an intake pump station; a seawater pipeline; a desalination plant with a capacity of 65-85mcm per year; a desalination brine conveyance pipeline; two lifting pump stations; hydropower plants; and discharge facilities at the Dead Sea.

The seawater will be pumped out from an intake located in the north of the Gulf of Aqaba.

In addition to providing much needed water to Jordan, Palestine and Israel, the project has an ecological dimension, as it seeks to stop the continuous diminishing of the Dead Sea, whose water level drops one metre each year, according to the ministry.