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 m3 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 on Thursday. 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.