Egypt plans to build a desalination plant on the Euphrates River to help address acute water shortages in southern Iraq amid a lack of rainfall and poor management of water resources.
An Egyptian delegation of water treatment experts visited Iraq this month for talks with Iraqi officials on addressing an acute water crisis in the Arab country.
The Ministry of Irrigation and Water Resources said that the Egyptian delegation discussed a proposal for building a water desalination plant on the Euphrates River. The station will be used to purify and desalinate seawater to help ease water shortages in southern Iraq.
Minister of Irrigation Mohamed Abdel-Ati said the visit was part of an agreement between Cairo and Baghdad to benefit from Egypt’s expertise in water management.
“Egypt and Iraq are keen on making the best use of their water resources amid challenges facing the two countries in the field of water,” he added.
The proposed plant on the Euphrates River will be modeled on Egypt’s Bahr al-Baqar wastewater treatment plant, the largest of its kind in the world. The plant has a production capacity of 5.6 million cubic meters per day.