TAIF, 15 July 2003 — Crown Prince Abdullah, deputy premier and commander of the National Guard, laid the foundation stone in a ceremony marking the inauguration of a strategic water storage project in Taif yesterday.
The project, which will take two years to complete, will be able to hold more than 80 million gallons of water and will be built at a cost of SR84 million. National company Alawi Tunisi will carry out the project under the supervision of the Ministry of Water and Electricity. A specialist team will be advising the company and the ministry.
According to Muhammad Baghdadi, general supervisor for the Makkah branch of the Ministry of Water and Electricity, Taif province relies on two sources for its water. The first is underground water, which provides 10 percent of its needs, while 90 percent comes from a desalination plant in Sheiabah, 140 kilometers south of Taif.
It takes 20 hours for water to arrive in Taif from the desalination plant, which periodically has to halt operations because of technical hiccups. Once the project is completed, there will be enough water in Taif to last three days even in an emergency. Al-Baghdadi clarified that Taif province already had a sewage processing plant which produces water good enough to be used for agricultural purposes.
Dr. Ghazi Al-Gosaibi, minister of water and electricity, said that this project was a part of dozens of others that will be established in the Kingdom. This particular project, he added, was of crucial importance to the residents of Taif and the surrounding region, and once completed would mean they would have a constant supply of clean, potable water. In the coming years, Saudi Arabia will face a growing demand and dwindling supply of water.
Although desalination plants, which currently supply about 50 percent of domestic consumption, are being built in anticipation of increased demand, they are not enough to meet the total requirement of water for the Kingdom. Agriculture, which uses 90 percent of the water used, is the area most likely to face cuts.
While Saudi Arabia has traditionally espoused self-sufficiency of food supply as a policy, pressures of demography, declining stocks of non-replenishable ground water and the increasing pollution of what stocks remain may provide the pressure that forces a rethink of water policy.
Estimates put Saudi Arabia’s stock of ground water at between 20 and 25 years. In an attempt to address the looming crisis, moves were proposed at a water conference in Riyadh this year to conserve water and introduce a realistic pricing policy to attract local and foreign investment in the development of water resources and distribution.
— With input from Roger Harrison
