Iran Desalination Plants Commissioned

According to Iran’s Tasnim News Agency, on September 8, Iranian Energy Minister Abbas Aliabadi attended the inauguration ceremonies of two seawater desalination plants—Asaluyeh and Bonak—in the southern Bushehr Province. Located along the petrochemical industrial corridor on the northern shore of the Persian Gulf, the two plants are intended to alleviate severe local water shortages and reduce reliance on inland reservoirs and long-distance water transfer pipelines.

The Asaluyeh plant has been designated by Iran’s Ministry of Energy as the country’s first “smart” water treatment facility. It employs reverse osmosis (RO) technology coupled with a self-cleaning pretreatment system, with an ultimate designed capacity of 5,000 m³/day. The first phase, with a capacity of 1,000 m³/day, was commissioned at this inauguration and is planned to serve more than 174,000 residents and surrounding industrial users. The plant is the first in Iran to adopt a fully domestically produced real-time monitoring system, enabling online control of production stability and water quality. With the first phase completed in under a year from construction to commissioning, officials said the rapid delivery significantly amortized construction costs; the plant is also slated for further expansion to 10,000 m³/day. The Bonak plant, commissioned on the same day, has a capacity of 5,000 m³/day and involved an investment of 6.5 trillion rials.

In recent years, Iran has continued to develop small- and medium-sized desalination projects along its southern coast, with reverse osmosis as the overwhelmingly dominant process. Individual plant capacities generally range from several thousand to tens of thousands of cubic meters per day, serving industrial users and coastal towns, with an emphasis on localizing equipment and monitoring systems.

In the Middle East’s small- to medium-tonnage industrial and municipal desalination market, “RO + self-cleaning pretreatment + smart monitoring + short lead time” is emerging as the standard delivery language. Skid-mounted and containerized units, together with remote operation and maintenance capabilities, hold clear competitive advantages in such markets, while local-content procurement requirements create differentiated opportunities for membrane manufacturers with qualified overseas supply credentials.