By John — Desalination News
A small seawater desalination plant has gone into service in Jebha, a coastal town in Morocco’s Chefchaouen province, giving roughly 14,500 residents of Jebha and the nearby community of Amtar a new, more reliable source of drinking water. The Tanger-Tetouan-Al Hoceima Regional Multi-Service Company, known by its French acronym SRM-TTA, inaugurated the plant on 7 November, describing it as part of a broader effort to diversify local water resources along Morocco’s northern Mediterranean coast.
The project was financed by Morocco’s Ministry of the Interior at a cost of nearly 13 million dirhams, a little over $1.3 million, and carried out by SRM-TTA under delegated project management. Despite the modest price tag next to Morocco’s larger coastal desalination schemes, the plant answers a very specific local problem: Jebha and Amtar previously relied on resources that struggled to keep pace with demand, particularly during the dry summer months when coastal towns across the region see both population and water stress rise together.
The new facility produces about 864 cubic meters of desalinated water a day, equivalent to 10 liters a second, using a compact reverse osmosis unit paired with a dedicated borehole capable of drawing 24.3 liters of seawater a second as feedstock. From there the water passes through filtration, pretreatment, remineralization and a final disinfection stage before it is deemed fit for human consumption, a standard treatment sequence for small-scale reverse osmosis plants that lets them meet drinking-water standards without the larger footprint of a major municipal facility. The project also included new pipelines to carry both raw and treated water and a dedicated electrical connection to keep the unit running.
Younes Hajjaj, SRM-TTA’s deputy director general for operations, framed the plant as evidence that desalination has a role to play well beyond Morocco’s showcase coastal megaprojects. Much of the country’s desalination capacity has so far been concentrated in large facilities serving cities such as Casablanca and Agadir, or in sizeable agricultural schemes further south; Jebha’s plant, by contrast, is built at a scale matched to a single small town and its immediate hinterland. That kind of project is harder to make newsworthy on its own merits, but it is precisely the type of incremental capacity addition that, multiplied across dozens of similar coastal communities, Morocco is counting on to reach its stated target of drawing 60 percent of its drinking water from desalination by 2030, a goal this blog has previously covered as part of the kingdom’s broader water strategy.
Morocco’s push toward desalination has been driven by a run of dry years that has left many of the country’s dams well below capacity, forcing authorities to look to the sea as a more drought-proof alternative to rainfall-dependent reservoirs. Smaller, modular plants like Jebha’s are cheaper and faster to build than large-scale facilities, which makes them a practical tool for shoring up supply in towns too small to justify a major desalination investment but still exposed to the same seasonal water stress affecting the rest of the coast. SRM-TTA did not name a contractor for the Jebha project or disclose when construction began, and the inauguration announcement focused on the plant’s commissioning rather than its build timeline.
For now, the plant stands as a working example of how Morocco’s national desalination ambitions translate down to town level, delivering a modest but meaningful supply increase to a community that had limited options for growing its water resources any other way.
(Source: Yabiladi, Maghreb Arabe Presse)