Four New Desalination Plants Planned for the Red Sea as MPs Press on Hurghada's Water

Egypt's Red Sea Water Company is building four new desalination plants with a combined capacity of 85,000 cubic metres a day, and work has already begun on preparing two of the sites, according to Al-Ahram. Al-Shorouk reported the same plan, describing the plants as intended to secure residents' water needs across the governorate.

Al-Ahram set the project within a wider push to close the Red Sea's water gap, which it said also includes building smaller-capacity plants inside Hurghada itself and dealing with a break in the Karimat line — the main pipeline that carries Nile water across the desert to the coast.

The plans surfaced in the same week that Hurghada's water reached parliament. A member of parliament raised the city's drinking-water problems in the chamber and called for the full picture to be disclosed and the crisis brought to an end, Sada El Balad reported. A separate parliamentary question, reported by Al-Ahali, pressed the government on the drinking-water crisis in Hurghada and on the differences in what residents are charged per tonne of water.

What the reports do not say

• no commissioning date for any of the four plants
• no cost figure and no contractor
• no locations beyond the two sites now being prepared
• no figures behind the price differences the parliamentary question raised

Hurghada's supply leans on desalination and on that single long line from the Nile Valley, and it is at its tightest in summer, when resident demand and hotel occupancy peak together. That is the context into which four plants totalling 85,000 cubic metres a day would land.

For residents, the measure of this announcement will be whether pressure and billing steady before next summer. None of the work reported here changes today's supply — the two sites are still being prepared.