State media said the project would cost $1 billion. It did not say when the water would begin flowing to Semnan.
The water will be drawn from the Caspian near Sari and desalinated there. Then the fresh water is to be pumped over the mountains 150 kilometers (90 miles) southward to Semnan, which now has a population of 200,000. It is from a site near Semnan that Iran fires its missiles and satellites into orbit.
The project was assailed by Nina Litvinova, director of the Astrakhan State Biosphere Reserve in Russia. “The Caspian Sea is already shallow,” she said. “The sea level falls by 20 centimeters a year. The water flow from the Volga River is also on the decline. The pumping of so much water [by Iran] will cause irreparable damage to the entire ecology and biosphere of the Caspian basin.”
She said the Islamic Republic should never have started such a project without first coordinating its plans with the four other states that border the Caspian. Iran itself has said numerous times that other Caspian coastal states cannot do anything new in the sea without Iran first agreeing.
President Ahmadi-nejad inaugurated the major project Monday near Sari. “The desert is growing,” he said. “Therefore, we need to control its growth.”
The first desalination plant to be built is to have a capacity of 200 million cubic meters per year, or 145 million gallons a day, according to Energy Minister Majid Namju.
Khatam ol-Anbiya, the construction arm of the Pasdaran, is handling the project.
Later, two other phases are planned that would pump more water into desert areas from the Caspian Sea as well as from the Persian Gulf, media reports said.
Such seawater treatment facilities are also in use in other wealthy and arid Middle East countries, including the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Israel, to augment scarce supplies of fresh water. Around the Caspian, Turkmenistan has three small desalinization plants and Kazakhstan one.