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It's practically a project of the Egyptian military who will mostly own the land. They will grow cash crops for export to gain a source of income.
This will also drain the ancient and non-renewable Nubian Sandstone Aquifer. This is water that has been trapped for thousands of years. It is the world's largest fossil water system and is of immense scientific value.
Not to mention the historic Nile Delta wetlands that will be lost from diversion and the massive increases in CO2 emissions necessary to pump the water at the elevation of the desert (which is higher than the Nile basin). Also the inevitable salination of soil means any economic benefits to this project are on a countdown.
Any large government project in Egypt is a project of the Egyptian military. That’s the result of being under a military dictatorship with a fake civilian president.
A state of affairs you can thank the US for.
Besides Israel and, as of recently, Ukraine, Egypt is the biggest receiver of US military "assistance". Most military officials have attended elite U.S. military academies and the two forces work closely together.
The 2011 revolution successfully outed Hosni Mubarak (another Egyptian dictator propped up by the US). Following the 2012 elections came the 2013 coup by Sisi. Except, the US was one of the few countries in the world that refused to label this a "coup". The Rabaa Massacre marked the definitive end to the Arab Spring in Egypt
What are you talking about? This is literally every single major infrastructure project in the world. In the U.S. for example, every major waterway and roadway is built by the govt (local or federal). There is even the “Army Corp of Engineers”.
You can dislike the project, but take your political beaf elsewhere. Your statements are irrational.
I’m not sure why the military running it makes this project inherently bad.
You can always point to some geological or ecological reason why a resource shouldn’t be developed. Here in western Kansas there is some endangered chicken grouse that is constantly used to prevent wind turbines from being constructed. It’s just an excuse to block development, as is the concern you’re raising.
I doubt the people who need water to survive give a damn about CO2 emissions. There will be environmental damage, for sure. It will be worth it to these people who will live better lives because of it. Ultimately, Egyptian leadership gets to make that call, not you or I.
If you really care about the environment, you should support these kinds of projects that will raise incomes to the level where Egyptians can afford to care about environmental conservation.
Here’s the source of the problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Ethiopian_Renaissance_Da...
Uh, it isn't. GERD's operation's negative effect on the Nile's yield are minimal, and they could be even positive with coordinated, basin-wide, water management, but that's something Egypt has been continusouly against. They've never really looked at the other nine/ten as equalls...
The problems are that the Nile is a modest River and that Egypt has a population problem in a resources-strapped region, coupled with extremely unsustainable government policies (a topic in itself is an amalgum of compounding issues).
> It's practically a project of the Egyptian military who will mostly own the land
It's a public-private project with Gulf and Asian financing and execution.
Sisi is a dictator, but he can and does execute. Look at how Egypt's developmental indicators have shot up over the past decade - that was not guaranteed, and he deftly took advantage of non-Western partners to push the reforms Egypt needs.
Which developmental indicators are you referring to? Almost all economical numbers mean nothing if the country is a dictatorship because the admin can straight up fabricate all of them. Administrations in democracies have to manipulate the numbers, introduce new ones, etc while dictatorships can just say "Nah, make that number 20% higher". You can look at the EGP exchange rate over the last 10 years and tell me if that chart looks organic to you.
That's not how it works. Egypt is not a closed country. International organizations can get in and get numbers.
It's also worth keeping in mind that many European countries, and every non-European country that's now developed, went through a phase of authoritarianism or one-party rule during which the organs of state developed. Germany's and Italy's modern democratic governments date to the end of WWII, and Spain and Greece's date only to the 1970s. By contrast, efforts to jump straight to multi-party democracy have largely failed.
Draining (or even using) the aquifer was never part of the plan. The goal has always been to have two streams of water come in from treated sewage/desal plants and the Nile itself. The problem being that the area they are trying to irrigate is higher than where they are pumping it from so they have something like 13 pump stations pumping the water uphill. Hopefully they figure it out and can eventually power the pump stations with solar+batteries so they don’t have to drain the aquifers. For alignment, the current status is dismal with almost all the water coming from just the aquifers.
I'm curious as to why they aren't considering (solar powered) desalinization as an additional source of water, to pump water directly from the ocean?
Hear me out:
There's a way the desert states can export and store their solar energy production cheaply, easily, at scale, without needing any rare earths (nothing that is hard to obtain / limited supply / is dirty to extract). And as part of the process, they get clean water as a side effect. Unlike e.g. export via electrolysing water and shipping the hydrogen gas which requires clean water and thus requires spending more energy on desalinization which is a dead end, literally: desalinisation is ecologically speaking terrible, and e.g. the persian gulf is already becoming saltier due to the many desal plants dumping their brine.
How?
Re-invent the Castner Process: An endlessly repeatable process.
Step 1: Combine energy + Caustic Soda (NaOH); out comes Na2 (sodium metal, ready to export), H2O, and O2. The water is clean, the oxygen you gas off (not exactly an environmental disaster, gassing off waste oxygen), the process is essentially perfect - nothing is lost, and the anode and cathode use cheap materials (iron, mostly). Ship the sodium bars in a big boat (wrap em in some oiled up paper first. Yes, if the boat sinks, it'll explode; if an H2 carrying boat springs a leak you also get fireworks. Energy storage mechanics have nasty failure modes, it's pretty much inherent in the concept).
Step 2: Once the sodium bars have arrived at some industrial port that wants energy, all they have to do is chuck a proverbial bucket of water at it; doesn't have to be particularly pure. The Na reacts, turning back into NaOH + H2 gas (useful feedstock gas! Don't ship it - ship the sodium, use the sodium to make H2 gas out of water at the site of the plant that needs hydrogen! If you don't need the hydrogen, burn it for energy) - and this reaction is highly exotermic on its own (let alone if you also burn the H2). Ship the NaOH back to the desert-based solar panels.
A boat loaded soup to nuts with sodium metal is about as energy dense as half of the energy in a boat loaded to the gills with hypercooled, hypercompressed H2. Except you can ship this stuff on any old creaky vessel vs the extremely expensive H2 carriers.
You can store the energy in any old warehouse, requiring pennies at best for safety - no need to store under pressure, nothing is particularly toxic, stuff lasts for years and doesn't lose appreciable amounts of energy during storage. Yes, if some catastrophe causes a flood to go through a warehouse full of sodium that's gonna be a nasty surprise, so preferably you don't build this stuff in the middle of town square, but it's orders of magnitude less scary than MIC, nuclear waste, a tank full of pressurized H2, and so on. This stuff is no more scary than an oil depot, really.
So.. why in the blazes isn't this a thing? Shouldn't the middle east be spending their money on a modern take on the Castner Cell instead of The Line or a pet war in Yemen?
Win win win. It can't even be patented. The only thing that needs to be done is to update/reinvent the castner cell: We haven't electrolysed caustic soda in about a century, because chlorine gas is a valuable feedstock for industry, and the Downs Cell (electrolysing salt into sodium + chlorine) is therefore the way it is done today. The sodium is a lucky byproduct (the process is run to fulfill the need for chlorine gas as feedstock). Due to this there's plenty of sodium to fulfil industrial needs and therefore no need to run Castner Cells. That's the only reason nobody's run one in many decades.
I'm sure I'm missing some key chemistry but I can't figure this one out.
It's too expensive for agriculture.
"Sounds like a great idea" -- Modern Humans
Wiki:
"A feddan (Arabic: فدّان, romanized: faddān) is a unit of area used in Egypt, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, and Oman. In Classical Arabic, the word means 'a yoke of oxen', implying the area of ground that could be tilled by oxen in a certain time. In Egypt, the feddan is the only non-metric unit which remained in use following the adoption of the metric system. A feddan is divided into 24 kirat (Arabic: قيراط, qīrāt), with one kirat equalling 175 square metres."
So 2.2M feddan works out to 9240 km^2. That is: roughly same area as a square with 96 km sides.
"Officials indicate the system will utilise roughly 10 million cubic metres of surface water daily alongside approximately 7.5 million cubic metres of treated drainage water per day, reflecting Egypt’s growing reliance on advanced water-recycling and smart-irrigation technologies amid mounting regional water pressures."
Article isn't clear on where either component comes from. Not an amount you could divert from somewhere without huge environmental effects elsewhere.
(Edit: quote is from the ME Observer article a commenter linked below. Original post seems to have more details)
Anyway sounds like an ambitious project. And understandable given Egypt's population vs. resources pressures (esp. water).
A lot of where they are getting water from right now is an ancient underground aquifer - there's not a lot of water there though, so the plan was it was a stopgap while the water recycling plan comes online.
Although the aquifer water plan itself is largely failing. The underground water was much more saline than they originally thought, so from space you can see lots of failed irrigation circles.
So similar origin to the Imperial acre; which it is very close in size to:
You have: 175*24m^2
You want: acre
* 1.0378426
/ 0.9635372410 million cubic meters per day is roughly 100 cubic meters per second. Aswan discharges 2800 m3/s on average. So around 4% of the flow
This article has several passages repeated verbatim. Either bad AI or bad editing, not really a great advertisement for the product (“Brilliant”) it seems to be selling.
Example: “The construction of the Aswan High Dam, completed in 1970, brought clear benefits. It provided a steady supply of hydroelectric power and allowed water to be regulated for year-round irrigation.” appears twice, word for word.
I skimmed through the article. Several pictures are also repeated. Would this kind of thing happen before 2020? I don't think so.
Either way, I got taught in high school geography that parts of rivers get rebuild all the time. The Maas (Meuse, as Dutch is my native language I say Maas) gets longer due to the corners getting more sharp (due to water and wind erosion). Then at some point, the water might actually go straight between two corners, leading to the part between the two corners (an extra 180 degrees of two corners, though might look like one) getting cut. Sometimes, that doesn't happen (quick enough) and humans need to help nature a bit. Because sometimes, the new part of river tends to reach villages or other parts of society humans want to preserve. So, we interfere. Near Maastricht, there's also a canal next to the Maas, and this can help with deficit or excess water in the Maas. But sometimes, even an extra part of river next to the old river is build. IIRC they do that because the erosion destroyed such parts, that the outcome of the erosion keeps coming back and back in too short amounts of time. So then, it makes more sense to look for a more long term solution.
The water and wind erosion were interesting to me back in the days. So, from memory (and I surely am forgetting something here, possibly related to the chemistry of the water/earth), the way it works on low water level the wind on the corners erodes the corners, while on high water level the water pressurizes against the corner, leading to basins in the (wind eroded) corner which itself is part of the domino effect. In other words, it is bound to happen, given time. The river snaking around is bound to happen, and the breach is bound to happen as well. But the breach usually means the river goes to its original pathway (although temporarily).
So for a large river as the Nile, it also comes as no surprise Egyptian government (Egypt being the country who benefit from the Nile delta) invests in the Nile. But the main problem the Nile faces is AFAIK related to drought which is related to climate. I'm not sure how they want to fix that.
I believe you are [trying to?] dedcribe typical river morphodynamics; meandering and oxbow lake formation. While yes, they do happen, rivers like the Nile, especially in its milder sloped ends in Egypt, don't see the dramatical versions of these phenomena. And even rivers/reaches that do braid/meander a lot tend to do that within a limited corridor. The topic at hand speaks more of inter-basin conveyance.
This is not the first project like this Egypt has tried. All have failed
To be fair, Egypt and Mexico made major reforms to their water usage in the past and succeeded. Compared to India, which failed abjectly.
How did India's water usage reforms fail?
I've been in Egypt and India - they aren't that different, and it's Indian companies that are working on and helping financing these megaprojects in Egypt via the credit line established after the pandemic [0] and it's Indian companies like Wabag that are implementing water treatment projects in Egypt [1].
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-12/egypt-say...
India relies on groundwater and its strategy has been to use the monsoons to replenish the groundwater under the Jal Shakti Abhyan. The monsoons come like clockwork so it’s a solid strategy.
State and financial capacity is much stronger in Egypt today versus previous attempts.
Egypt's developmental indicators have finally caught up to where the CEE was 5-10 years ago but with a better demographic profile, and Gulf and Asian capital and technology partners are much more hands-on.
If you look at UNDP historical HDI data [1] you will see that Egypt barely caught up with the HDI levels of poorest Eastern European countries like Moldova from 10 years ago and is still well behind the HDI levels of better-off Eastern European countries like Czechia from 1990.
[1] https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/human-development-index#/in...
The article makes a good point about food imports to Egypt. I think a lot of people don't realize that Egypt has been an innocent victim of Russia's invasion of Ukraine which disrupted wheat exports.
Recent strikes by Ukraine on Russian oil refineries are in turn disrupting Russian grain harvests due to shortages of diesel fuel. While this is a legitimate defensive tactic by Ukraine, as a side effect it's likely to cause further food price inflation in Egypt.
Maybe the Egyptian government could pressure Putin to stop killing innocent people and sending young men to the front to needlessly die, how about that ?
Sounds good, I hope they do. But as a practical matter Egypt is in a difficult spot because they import wheat from both Ukraine and Russia. And Egypt has no real leverage with Putin.
Egypt is also hard at work transforming the Sinai Plain and the vicinity of Mount Sinai itself, into a tourist magnet, and a thriving hotel/resort region. The monks of St. Katherine's monastery are nonplussed about these developments.
(Many monasteries and convents in modern times are renowned, and/or an open secret, for their peaceful hospitality, and gladly welcome pilgrims and tourists for overnight stays, especially in places where the hotels are in short supply, and especially in places like Republic of Ireland, where the monasteries' populations are dwindling, and losing donors, while the tourist trade is stronger every day...)
Do we have a better source? This article contains repeating text which makes me suspect copy-pasted slop.
EDIT: This [1] is better.
[1] https://meobserver.org/nutrition/2026/05/18/egypts-new-delta...
I'd suspect it's a transcript of a video on his (excellent) YouTube[0], hence the repetition.
It's a great channel if you don't care about any degree of technical debt and wanna see someone glaze over human rights violations in order to celebrate mega projects. I'd at least highly recommend the DeArrow extensions to de-clickbait this channel's titles.
As much as I criticize the channel, I admit I can't look away
With a such rapid demographic growth they have no choice.
The population of Egypt doubled in last ~35 years. (quadrupled in the last ~60 years)
That's true for now, although their rate of population growth appears to have peaked several years ago and like most other countries the birth rate has since declined sharply.
People born yesterday are alive today and will be alive in the next ~70 years mostly.
How is that even sustainable, like housing, education, electricity, running water, etc. how can they scale those with that fast growing population
Typically, people produce about as much as they consume, so a growing population normally sustains itself.
Grow more crops, build more dams, etc?
Until they are out of room anyway, but they have a lot of unused desert right now.
Egypt is trapped in mega projects death spiral
This could completely terraform the weather for the entire region. Possibly even increasing the amount of rain in the middle east overall.
Aren't they already on Terra, or did I miss something?
I don't believe it.
Possibly better source: https://www.arabnews.com/node/2619542/business-economy
Huh? Different project.