Underground rivers of Muammar Gaddafi. Gaddafi's grand water project
Among the latest conspiracy theories about the actions of the US government, one of the most high-profile and recent is the assassination of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi not because of oil, but because of a grandiose irrigation project. The project was reported to turn a dried-up Africa into a prosperous continent, which is very disadvantageous to those who earn billions from the hunger and thirst of Africans.
For some reason, the construction of the Great Man-Made River in Libya has been deprived of media attention, despite the fact that this structure has been recognized by the Guinness Book of Records as the largest irrigation project in the world since 2008. But here it is not the scale of the construction of the century that is important, but the goals. After all, if the Libyan man-made river is completed, it will turn Africa from a desert into a fertile continent, the same as, for example, Eurasia or America. However, the whole problem lies in this very "if" ...
In 1953, Libyans, while trying to find sources of oil in the south of their country, discovered water: giant underground reservoirs that feed the oases. Only a couple of decades later, the inhabitants of Libya realized that they got their hands on a much larger treasure than black gold. Africa, from time immemorial, is a continent suffering from drought with sparse vegetation, and here literally underfoot there are about 35 thousand cubic kilometers of artesian water. An appropriate volume can, for example, completely flood the territory of Germany (357,021 square kilometers), and the depth of such a reservoir will be about 100 meters. If this water is released to the surface, it will turn Africa into a blooming garden!
This is exactly the idea that visited the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. Still, because the territory of Libya is more than 95% desert. Under the patronage of Gaddafi, a project was developed for a complex network of pipelines that would deliver water from the Nubian aquifer to the arid regions of the country. To implement this ambitious plan to Libya from South Korea specialists in modern technologies arrived. A plant for the production of reinforced concrete pipes with a diameter of four meters was launched in the city of Al-Buraika. On August 28, 1984, Muammar Gaddafi was personally present at the beginning of the construction of the pipeline.
The eighth wonder of the world
The great man-made river is called the largest irrigation project in the world for a reason. Some even consider it to be the largest engineering structure on the planet. Gaddafi himself called his creation the eighth wonder of the world. Now this network includes 1,300 wells 500 meters deep, four thousand kilometers of concrete pipes laid underground, a system of pumping stations, storage tanks, control and management centers. Every day, six and a half million cubic meters of water flows through the pipes and aqueducts of the man-made river, supplying the cities of Tripoli, Benghazi, Sirte, Garyan and others, as well as green fields in the middle of the former desert. In the future, the Libyans intended to irrigate 130-150 thousand hectares of cultivated land and, in addition to Libya, include other African countries in this system. Ultimately, Africa would not only cease to be an eternally starving continent, but would even begin to export barley, oats, wheat and corn itself. The completion of the project was planned in 25 years, but ...
Expulsion from paradise
In early 2011, Libya was engulfed in civil war, and on October 20, Muammar Gaddafi was killed by the rebels. But it is believed that the real reason for the murder of the Libyan leader was precisely his Great Man-Made River. First, a number of major powers were involved in the supply of food to African countries. Of course, it is completely unprofitable for them to transform Africa from a consumer into a producer. Secondly, due to the growing population on the planet, fresh water is becoming an increasingly valuable resource every year. There is already a shortage drinking water experienced by many European states. And here in the hands of Libya is a source, which, according to experts, will be enough for the next four to five millennia.
Once, at the ceremonial completion of one of the stages of the construction of the Great Man-Made River, Muammar Gaddafi said: “Now, after this achievement, the US threats against Libya will double. The Americans will do everything to ruin our labors and leave the people of Libya oppressed. " By the way, this celebration was attended by the heads of many African states, and the leaders of the Black Continent supported Gaddafi's initiative. Among them was the Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Earlier this year, Mubarak was ousted from his post as a result of the sudden outbreak of revolution in Egypt. Strange coincidence, isn't it? It is noteworthy that when NATO forces intervened in the Libyan conflict, in order to "protect the civilian population", their aircraft struck precisely on the sleeves The great river, pumping stations and destroyed a concrete pipe plant.
So, I think, with a high probability, one can assume that the struggle for oil is being replaced by another war - for water. And Gaddafi was the first victim of this war.
Evgeniya KURLAPOVA
Secrets of the XX century № 48 (Ukraine) 2011
September 2010 is the anniversary of the opening of the main section of the Great Man-Made River, recognized in 2008 by the Guinness Book of Records as the largest irrigation project in the world. However, the media for some reason stubbornly do not write about this. Although in this case, the main thing in this project is not its gigantic scale, but the very purpose of this unique construction site. If the project ends successfully, this Great Man-Made River will transform desert Africa into a green continent like America or Australia. However, will this "happy ending" be?
Instead of oil, water?
When Libya was looking for oil in 1953, it unexpectedly found huge reserves of drinking water in the south, which fed the desert oases. And only a few decades later, the Libyans realized what treasure they had found: water, which turned out to be more expensive than black gold. The black continent, always experiencing a shortage of water and therefore having very poor vegetation, had gigantic water reservoirs under it - 35 thousand cubic meters of artesian water. There is so much water that you can completely flood a country like Germany, which has an area of more than 350 thousand square kilometers. The reservoir descended to a depth of one hundred meters. If the entire surface of Africa is flooded with this water, then this continent will become a green and blooming garden.
This is what Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi thought about. And no wonder, because almost all of Libya is a desert. And Gaddafi came up with the idea to develop a very complex pipeline system that would pump water from the Nubian reservoir to the driest regions of the country. For this purpose, specialists on such projects were invited from South Korea. And in the city of Al-Buraika, a plant was even built, which began to produce reinforced concrete pipes with a diameter of four meters. Gaddafi himself opened the construction of the pipeline in August 1984.
The eighth miracle of Gaddafi
It is no coincidence that the man-made river is listed in the Guinness Book of Records. Many people generally call it the largest engineering structure on our planet. And the Libyan leader himself called it the eighth wonder of the world. Today, this water supply network consists of 1,300 wells, each of which is half a kilometer deep, about four thousand kilometers of underground concrete pipes, a network of pumping stations, reservoirs, system management and control centers. About seven million cubic meters of water flows through these four-meter concrete pipes of the man-made river per day, which supplies several cities at once, including the capital of Libya, then Benghazi, Garyan, Sirte and others, and also irrigates fields planted right in the middle of the desert. Libya's far-reaching plans included irrigation of about 150 thousand hectares of cultivated areas, and then Libya intended to connect some other African countries to this system. And at the very end, the Libyans intended to turn their continent from an eternally starving and beggarly into a continent that would not only be able to provide itself with supplies of barley, oats, wheat and corn, but would also begin to export these agricultural products. The end of the project was to come within a quarter of a century. But alas ...
Expulsion from Eden
Libya embarked on a revolutionary path. An uprising broke out there early last year, and Muammar Gaddafi was killed in the fall of 2011 at the hands of the rebels. However, there are rumors that the Libyan leader was destroyed by his own man-made river.
Of course, it would not be profitable for certain major powers that were involved in the supply of food products to the Black Continent if Africa would acquire independence in this matter, overnight turning into a producer from a consumer. And second: already now, when the planet's population has increased greatly, our globe has begun to consume even more fresh water which has become a very valuable resource. Many European countries suffer from drinking water shortages. And here in Africa, in some kind of Libya, a source of fresh water appeared, which is able to provide everyone for several centuries.
Once, opening another site for the construction of the Great Man-Made River, Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi said: “Now that we have achieved this, the United States will increase its threats against us. America will do everything so that our great work was destroyed, so that the Libyan people will always remain oppressed. " This solemn meeting was attended by many heads of state located on the continent of Africa, who supported this initiative of Gaddafi. Among them was the President of Egypt Hosni Mubarak.
At the beginning of the year, Mubarak also stepped down from the presidency due to the sudden revolution that broke out in Egypt.
Aren't there many coincidences? Moreover, what is interesting: when NATO troops intervened in the Libyan conflict, the first thing they began to bomb in order to "achieve peace" was precisely the Great Man-Made River, its plant producing concrete pipes, its pumping stations and system control panels. So there is a very big doubt that the battle for oil smoothly turns into a battle for ... water. And Gaddafi is the first victim in this battle. And let's hope the last one.
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The largest engineering and construction project of our time is considered the Great Manmade River - a huge underground network of aqueducts that daily supplies 6.5 million cubic meters of drinking water to settlements in the desert regions and the coast of Libya. The project is incredibly significant for this country, but it also gives grounds in a slightly different way, different from the one drawn by Western means. mass media, a light look at the former leader of the Libyan Jamahiriya Muammar Gaddafi. Perhaps this can explain the fact that the implementation of this project was practically not covered by the media.
The eighth wonder of the world
The total length of underground communications of the artificial river is close to four thousand kilometers. The volume of soil removed and thrown during construction - 155 million cubic meters - is 12 times more than during the creation of the Aswan Dam. And the spent building materials would be enough for the construction of 16 pyramids of Cheops. In addition to pipes and aqueducts, the system includes over 1,300 wells, most of which are more than 500 meters deep. The total depth of the wells is 70 times the height of Mount Everest.
The main branches of the water supply system consist of concrete pipes 7.5 meters long, 4 meters in diameter and weighing more than 80 tons (up to 83 tons). And each of more than 530 thousand of these pipes could easily serve as a tunnel for subway trains.
From the main pipes, water enters the reservoirs built near the cities with a volume of 4 to 24 million cubic meters, and from them the local water supply systems of cities and villages begin. Fresh water enters the water supply system from underground sources located in the south of the country, and feeds settlements concentrated mainly along the coast Mediterranean Sea, including the largest cities in Libya - Tripoli, Benghazi, Sirte. Water is withdrawn from the Nubian Aquifer, the largest known source of fossil fresh water in the world. The Nubian aquifer is located in the eastern Sahara Desert over an area of over two million square kilometers and includes 11 large underground reservoirs. The territory of Libya is located above four of them. In addition to Libya, there are several other African states on the Nubian layer, including northwestern Sudan, northeastern Chad and most of Egypt.
Nubian aquifer life was discovered in 1953 by British geologists during the search for oil fields. Fresh water in it is hidden under a layer of hard ferruginous sandstone with a thickness of 100 to 500 meters and, as scientists have established, accumulated underground at a time when fertile savannas, irrigated by frequent heavy rains, stretched on the site of the Sahara. Most of this water was accumulated in the period from 38 to 14 thousand years ago, although some reservoirs were formed relatively recently - about five thousand BC. When the planet's climate changed dramatically three thousand years ago, the Sahara became a desert, but the water that had seeped into the earth for thousands of years had already accumulated in the underground horizons.
After the discovery of huge reserves of fresh water, projects for the construction of an irrigation system immediately appeared. However, the idea was implemented much later and only thanks to the Government of Muammar Gaddafi. The project involved the creation of a water pipeline to deliver water from underground reservoirs from the south to the north of the country, to the industrial and more populated part of Libya. In October 1983, the Project Office was established and funding began. The total cost of the project by the start of construction was estimated at $ 25 billion, and the planned implementation period was at least 25 years. The construction was divided into five phases: the first - the construction of a pipe plant and a pipeline with a length of 1200 kilometers with a daily supply of 2 million cubic meters of water to Benghazi and Sirte; second - bringing pipelines to Tripoli and providing it with daily supplies of one million cubic meters of water; third - completion of the construction of a water conduit from the Kufra oasis to Benghazi; the last two - the construction of the western branch to the city of Tobruk and the unification of the branches into a single system near the city of Sirte.
The fields, which appeared thanks to the Great Man-Made River, are clearly visible from space: on satellite images they are in the form of bright green circles, scattered among the gray-yellow desert areas.
Direct construction work began in 1984 - on August 28, Muammar Gaddafi laid the foundation stone of the project. The cost of the first phase of the project was estimated at $ 5 billion. The construction of a unique, the world's first giant pipe plant in Libya was carried out by South Korean specialists using modern technologies. The country was visited by specialists from the world's leading companies from the USA, Turkey, Great Britain, Japan and Germany. The latest technology was purchased. For laying concrete pipes, 3,700 kilometers of roads were built, allowing heavy equipment to move. The main unskilled labor force was the labor of migrants from Bangladesh, the Philippines and Vietnam.
In 1989, water entered the Ajdabiya and Grand Omar Muktar reservoirs, and in 1991 - into the Al Gardabiya reservoir. The first and largest stage was officially opened in August 1991 - water supply began to such large cities as Sirte and Benghazi. Already in August 1996, regular water supply was established in the capital of Libya - Tripoli.
As a result, the Libyan government spent $ 33 billion on the creation of the eighth wonder of the world, and the financing was carried out without international loans and the support of the IMF. Recognizing the right to water supply as a basic human right, the Libyan government did not charge the population for water. The government also tried not to buy anything for the project in the countries of the "first world", but to produce everything needed domestically. All materials used for the project were locally sourced, and a factory built in the city of Al Burajqah produced more than half a million four-meter diameter prestressed concrete pipes.
Before the construction of the aqueduct began, 96% of Libya's territory was in the desert, and only 4% of the land was suitable for human life. After the complete completion of the project, it was planned to supply water and cultivate 155 thousand hectares of land. By 2011, it was possible to arrange the supply of 6.5 million cubic meters of fresh water to the cities of Libya, providing it with 4.5 million people. At the same time, 70% of the water produced by Libya was consumed in the agricultural sector, 28% - by the population, and the rest - by industry. But the government's goal was not only to fully provide the population with fresh water, but also to reduce Libya's dependence on imported food, and in the future, the country's access to completely its own food production. With the development of water supply, large agricultural farms were built for the production of wheat, oats, corn and barley, which were previously only imported. Thanks to the irrigation machines connected to the irrigation system, circles of man-made oases and fields with diameters ranging from several hundred meters to three kilometers have grown in the arid regions of the country.
Measures were also taken to encourage the Libyans to move to the south of the country, in the economy created in the desert. However, not all of the local population moved willingly, preferring to live in the northern coastal regions. Therefore, the country's government appealed to the Egyptian peasants with an invitation to come to Libya to work. After all, the population of Libya is only 6 million people, while in Egypt - more than 80 million, living mainly along the Nile. The aqueduct also made it possible to organize resting places for people and animals on the routes of camel caravans in the Sahara with water trenches (irrigation ditches) brought to the surface. Libya has even begun to supply water to neighboring Egypt.
Compared to the Soviet irrigation projects implemented in Central Asia to irrigate cotton fields, the man-made river project had a number of fundamental differences. Firstly, for irrigation of agricultural land in Libya, a huge underground source was used, and not a superficial one, and a relatively small source, in comparison with the withdrawn volumes. As everyone probably knows, the result of the Central Asian project was the Aral ecological catastrophe. Secondly, in Libya, water losses during transportation were excluded, since the delivery took place in a closed way, which excluded evaporation. Devoid of these shortcomings, the established water supply system has become an advanced system for supplying water to arid regions.
When Gaddafi first started his project, he became the object of constant ridicule from the Western media. It was then that the derogatory stamp “dream in the pipe” appeared in the mass media in the United States and Britain. But 20 years later, in one of the rare materials dedicated to the success of the project, National Geographic magazine recognized it as “epoch-making”. By this time, engineers from all over the world were coming to the country to gain Libyan hydroengineering experience. Since 1990, UNESCO has been helping to support and train engineers and technicians. Gaddafi also designated the water project as "the strongest response to America, which accuses Libya of supporting terrorism, saying that we are not capable of anything else."
In 1999, the Great Man-Made River was awarded the International Water Prize by UNESCO, an award that recognizes outstanding research work on the use of water in drylands.
It's not beer that kills people ...
On September 1, 2010, speaking at the opening ceremony of another section of an artificial water river, Muammar Gaddafi said: “After this achievement of the Libyan people, the US threat against Libya will double. The US will try to do everything under any other pretext, but the real reason will be to stop this achievement in order to leave the people of Libya oppressed. " Gaddafi turned out to be a prophet: as a result of the speech provoked a few months after this civil war and foreign intervention, the leader of Libya was overthrown and killed without trial. In addition, as a result of the unrest that arose in 2011, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, one of the few leaders who supported Gaddafi's project, was removed from office.
By the beginning of the 2011 war, three phases of the Great Man-Made River had already been completed. The construction of the last two stages was scheduled to continue over the next 20 years. However, the NATO bombing caused significant damage to the water supply system and destroyed a pipe manufacturing plant for its construction and repair. Many foreign nationals who have worked on the project in Libya for decades have left the country. Because of the war, the water supply for 70% of the population was disrupted, the irrigation system was damaged. And the NATO aircraft bombing of power supply systems has deprived the water supply even of those regions where the pipes remained intact.
Of course, we cannot say that true reason The assassination of Gaddafi was precisely his water project, but the fears of the Libyan leader were fully justified: today water is playing the role of the main strategic resource of the planet.
Unlike the same oil, water is a necessary and paramount condition for life. Middle man can live without water for no more than 5 days. According to the UN, by the beginning of the 2000s, more than 1.2 billion people lived in conditions of constant shortage of fresh water, about 2 billion suffered from it on a regular basis. By 2025, the number of people living with constant water shortages will exceed 3 billion. According to 2007 United Nations Development Program data, global water consumption doubles every 20 years, more than double the growth rate of the human population. At the same time, every year, large deserts around the world become more and more, and the amount of useful agricultural land in most areas is decreasing, while rivers, lakes and large underground aquifers around the world are losing debit. At the same time, the cost of a liter of high-quality bottled water on the world market can reach several euros, which is significantly higher than the cost of a liter of 98 gasoline and, moreover, the price of a liter of crude oil. By some estimates, the revenues of the freshwater companies will soon exceed the revenues of the oil companies. A number of analytical reports on the fresh water market indicate that today more than 600 million people (9% of the world's population) receive water from a dosimeter of private providers and at market prices.
Available fresh water resources have long been in the sphere of interests of transnational corporations. At the same time, the World Bank strongly supports the idea of privatizing fresh water sources, at the same time in every possible way slowing down water projects that arid countries are trying to implement on their own, without the involvement of Western corporations. For example, the World Bank and the IMF have sabotaged several projects to improve irrigation and water supply in Egypt over the past 20 years, and have blocked the construction of a canal on the White Nile in South Sudan.
Against this background, the resources of the Nubian aquifer are of great commercial interest for large foreign corporations, and the Libyan project does not seem to fit into the general scheme of private development of water resources. Look at these numbers: the world's fresh water reserves, concentrated in the rivers and lakes of the Earth, are estimated at 200 thousand cubic kilometers. Of these, Baikal (the largest freshwater lake) contains 23 thousand cubic kilometers, and in all five Great Lakes - 22.7 thousand. The reserves of the Nubian reservoir are 150 thousand cubic kilometers, that is, they are only 25% less than all the water contained in rivers and lakes. At the same time, we must not forget that most of the rivers and lakes of the planet are heavily polluted. Scientists consider the reserves of the Nubian aquifer to be equivalent to two hundred years of the Nile River. If we take the largest underground reserves found in sedimentary rocks near Libya, Algeria and Chad, then they will be enough to cover all these territories with a 75-meter layer of water. It is estimated that these reserves will last for 4-5 thousand years of consumption.
Before the commissioning of the water supply system, the cost of the demineralized sea water amounted to $ 3.75 per ton. The construction of its own water supply system allowed Libya to completely abandon imports. At the same time, the sum of all costs for the extraction and transportation of 1 cubic meter of water cost the Libyan state (before the war) 35 American cents, which is 11 times less than before. This was already comparable to the cost of cold tap water in Russian cities. For comparison: the cost of water in European countries is approximately 2 euros.
In this sense, the value of Libyan water reserves turns out to be much higher than the value of reserves of all its oil fields. Thus, the proven oil reserves in Libya - 5.1 billion tons - at the current price of $ 400 per ton will amount to about $ 2 trillion. Compare them with the cost of water: even based on the minimum 35 cents per cubic meter, Libyan water reserves are 10-15 trillion dollars (with the total cost of water in the Nubian layer at 55 trillion), that is, they are 5-7 times more than all Libyan oil reserves ... If we start exporting this water in bottled form, the amount will increase many times over.
Therefore, the assertions that the military operation in Libya was nothing more than a "war for water" have quite obvious grounds.
Risks
In addition to the above political risk, the Great Artificial River had at least two more. It was the first major project of its kind, so no one could predict with certainty what would happen when the aquifers began to deplete. There were fears that the entire system would simply collapse under its own weight into the resulting voids, which would entail large-scale sinkholes in the territories of several African countries. On the other hand, it was not clear what would happen to the existing natural oases, since many of them were originally fed from underground aquifers. Today, at least the drying up of one of the natural lakes in the Libyan oasis of Kufra is associated precisely with the overexploitation of aquifers.
But be that as it may, on this moment the artificial Libyan river is one of the most complex, most expensive and large engineering projects implemented by mankind, but it grew out of the dream of a single person "to make the desert green like the flag of the Libyan Jamahiriya."
October 20 will mark another anniversary of the death of Muammar Gaddafi at the hands of al-Qaeda militants, used by NATO in Libya as a ground force to overthrow the only regime of Arab socialism. The West blamed the leader of the Jamahiriya for encroachment on the income of transnational corporations (TNCs), which provide the balance of the golden billion. Colonel Gaddafi's global projects - the irrigation of the Libyan desert, the pan-African currency “golden dinar” and the nationalization of a third of oil production - made Libya the leader of all of Africa, depriving Western TNCs of the monopoly on the supply of food, water and pumping oil. That is why US President Obama said that Gaddafi's death confirms "American leadership in the world."
Indeed, all of black Africa is still enslaved in dollars, Libyan oil is captured by IS, and the Great Man-Made River is on the verge of being captured by militants. The Islamists' interest in a large reservoir with fresh water, which is 20 km east of Sirte, is not accidental. In North Africa, as in the Middle East, drinking water is three times more expensive than oil, and Libya has more reserves than oil: 35 thousand cubic meters. km of artesian water against 5.1 billion tons of oil worth 60 trillion. Euro. This explains why Gaddafi 30 years ago foreshadowed a doubling of the "US threats against Libya": "The United States will do everything under a different connotation, but the real reason will be to stop this achievement ...". For the same reason, fresh water firms became the main sponsors of the war against Libya in France.
"Great man-made river" - this is how the giant plumbing system is called in Libya, which connects the underground sea of artesian water in the Nubian oasis with the largest cities in Libya. Its construction began in 1984 and cost $ 25 billion. It is recognized as the largest irrigation facility in the world, and Gaddafi himself called it "the eighth wonder of the world." Four thousand pipes, four meters in diameter, made of stressed reinforced concrete, are combined underground into a complex system with a thousand aquiducks, shafts and wells up to 500 meters deep. It pumps 6.5 million cubic meters. m of water per day and irrigates 160 thousand hectares of land. For its construction, it was required to excavate 85 million cubic meters. m of soil. It owes its construction to the exploration of oil fields in southern Libya in the early 50s of the last century, when instead of oil, the Nubian aquifer was discovered.
However, the economic effect of the “Great Man-Made River” turned out to be even more grandiose. Artificial irrigation not only provided Libya with food self-sufficiency, but also turned it into an importer of cereals and corn. Due to the fact that the project was built without foreign investment, Libya managed to maintain the world's lowest price for drinking water - 36 cents per cubic meter. For comparison: water in the EU costs 2 euros, and for sale in Arab and African countries USA, Israel and Saudi Arabia send for 3.75 - 4 dollars. Gaddafi destroyed world prices for artesian water and intended, by irrigating the North African deserts, to solve the problem of hunger in Africa in order to once and for all ensure the countries of the region economic independence.
Muammar Gaddafi presented this project as a gift to the third world and told the celebrants: “After this achievement, the US threats against Libya will double…. The United States will do everything under a different pretext, but the real reason will be to stop this achievement in order to leave the people of Libya oppressed. "
It was a real slap in the face to the entire West, about which the Western press stubbornly kept silent. After all, the West benefits from a shortage of water in order to maintain high water prices for developing countries and speculate on this humanitarian problem for the sake of its political influence in the third world countries. In southern Sudan, the IMF and the World Bank blocked the construction of a canal on the White Nile back in 1980, and overpopulated Egypt was so prevented from bringing peasants to the plain from the narrow floodplain and the Nile delta. Libya ranks first in the world in terms of fresh water reserves, its cost is 40 times higher than the cost of its oil reserves. This is why the overthrow of Gaddafi was the first war over drinking water.
The Great Manmade River (GMR) is a complex network of aqueducts that supplies water from the Nubian aquifer to the desert areas and coast of Libya. According to some estimates, this is the largest engineering project in existence. This huge system of pipes and aqueducts, which also includes more than 1,300 wells over 500 meters deep, supplies the cities of Tripoli, Benghazi, Sirte and others, supplying 6,500,000 m³ of drinking water per day. Muammar Gaddafi called this river "The Eighth Wonder of the World". In 2008, the Guinness Book of Records recognized the Great Man-Made River as the largest irrigation project in the world.
September 1, 2010 - the anniversary of the opening of the main section of the Great Libyan artificial river. The world media kept silent about this project in Libya, and by the way, this project surpasses the largest construction projects. Its cost is 25 billion US dollars.
Back in the 80s, Gaddafi began a large-scale project to create a network of water resources, which was supposed to cover Libya, Egypt, Sudan and Chad. To date, this project has been almost completed. The task was, I must say, historical for the entire North African region, because the problem of water has been relevant here since the times of Phenicia. And more importantly, not a single cent from the IMF has been spent on a project that could turn all of North Africa into a blooming garden. It was with the last fact some analysts link the current destabilization of the situation in the region.
The pursuit of a global monopoly on water resources is already the most important factor in world politics. And in the south of Libya, there are four giant water reservoirs (oases Kufra, Sirt, Morzuk and Hamada). According to some reports, they contain an average of 35,000 cubic meters. kilometers (!) of water. To imagine this volume, it is enough to imagine the whole territory of Germany as a huge lake 100 meters deep. Such water resources are undoubtedly of separate interest. And, perhaps, it is more than an interest in Libyan oil.
This water project has been named "The Eighth Wonder of the World" by its scale. It provides a daily flow of 6.5 million cubic meters of water through the desert, greatly increasing the area of irrigated land. 4 thousand kilometers of pipes, buried deep in the earth from the heat. Underground water is pumped through 270 mines from hundreds of meters of depth. A cubic meter of the purest water from Libyan reservoirs, taking into account all costs, can cost 35 cents. This is the approximate cost of a cubic meter cold water in Moscow. If we take the cost of a European cubic meter (about 2 euros), then the value of water reserves in Libyan reservoirs is 58 billion euros.
The idea of extracting water hidden deep under the surface of the Sahara Desert appeared back in 1983. In Libya, like its Egyptian neighbor, only 4 percent of the territory is suitable for human life, the remaining 96 percent is dominated by sands. Once on the territory of modern Jamahiriya there were river beds that flowed into the Mediterranean Sea. These channels have dried up long ago, but scientists managed to establish that at a depth of 500 meters underground there are huge reserves - up to 12 thousand cubic kilometers of fresh water. Its age exceeds 8.5 thousand years, and it accounts for the lion's share of all sources in the country, leaving an insignificant 2.3% for surface water and a little more than 1 percent for desalinated water. Simple calculations showed that the creation of a hydraulic system that allows pumping water from southern Europe will give Libya 0.74 cubic meters of water for one Libyan dinar. Delivery of life-giving moisture by sea will bring benefits of up to 1.05 cubic meters per dinar. Desalination, which also requires powerful and expensive installations, loses significantly, and only the development of the "Great man-made river" will make it possible to receive nine cubic meters from each dinar. The project is still far from complete - at present, the second phase is underway, which provides for the laying of the third and fourth stages of pipelines hundreds of kilometers inland and the installation of hundreds of deep-water wells. A total of 1149 such wells were planned, including more than 400 still to be built. Over the past years, 1926 km of pipes have been laid, with another 1732 km ahead. Each 7.5-meter steel pipe reaches four meters in diameter and weighs up to 83 tons, and in total there are more than 530.5 thousand of such pipes. The total cost of the project is $ 25 billion. As the minister told reporters Agriculture Libya Abdel Majid al-Matruh, the main share of the produced water - 70% - goes to the needs of agriculture, 28% - to the population, the rest goes to industry.
