Water channel Gaddafi. The Great Man-Made River - Gaddafi's Treasure

The Great Man-Made River in Libya is the largest engineering and construction project of our time, thanks to which the inhabitants of the country received access to drinking water and were able to settle in areas where no one had ever lived before. Now, 6.5 million cubic meters of fresh water passes through underground water conduits every day, which is also used for the development of agriculture in the region. How the construction of this grandiose object took place, read on.

The eighth wonder of the world

The total length of the underground communications of the artificial river is close to four thousand kilometers. The volume of excavated and transferred during the construction of soil - 155 million cubic meters - is 12 times more than during the creation of the Aswan Dam. And the building materials spent 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 over 500 meters deep. The total depth of the wells is 70 times the height of Everest.

The main branches of the water pipeline 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 the 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 local water pipelines of cities and towns begin from them.
Fresh water enters the pipeline from underground sources located in the south of the country and feeds settlements concentrated mainly off the coast of the Mediterranean Sea, including the largest cities in Libya - Tripoli, Benghazi, Sirte. Water is abstracted from the Nubian Aquifer, the world's largest source of fossil fresh water.
The Nubian aquifer is located in the eastern part of the Sahara desert over an area of ​​more than 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.

The Nubian aquifer was discovered in 1953 by British geologists while searching for oil deposits. 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 during a period when fertile savannas stretched on the site of the Sahara, irrigated by frequent heavy rains.
Most of this water was accumulated between 38,000 and 14,000 years ago, although some reservoirs are relatively recent, around 5,000 BC. When the climate of the planet changed dramatically three thousand years ago, the Sahara became a desert, but the water that had seeped into the ground over thousands of years had already been accumulated in 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 realized 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 Management was established and funding started. 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 1200 kilometers long with a daily supply of two million cubic meters of water to Benghazi and Sirte; the second is to bring pipelines to Tripoli and provide it with a daily supply of one million cubic meters of water; the third is the completion of the construction of a conduit from the Kufra oasis to Benghazi; the last two are 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, created by the Great Man-Made River, are clearly visible from space: on satellite images, they look like bright green circles scattered in the middle of gray-yellow desert areas. In the photo: cultivated fields near the Kufra oasis.
Direct construction work began in 1984 - on August 28, Muammar Gaddafi laid the first stone of the project. The cost of the first phase of the project was estimated at $5 billion. The construction in Libya of a unique, world's first plant for the production of giant pipes was implemented by South Korean specialists in modern technologies.
Experts from leading world companies from the USA, Turkey, Great Britain, Japan and Germany arrived in the country. The latest equipment was purchased. For laying concrete pipes, 3,700 kilometers of roads were built, allowing heavy equipment to move. The labor of migrants from Bangladesh, the Philippines and Vietnam was used as the main unskilled labor force.

In 1989, water entered the Ajdabiya and Grand Omar Muktar reservoirs, and in 1991, the Al Ghardabiya reservoir. The first and largest line was officially opened in August 1991 - the water supply to such large cities as Sirte and Benghazi began. Already in August 1996, regular water supply was established in the capital of Libya - Tripoli.

As a result, the government of Libya spent 33 billion dollars on the creation of the eighth wonder of the world, and the financing was carried out without international loans and IMF support. Recognizing the right to water supply as one of the fundamental human rights, the Libyan government did not charge the population for water.
The government also tried not to purchase anything for the project in the countries of the "first world", but to produce everything necessary domestically. All materials used for the project were locally produced, and the plant built in the city of Al Buraika produced more than half a million pipes with a diameter of four meters from prestressed concrete.

Prior to the construction of the water pipeline, 96% of the territory of Libya was in the desert, and only 4% of the land was suitable for human life.
After the full 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 to 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 goal of the government 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 to produce wheat, oats, corn and barley, which had previously only been imported. Thanks to watering machines connected to the irrigation system, circles of man-made oases and fields with a diameter of several hundred meters to three kilometers have grown in the arid regions of the country.

Measures were also taken to encourage Libyans to move to the south of the country, to farms created in the desert. However, not all of the local population moved willingly, preferring to live in the northern coastal regions.
Therefore, the government of the country turned 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 water pipeline also made it possible to organize in the Sahara, on the paths of camel caravans, places of rest for people and animals with water trenches (ditches) brought to the surface.
Libya has even begun to supply water to neighboring Egypt.

Compared to Soviet irrigation projects implemented in Central Asia to irrigate cotton fields, the man-made river project had a number of fundamental differences.
Firstly, for the irrigation of agricultural land in Libya, a huge underground, rather than surface and relatively small, compared to the volumes withdrawn, source was used. As everyone probably knows, the result of the Central Asian project was the Aral Sea ecological catastrophe.
Secondly, in Libya, water losses during transportation were excluded, since the delivery took place in a closed way, which excluded evaporation. Deprived of these shortcomings, the created pipeline became an advanced system for supplying water to arid regions.
When Gaddafi was just starting his project, he became the object of constant ridicule from the Western media. It was then that the pejorative stamp "dream in the pipe" appeared in the mass media of the States and Britain.
But 20 years later, in one of the rare materials on 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 experience in hydroengineering.
Since 1990, UNESCO has been providing support and training for engineers and technicians. Gaddafi also described the water project as "the strongest response to America, which accuses Libya of supporting terrorism, saying that we are not capable of anything else."

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 hindering water projects that dry countries are trying to implement on their own, without the involvement of Western corporations. For example, the World Bank and the IMF over the past 20 years have sabotaged several projects to improve irrigation and water supply in Egypt, 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 to 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 figures: the world's fresh water reserves, concentrated in the rivers and lakes of the Earth, are estimated at 200,000 cubic kilometers. Of these, Baikal (the largest freshwater lake) contains 23 thousand cubic kilometers, and 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 flow of the Nile River. If we take the largest underground reserves found in sedimentary rocks under Libya, Algeria and Chad, then they will be enough to cover all these areas with a 75-meter water column.
According to estimates, these reserves will last for 4-5 thousand years of consumption.

Prior to the commissioning of the pipeline, the cost of demineralized sea water purchased by Libya was $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 US 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 about 2 euros.
In this sense, the value of the Libyan water reserves is much higher than the value of the 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 a minimum of 35 cents per cubic meter, Libyan water reserves are 10-15 trillion dollars (with a total cost of water in the Nubian layer of 55 trillion), that is, they are 5-7 times larger than all Libyan oil reserves . If you start exporting this water in bottled form, then the amount will increase many times over.
Therefore, the allegations that the military operation in Libya was nothing more than a "war for water" have quite obvious grounds.

In addition to the political risk identified above, the Great Artificial River had at least two more. It was the first major project of its kind, so no one could predict with any certainty what would happen when the aquifers began to dry up. There were fears that the entire system would simply collapse under its own weight into the resulting voids, which would lead to 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 by 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, at the moment the artificial Libyan river is one of the most complex, most expensive and major engineering projects implemented by mankind, but grew out of the dream of a single person "to make the desert green, like the flag of the Libyan Jamahiriya."
Modern satellite images show that after the bloody US-European aggression, the round fields in Libya are now quickly turning into a desert again...

The Great Manmade River (GMR) is a complex network of conduits that supplies the desert regions and coast of Libya with water from the Nubian aquifer. By 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. This project of Libya was kept quiet by the world media, 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 time of Phoenicia. And, more importantly, not a single cent from the IMF was spent on a project that could turn all of North Africa into a flowering garden. It is with the latter fact that some analysts associate the current destabilization of the situation in the region.

The desire for 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 (the oases of 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 entire territory of Germany as a huge lake 100 meters deep. Such water resources are undoubtedly of particular interest. And perhaps it is more than an interest in Libyan oil.
This water project has been called the "Eighth Wonder of the World" due to 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. 4,000 kilometers of pipes buried deep in the ground from the heat. Underground water is pumped through 270 shafts from hundreds of meters deep. 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 of cold water in Moscow. If we take the cost of a European cubic meter (about 2 euros), then the value of the 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 upon a time, on the territory of modern Jamahiriya, there were riverbeds that flowed into the Mediterranean Sea. These channels 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 makes up the lion's share of all sources in the country, leaving an insignificant 2.3% for surface water and a little more than 1% 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 benefit up to 1.05 cubic meters per dinar. Desalination, which also requires powerful expensive installations, loses significantly, and only the development of the "Great Man-Made River" will make it possible to obtain nine cubic meters from each dinar. The project is still far from complete - the second phase is currently 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 wells. A total of 1,149 such wells were planned, including more than 400 still to be built. Over the past years, 1,926 km of pipes have been laid, and another 1,732 km are ahead. Each 7.5-meter steel pipe reaches four meters in diameter and weighs up to 83 tons, and there are more than 530.5 thousand such pipes in total. The total cost of the project is $25 billion. As Libyan Minister of Agriculture Abdel Majid al-Matrouh told journalists, the bulk of the produced water - 70% - goes to the needs of agriculture, 28% - to the population, the rest goes to industry.

The pipe, laid under the sands, could serve as a tunnel for subway trains - its diameter is four meters.

The Arabian night is illuminated by the lights of the Al-Tewilah desalination plant on the shores of the Persian Gulf.

The "Great Artificial River", the "Eighth Wonder of the World" is the name given to the system for distributing fresh water throughout Libya, which went into operation last summer. This gigantic aqueduct is the largest engineering structure of our time, far exceeding in scale, for example, the Channel Tunnel. A system of huge pipelines, covering an area equal to the area of ​​all of Western Europe, carries fresh water from underground sources from the south to the north of the country, to the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, where settlements are mainly concentrated.

In the 60s of the last century, almost simultaneously, large reserves of oil and fresh water were discovered in Libya - both deep underground. More precisely, under the sand of the Sahara. Two huge underground seas of clean fresh water have been discovered here. One extends under the territories of Libya, Egypt, Sudan and Chad (it is this basin with a volume of two-thirds of the Black Sea that is currently used), the other - under the territories of Libya, Tunisia and Algeria (exploitation of these reserves in the project). Water accumulated underground 10 thousand years ago, when fertile savannahs, irrigated by frequent rains and inhabited by elephants and giraffes, stretched on the site of the Sahara. Then, about three thousand years ago, the climate of the planet changed dramatically - the Sahara became a desert. But the water that has seeped into the ground over thousands of years has managed to accumulate in underground horizons.

The construction of a huge water pipeline began in 1983, its main part was completed in 2001. Water enters it from 1,300 wells, many of them, with a depth of 500 meters or more, are located on an area of ​​13,000 square kilometers. The total depth of these wells is 70 times the height of Everest. Through the collector pipes, water enters concrete pipes with a diameter of 4 meters, stretching for thousands of kilometers. Tanks with a volume of 4-24 million cubic meters have been built closer to the places of water consumption, and water pipes of local cities and towns begin from them.

During the construction of the giant system, 155 million cubic meters of soil had to be removed and transferred (12 times more than during the creation of the Aswan Dam), and this at temperatures that at times reached 58 degrees Celsius. From the building materials that went into business, it would be possible to build 16 pyramids of Cheops. One concrete used for pipes would be enough to pave the road from Tripoli to Bombay.

Water brought from the south of the country is used in the north for domestic and industrial needs, but 85-90 percent is used to irrigate fields. Up to six million cubic meters of water can be supplied per day. According to calculations, underground reserves will last for half a century, and during this time, experts hope, it will be possible to develop other options, for example, desalination of sea water. True, geologists fear that as the underground layers are devastated, the earth may begin to sink above them. Will not a huge pit form in a few decades on the site of the desert?

The construction of the Great Man-Made River in Libya was for some reason deprived of media attention, despite the fact that since 2008 this structure has been recognized by the Guinness Book of Records as the largest irrigation project in the world. But what is important here is not the scale of the construction of the century, 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 snag is precisely in this very “if” ...

WATER INSTEAD OF OIL

In 1953, the Libyans, trying to find sources of oil in the south of their country, discovered water: giant underground reservoirs that feed oases. Only a couple of decades later, the inhabitants of Libya realized that a much greater treasure fell into their hands than black gold. From time immemorial, Africa has been a drought-stricken continent with sparse vegetation, and here, literally under your feet, there are about 35,000 cubic kilometers of artesian water.

The corresponding 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!

It was this idea that visited the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. No wonder, 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 grandiose plan, specialists in modern technologies arrived in Libya from South Korea. A plant for the production of reinforced concrete pipes with a diameter of four meters was launched in the city of El 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 not without reason called the largest irrigation project in the world. Some even consider it 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, Gharyan 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 a perpetually starving continent, but even itself would begin to export barley, oats, wheat and corn. The completion of the project was planned in 25 years, but…

EXILE FROM PARADISE

4,000 kilometers of underground pipes stretched across the desert

In early 2011, Libya was engulfed in civil war, and on October 20, Muammar Gaddafi died at the hands of the rebels. But there is an opinion 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 engaged in the supply of food to African countries. Of course, it is absolutely unprofitable for them to transform Africa from a consumer into a producer. Secondly, due to the growth of the population on the planet, fresh water is becoming an increasingly valuable resource every year. Many European states are already experiencing a shortage of drinking water. And here in the hands of Libya is a source, which, according to experts, will last for the next four to five millennia.

Once, at the solemn 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 anything to ruin our labors and leave the people of Libya oppressed.” By the way, the heads of many African states were present at this celebration, and the leaders of the Black Continent supported Gaddafi's initiative. Among them was Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

Mubarak was also removed from his post as a result of a 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 civilians" their aircraft struck precisely on the branches of the Great River, pumping stations and destroyed a factory producing concrete pipes. So, I think it is highly likely that we can assume that the fight for oil is being replaced by a different one. war for water. And Gaddafi became the first victim of this war.

Muammar Gaddaf launched the largest irrigation project in the world. A photo
Great man-made river- This is one of the largest engineering projects of former Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi, which he took up in the forty-second year of his reign. Gaddafi dreamed of providing all of Libya with fresh water and turning the desert into a green garden, making the country self-sufficient in food production. In order to make this dream a reality, Gaddafi ordered a massive engineering project, the essence of which was to build an extensive network that would bring fresh water to the arid regions of the country from ancient underground aquifers deep in the Sahara. Gaddafi called his project The eighth wonder of the world .

The Great Man-Made River in Libya is the world's largest irrigation project

Western media rarely mention the man-made river in Libya, while using such characteristics as "vanity", "Gaddafi's favorite project" and "mad dog's pipe dream". But this does not change the essence, the Great Man-Made River is a fantastic water supply system that has dramatically changed the lives of Libyans throughout the country. Libya is one of the sunniest and driest countries in the world. There are places where there has been no precipitation for decades. Less than 5% of the country receives enough rainfall for settled agriculture. Most of Libya's water supply came from desalination plants on the coast, but this method of obtaining fresh water is too expensive.

A photo

In 1953, while searching for new oil fields in southern Libya, geologists discovered gigantic reserves of fresh water in the desert, hidden deep in the bowels of the earth. In total, four huge basins were discovered with a volume of 4,800 to 20,000 cubic kilometers. Most of this water was accumulated 38,000-14,000 years ago, before the end of the last ice age, when this region of the Sahara was temperate.

A photo

In August 1984, Muammar Gaddafi laid the foundation stone for a pipe factory in Brega. From that moment, the implementation of the Great Man-Made River project began. About 1,300 wells have been dug in the desert, some up to 500 meters deep, to extract water. Through a network of 2,800 kilometers of underground pipes, water is distributed to 6.5 million people living in the cities of Tripoli, Benghazi, Sirte and elsewhere. When the fifth and final phase of the project is completed, the pipe network will be 4,000 km long, allowing 155,000 hectares of land to be irrigated for cultivation. Even at the moment, the Great Man-Made River is the world's largest irrigation project.

A photo

In July 2011, NATO bombed a water pipe near Brega and a pipe factory. This has led to disruption of the water supply for almost 70% of the population. At present, the country still has not recovered from the civil war, so the future of the Great Man-Made River looks very vague.

A photo
A photo