The great man-made river of Libya (18 photos). Artificial river of life in libya

The Great Man-Made River, the Libyan Jamahiriya's most ambitious project, is a network of aquifers that supply waterless regions and the northern industrial part of Libya with the purest drinking water from underground reservoirs of oases located in the southern part of the country. According to independent experts, this is the world's largest engineering project currently in existence. The little-known project is due to the fact that the Western media practically did not cover it, and meanwhile the project overtook the world's largest construction activities in terms of its cost: the project cost $ 25 billion.

Gaddafi began work on the project back in the 80s, and by the time the current hostilities began, it was practically implemented. We note in particular: not a cent of foreign money was spent on the construction of the system. And this fact is definitely suggestive, because control over water resources is becoming an increasingly significant factor in world politics. Is the current war in Libya the first war over drinking water? After all, there really is something to fight for! The functioning of the man-made river is based on the intake of water from 4 huge water reservoirs located in the oases of Hamada, Kufra, Morzuk and Sirt and containing approximately 35,000 cubic meters. kilometers of artesian water! Such a volume of water could completely cover the territory of a country like Germany, while the depth of such a reservoir would be about 100 meters. And according to recent studies, the water from the Libyan artesian springs will last almost 5,000 years.

In addition, this water project can rightly be called the "Eighth Wonder of the World" in terms of its scale, as it provides transportation of 6.5 million cubic meters of water through the desert per day, which tremendously increases the area of ​​irrigated desert land. The project of a man-made river is completely incomparable with what was carried out by the Soviet leaders in Central Asia in order to irrigate its cotton fields and which led to the Aral catastrophe. The fundamental difference of the Libyan irrigation project is that for the irrigation of agricultural land, an almost inexhaustible underground, rather than surface water source is used, which is easily subjected to significant damage in a short period of time. Water is transported in a closed way using 4,000 kilometers of steel pipes buried deep in the ground. Water from artesian pools is pumped through 270 shafts from a depth of several hundred meters. One cubic meter of crystal clear water from Libyan underground reservoirs, taking into account all the costs of its extraction and transportation, cost the Libyan state only 35 cents, which is approximately comparable to the cost of a cubic meter of cold water in a large Russian city, for example, in Moscow. If we take into account the cost of a cubic meter of drinking water in European countries (about 2 euros), then the cost of artesian water reserves in Libyan underground reservoirs is, according to the most rough estimates, almost 60 billion euros. Agree that such a volume of a resource that continues to grow in price may be of much more serious interest than oil.

Before the war, the man-made river irrigated about 160,000 hectares, actively developed for agriculture. And to the south, on the territory of the Sahara, ditches brought to the surface serve as a place for watering animals. And most importantly, major cities of the country, in particular the capital Tripoli, were supplied with drinking water.

Here are the most important dates in the Libyan irrigation project "Great Man-Made River", in 2008 recognized by the Guinness Book of Records as the largest in the world:
October 3, 1983 - The General People's Congress of the Libyan Jamahiriya was convened and an emergency session was held, at which the start of funding for the project was announced.
August 28, 1984 - The leader of Libya lays the foundation stone for the launch site of the project.
August 26, 1989 - The second phase of construction of the irrigation system begins.
September 11, 1989 - water entered the reservoir in Ajdabiya.
September 28, 1989 - water entered the Grand Omar Muktar reservoir.
September 4, 1991 - water enters the Al-Ghardabiya reservoir.
August 28, 1996 - the beginning of regular water supply to Tripoli.
September 28, 2007 - water appeared in Garyan.

Due to the fact that the neighboring countries of Libya, including Egypt, suffer from a lack of water resources, it is quite logical to assume that the Jamahiriya, with its water project, was quite capable of significantly expanding its influence in the region, starting a green revolution in neighboring countries, and figuratively , and in the literal sense of the word, since by irrigating the North African fields, most of the food problems in Africa would be solved very quickly, providing the countries of the region with economic independence. And corresponding attempts took place. Gaddafi actively encouraged the peasants of Egypt to come and work in the fields of Libya.

The Libyan water project has become a real slap in the face for the entire West, because both the World Bank and the US State Department are promoting only projects that are beneficial to them, like the seawater desalinization project in Saudi Arabia, which costs $4 per cubic meter of water. Obviously, the West benefits from a shortage of water - this supports its high price.

It is noteworthy that, speaking at the celebration of the anniversary of the beginning of the construction of the river, on September 1 last year, Gaddafi said: “Now that this achievement of the Libyan people has become obvious, the US threat against our country will double!” In addition, a few years ago, Gaddafi said that the Libyan irrigation project would be "the most serious response to America, which constantly accuses Libya of being sympathetic to terrorism and living on petrodollars." A very eloquent fact was the support of this project and the former President of Egypt Mubarak. And this is certainly not a mere coincidence.

The Great Manmade River is considered the largest engineering and construction project of our time - a huge underground network of water conduits that daily supplies 6.5 million cubic meters of drinking water to the settlements of the desert regions and the coast of Libya. The project is incredibly significant for this country, but it also provides grounds for looking at the former leader of the Libyan Jamahiriya, Muammar Gaddafi, in a somewhat different light than that drawn by the Western media. Perhaps this is what explains the fact that the implementation of this project was practically not covered by the media.

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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 a western branch to the city of Tobruk and the unification of 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 exit 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 taken, 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."

In 1999, the Great Man-Made River was awarded the International Water Prize by UNESCO, an award given for 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 the 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 civil war and foreign intervention provoked a few months after this speech, the leader of Libya was overthrown and killed without trial or investigation. In addition, as a result of the unrest in 2011, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, one of the few leaders who supported Gaddafi's project, was also removed from office.

By the start of the 2011 war, three stages of the Great Man-Made River had already been completed. The construction of the last two phases was scheduled to continue over the next 20 years. However, NATO bombing caused significant damage to the water supply system and destroyed a pipe factory for its construction and repair. Many foreign nationals who worked for decades on the project in Libya have left the country. Due to the war, water supply for 70% of the population was disrupted, and the irrigation system was damaged. And the bombing of power supply systems by NATO aircraft deprived even those regions where the pipes remained intact.

Of course, we cannot say that the real reason for killing Gaddafi was his water project, but the Libyan leader's fears were well founded: today water is becoming the planet's main strategic resource.

Unlike the same oil, water is a necessary and paramount condition for life. The average person can live no more than 5 days without water. According to the UN, by the beginning of the 2000s, more than 1.2 billion people lived in conditions of constant fresh water shortage, about 2 billion suffered from it regularly. By 2025, there will be more than 3 billion people living with permanent water scarcity. According to the United Nations Development Program in 2007, global water consumption is doubling every 20 years, more than twice the rate of human population growth. At the same time, every year there are more and more large deserts around the world, and the amount of usable agricultural land in most areas is decreasing, while rivers, lakes and large underground aquifers around the world are losing their debit. At the same time, the cost of a liter of high-quality bottled water on the world market can reach several euros, which significantly exceeds the cost of a liter of 98th gasoline and, moreover, the price of a liter of crude oil. According to some estimates, freshwater companies' revenues will soon exceed those of oil companies. And a number of analytical reports on the fresh water market indicate that already today more than 600 million people (9% of the world's population) receive water from the 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 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.

Risks

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 largest 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."

One of the biggest civil development projects in the 42 years of former Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi was the Great Artificial River. Gaddafi dreamed of providing fresh water to all the inhabitants of the country and turning the desert into a flourishing oasis, providing Libya with its own food. To make this dream a reality, Gaddafi launched a major technical project consisting of a network of underground pipes. They were supposed to carry fresh water from ancient underground aquifers deep in the Sahara to arid Libyan cities. Gaddafi called it the "Eighth Wonder of the World." The Western media rarely mentions it, calling it a "vanity project", "Gaddafi's Pet Project" and "mad dog's pipe dream". But in fact, the Artificial River of Life is a fantastic water delivery system that has changed the lives of Libyans all across the country.

Libya is one of the sunniest and driest countries in the world. There are places where no precipitation has fallen for decades, and even in mountainous areas it can rain once every 5 to 10 years. Less than 5% of the country receives sufficient rainfall for agriculture. Much of Libya's water supply used to come from coastal desalination plants, which were expensive and only used locally. There was practically nothing left to irrigate farmland.


In 1953, during the exploration of new oil fields in southern Libya, a huge number of ancient aquifers were discovered. The team of researchers discovered four huge pools with estimated volumes of 4,800 to 20,000 cubic kilometers of water. Most of this water was collected between 38,000 and 14,000 years ago, before the end of the last ice age, when the Sahara region had a temperate climate.


After Gaddafi seized power in a bloodless coup in 1969, the new government immediately nationalized the oil companies and began using oil revenues to drill hundreds of wells to extract water from desert aquifers. Initially, Gaddafi planned to arrange large-scale agricultural projects right in the desert, next to water sources. But people refused to move far from their homes, so he decided to bring water directly to them.


In August 1984, a pipe factory was opened and the Great Artificial River of Life project in Libya began. Approximately 1,300 wells 500 meters deep have been dug in the desert soil to pump water from the underground water supply. This water was then distributed to 6.5 million people in the cities of Tripoli, Benghazi, Sirte and elsewhere through a 2,800 km network of underground pipes. When the fifth and final phase of the project is completed, the network will consist of 4,000 km of pipes, which will allow the cultivation of 155,000 hectares of land. Even with the last two phases unfinished, the Great Artificial River is the largest irrigation project in the world.



The pipeline first reached Tripoli in 1996, on completion of the first phase of the project. Adam Kuvairi (the main figure of the project) vividly remembers the impact that fresh water had on him and his family. "Water has changed lives. For the first time in our history, there is water for showering, washing and shaving," he told the BBC. "The quality of life has increased by an order of magnitude across the country." The project was recognized internationally, and in 1999 UNESCO awarded the River of Life with an award, recognizing the remarkable work in scientific research on the use of water in drylands.





In July 2011, NATO attacked a pipeline near Brega, including a pipe factory. They claimed that the factory was used as a military depot and that rockets had been fired from there. The blow to the pipeline deprived 70% of the country's population of water. A civil war has broken out in the country, and the future of the Artificial River of Life project is in jeopardy.

The Great Manmade River is considered the largest engineering and construction project of our time - a huge underground network of water conduits that daily supplies 6.5 million cubic meters of drinking water to the settlements of the desert regions and the coast of Libya. The project is incredibly significant for this country, but it also provides grounds for looking at the former leader of the Libyan Jamahiriya, Muammar Gaddafi, in a somewhat different light than that drawn by the Western media. Perhaps this is what explains 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 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 a western branch to the city of Tobruk and the unification of 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.

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 exit 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 taken, 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."

In 1999, the Great Man-Made River was awarded the International Water Prize by UNESCO, an award given for 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 the 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 civil war and foreign intervention provoked a few months after this speech, the leader of Libya was overthrown and killed without trial or investigation. In addition, as a result of the unrest in 2011, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, one of the few leaders who supported Gaddafi's project, was also removed from office.

By the start of the 2011 war, three stages of the Great Man-Made River had already been completed. The construction of the last two phases was scheduled to continue over the next 20 years. However, NATO bombing caused significant damage to the water supply system and destroyed a pipe factory for its construction and repair. Many foreign nationals who worked for decades on the project in Libya have left the country. Due to the war, water supply for 70% of the population was disrupted, and the irrigation system was damaged. And the bombing of power supply systems by NATO aircraft deprived even those regions where the pipes remained intact.

Of course, we cannot say that the real reason for killing Gaddafi was his water project, but the Libyan leader's fears were well founded: today water is becoming the planet's main strategic resource.

Unlike the same oil, water is a necessary and paramount condition for life. The average person can live no more than 5 days without water. According to the UN, by the beginning of the 2000s, more than 1.2 billion people lived in conditions of constant fresh water shortage, about 2 billion suffered from it regularly. By 2025, there will be more than 3 billion people living with permanent water scarcity. According to the United Nations Development Program in 2007, global water consumption is doubling every 20 years, more than twice the rate of human population growth. At the same time, every year there are more and more large deserts around the world, and the amount of usable agricultural land in most areas is decreasing, while rivers, lakes and large underground aquifers around the world are losing their debit. At the same time, the cost of a liter of high-quality bottled water on the world market can reach several euros, which significantly exceeds the cost of a liter of 98th gasoline and, moreover, the price of a liter of crude oil. According to some estimates, freshwater companies' revenues will soon exceed those of oil companies. And a number of analytical reports on the fresh water market indicate that already today more than 600 million people (9% of the world's population) receive water from the 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 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.

Risks

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 largest 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."

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?