Gaddafi's grandiose water project. The great man-made river of Libya (18 photos)

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

The Arabian night is illuminated by the lights of the Al-Tevilah 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 fresh water distribution system across Libya that came into operation last summer. This giant water pipe is the largest engineering structure of our time, far surpassing in scale, for example, the Channel Tunnel. A system of huge pipelines covering an area equal to the entire area Western Europe, carries fresh water from underground sources from the south to the north of the country, to the shores Mediterranean Sea, where populated areas are mainly concentrated.

In the 1960s, large reserves of oil and fresh water were discovered almost simultaneously in Libya - both deep underground. More precisely, under the sand of the Sahara. Two huge underground seas of pure 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 in use), the other under the territories of Libya, Tunisia and Algeria (the exploitation of these reserves in the project). Water accumulated underground 10 thousand years ago, when fertile savannas stretched out in place of the Sahara, irrigated by frequent rains and inhabited by elephants and giraffes. Then, about three thousand years ago, the planet's climate changed dramatically - the Sahara became a desert. But the water that seeped into the ground over thousands of years managed to accumulate in underground horizons.

Construction of the huge water pipeline began in 1983, and the main part was completed in 2001. Water enters it from 1,300 wells, many of them 500 meters deep or more, located over an area of ​​13,000 square kilometers. The total depth of these wells is 70 times the height of Everest. Through collector pipes, water flows into concrete pipes with a diameter of 4 meters, stretching for thousands of kilometers. Reservoirs with a capacity of 4-24 million cubic meters were built closer to the places of water consumption, and water supply systems of local cities and towns begin from them.

During the construction of the gigantic system, 155 million cubic meters of soil had to be removed and transferred (12 times more than when creating the Aswan Dam), and this in temperatures that at times reached 58 degrees Celsius. From the building materials used, it would be possible to build 16 Cheops pyramids. The concrete used for the pipes alone 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, such as desalination of sea water. True, geologists fear that as the underground layers become empty, the earth above them may begin to collapse. Will a huge hole form in the place of the desert in a few decades?

The largest engineering and construction project of our time is considered the Great man-made river(eng. The Great Manmade River) is a huge underground network of water pipelines that daily supplies 6.5 million cubic meters of drinking water to settlements desert areas and coast of Libya. The project is incredibly significant for this country, but it also gives reasons to look at the former leader of the Libyan Jamahiriya, Muammar Gaddafi, in a slightly different light from that painted by the Western media. Perhaps this is precisely what can explain 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 underground communications of the artificial river is close to four thousand kilometers. The volume of soil excavated and transferred during construction - 155 million cubic meters - is 12 times more than during the creation of the Aswan Dam. And the building materials spent would be enough to build 16 Cheops pyramids. 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 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 over 530 thousand of these pipes could easily serve as a tunnel for subway trains.

From the main pipes, water flows into reservoirs built near cities with a volume of 4 to 24 million cubic meters, and from them the local water supply systems of cities and towns begin. Fresh water enters the water supply system 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 of Libya - Tripoli, Benghazi, Sirte. The water is drawn from the Nubian Aquifer, which is 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 ​​more than two million square kilometers and contains 11 large underground reservoirs. The territory of Libya is located above four of them. In addition to Libya, several other African states are located 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 fields. The fresh water in it is hidden under a layer of hard ferruginous sandstone from 100 to 500 meters thick and, as scientists have established, accumulated underground during the period when fertile savannas stretched in place of the Sahara, irrigated by frequent heavy rains. Most of this water was accumulated between 38 and 14 thousand years ago, although some reservoirs formed relatively recently - around 5000 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 ground over thousands of years had already 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, Project Management was created and funding began. The total cost of the project at the start of construction was estimated at $25 billion, and the planned implementation period was at least 25 years. Construction was divided into five phases: the first - the construction of a pipe plant and a 1,200-kilometer-long pipeline 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 daily supplies of one million cubic meters of water; third - completion of the construction of a water pipeline 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 that appeared thanks to the Great Man-Made River are clearly visible from space: on satellite images they take the form of bright green circles scattered among 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 of a unique, world's first plant for the production of giant pipes in Libya was carried out by South Korean specialists using modern technologies. Specialists from the world's leading companies from the USA, Turkey, Great Britain, Japan and Germany came to the country. The latest equipment was purchased. To lay concrete pipes, 3,700 kilometers of roads were built, allowing heavy equipment to move. Migrant labor 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 - into the Al-Ghardabiya reservoir. The first and largest stage was officially opened in August 1991 - water supply to such major cities like 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 or IMF support. Recognizing the right to water supply as a fundamental human right, the Libyan government did not charge the population for water. The government also tried not to purchase anything for the project in the “first world” countries, but to produce everything necessary within the country. 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 reinforced concrete.

Before the construction of the water pipeline began, 96% of Libya's territory was desert, and only 4% of the land was suitable for human life. After the project was fully completed, it was planned to supply water and cultivate 155 thousand hectares of land. By 2011, it was possible to establish supplies 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 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 entry into 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 ranging from 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 the farms created in the desert. However, not all of the local population moved willingly, preferring to live in the northern coastal areas. Therefore, the country's government turned to 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 there are more than 80 million, living mainly along the Nile. The water pipeline also made it possible to organize resting places for people and animals with water trenches (aryks) brought to the surface on the routes of camel caravans in the Sahara. Libya has even begun supplying water to neighboring Egypt.

Compared to Soviet irrigation projects implemented in Central Asia for the purpose of irrigating cotton fields, the man-made river project had a number of fundamental differences. Firstly, to irrigate Libyan agricultural land, a huge underground source was used, rather than a surface and relatively small, compared to the volumes taken. As everyone probably knows, the result of the Central Asian project was the Aral environmental disaster. Secondly, in Libya, water losses during transportation were eliminated, since delivery took place in a closed way, which eliminated evaporation. Devoid of these shortcomings, the created water supply system became an advanced system for supplying water to arid regions.

When Gaddafi first started his project, he became the target of constant ridicule from the Western media. It was then that the derogatory stamp “dream in a pipe” appeared in the media of the 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 experience in hydraulic engineering. Since 1990, UNESCO has provided assistance in supporting and training engineers and technicians. Gaddafi described the water project as “the strongest answer 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 dry areas.

It's not beer that kills people...

On September 1, 2010, speaking at the opening ceremony of the next section of 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 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 war in 2011, three stages of the Great Man-Made River had already been completed. Construction of the last two stages was scheduled to continue over the next 20 years. However, NATO bombing caused significant damage to the water supply system and destroyed the pipe production plant for its construction and repair. Many foreign citizens who 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, and the irrigation system was damaged. And the bombing of power supply systems by NATO planes deprived water supply even to those regions where the pipes remained untouched.

Of course, we cannot say that the true reason for Gaddafi’s murder was his water project, but the Libyan leader’s fears were well founded: today water is emerging as the planet’s main strategic resource.

Unlike the same oil, water is a necessary and primary condition of life. The average person 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 fresh water shortage, and about 2 billion suffered from it regularly. By 2025, the number of people living with chronic water shortages will exceed 3 billion. According to 2007 data from the United Nations Development Program, global water consumption doubles every 20 years, more than twice as fast as 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 less and less, while rivers, lakes and large underground aquifers around the world are losing their flow. 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 98 gasoline and, even more so, the price of a liter of crude oil. According to some estimates, the revenues of freshwater companies will soon exceed those of oil companies. And 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, while at the same time doing its best to slow down water projects that dry countries are trying to implement on their own, without the involvement of Western corporations. For example, over the past 20 years, the World Bank and the IMF have sabotaged several projects to improve irrigation and water supply in Egypt, and blocked the construction of a canal on the White Nile in South Sudan.

Against this background, the resources of the Nubian aquifer are of enormous 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 numbers: the world's fresh water reserves, concentrated in the Earth's rivers and lakes, are estimated at 200 thousand cubic kilometers. Of these, Baikal (the largest freshwater lake) contains 23 thousand cubic kilometers, and all five Great Lakes contain 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 planet’s rivers and lakes are heavily polluted. Scientists estimate the reserves of the Nubian Aquifer to be equivalent to two hundred years of 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 territories with 75 meters of water. It is estimated that these reserves will be enough for 4-5 thousand years of consumption.

Before the water pipeline was put into operation, the cost of desalted seawater 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 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 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 the minimum 35 cents per cubic meter, Libyan water reserves amount to 10-15 trillion dollars (with a total cost of water in the Nubian layer of 55 trillion), that is, they are 5-7 times greater 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 political risks outlined 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 deplete. Concerns were expressed that the entire system would simply collapse under its own weight into the resulting voids, which would lead to large-scale ground failures in the territories of several African countries. On the other hand, it was unclear 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 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 grew out of the dream of one single person “to make the desert green, like the flag of the Libyan Jamahiriya.”

October 20 marks the next 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 accused the leader of the Jamahiriya of encroaching on the income of transnational corporations (TNCs), which ensure the balance of the golden billion. Colonel Gaddafi's global projects - 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 out oil. That's why US President Obama said Gaddafi's death reaffirms "American leadership in the world."

Indeed, all of black Africa is still pledged to dollar slavery, Libyan oil is captured by ISIS, and the “Great Man-Made River” is on the verge of being captured by militants. The Islamists' interest in a large fresh water reservoir, 20 km east of Sirte, is not accidental. In North Africa, as in the Middle East, drinking water costs three times more than oil, and its reserves in Libya are greater 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 “US threats against Libya”: “The United States will do everything under a different subtext, but the real reason will be to stop this achievement...”. For the same reason, companies selling fresh water became the main sponsors of the war against Libya in France.

“The Great Man-Made River” is the name in Libya for the giant water supply system that 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 structure in the world, and Gaddafi himself called it “the eighth wonder of the world.” Four thousand pipes, four meters in diameter, made of prestressed reinforced concrete are combined underground into a complex system with a thousand aquiducts, 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 necessary 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 ambitious. Artificial irrigation not only provided Libya with food independence, 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 lowest price for drinking water in the world - 36 cents per cubic meter. For comparison: water in the EU costs 2 euros, and for sale to Arab and African countries the USA, Israel and Saudi Arabia They ship for $3.75 - $4. 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 provide the countries of the region with economic independence.

Muammar Gaddafi presented the 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.”

This was a real slap in the face to the entire West, about which the Western press was stubbornly silent. After all, the West benefits from water shortages in order to maintain developing countries high water prices and speculate on this humanitarian problem for the sake of their political influence in third world countries. IN southern Sudan The IMF and World Bank blocked the construction of a canal on the White Nile back in 1980, and overpopulated Egypt was prevented from bringing peasants out onto the plain from the narrow floodplain and Nile Delta. Libya ranks first in the world in terms of fresh water reserves; its value is 40 times higher than the value of its oil reserves. That's why the overthrow of Gaddafi became the first war over drinking water.

The Great Manmade River (GMR) is a complex network of water conduits that supplies desert areas and the 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 more than 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 World Records recognized the Great Man-Made River as the largest irrigation project in the world.

September 1, 2010 is the anniversary of the opening of the main section of the Great Libyan artificial river. The world media kept quiet about this Libyan project, but by the way, this project surpasses the largest construction projects. Its value 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 almost been completed. The task was, it must be said, 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 penny from the IMF was spent on a project that could have turned the whole of North Africa into a blooming 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 a major factor in world politics. And in the south of Libya there are four giant water reservoirs (oases of Kufra, Sirt, Morzuk and Hamada). According to some data, 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 he has more than an interest in Libyan oil.
This water project was 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 thousand kilometers of pipes buried deep into the ground due to 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 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 sand. 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 were able to establish that at a depth of 500 meters underground there are huge reserves - up to 12 thousand cubic km 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 a paltry 2.3% for surface water and a little more than 1 percent for desalinated water. Simple calculations showed that creating a hydraulic system that allows you to pump 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, expensive installations, is losing 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 completion - the second phase is currently underway, which involves laying the third and fourth stages of pipelines hundreds of kilometers inland and installing hundreds of deep-water wells. A total of 1,149 such wells were planned, including more than 400 that still had to be built. Over the past years, 1,926 km of pipes have been laid, with another 1,732 km ahead. Each 7.5-meter steel pipe reaches a diameter of four meters and weighs up to 83 tons, and in total there are more than 530.5 thousand such pipes. The total cost of the project is $25 billion. As the minister told reporters Agriculture Libya Abdel Majid al-Matrouh, the bulk of the extracted water - 70% - goes to the needs of agriculture, 28% - to the population, the rest goes to industry.

The Great Man-Made River in Libya is the largest engineering and construction project of our time, thanks to which the country's residents gained access to drinking water and were able to settle in areas where no one had ever lived before. Currently, 6.5 million cubic meters of fresh water flow through underground water pipelines every day, which is also used for the development of agriculture in the region. Read on to see how the construction of this grandiose facility took place.

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 excavated and transferred during construction - 155 million cubic meters - is 12 times more than during the creation of the Aswan Dam. And the building materials spent would be enough to build 16 Cheops pyramids. 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 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 over 530 thousand of these pipes could easily serve as a tunnel for subway trains.
From the main pipes, water flows into reservoirs built near cities with a volume of 4 to 24 million cubic meters, and from them the local water supply systems of cities and towns begin.
Fresh water enters the water supply system from underground sources located in the south of the country and feeds settlements concentrated mainly near the shores of the Mediterranean Sea, including Largest cities Libya - Tripoli, Benghazi, Sirte. The water is drawn from the Nubian Aquifer, which is 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 ​​more than two million square kilometers and contains 11 large underground reservoirs. The territory of Libya is located above four of them.
In addition to Libya, several other African states are located 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 fields. The fresh water in it is hidden under a layer of hard ferruginous sandstone from 100 to 500 meters thick and, as scientists have established, accumulated underground during the period when fertile savannas stretched in place of the Sahara, irrigated by frequent heavy rains.
Most of this water was accumulated between 38 and 14 thousand years ago, although some reservoirs formed relatively recently - around 5000 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 ground over thousands of years had already 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, Project Management was created and funding began. The total cost of the project at the start of construction was estimated at $25 billion, and the planned implementation period was at least 25 years.
Construction was divided into five phases: the first - the construction of a pipe plant and a 1,200-kilometer-long pipeline 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 daily supplies of one million cubic meters of water; third - completion of the construction of a water pipeline 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: in satellite images they appear as bright green circles scattered among grey-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 of a unique, world's first plant for the production of giant pipes in Libya was carried out by South Korean specialists using modern technologies.
Specialists from the world's leading companies from the USA, Turkey, Great Britain, Japan and Germany came to the country. The latest equipment was purchased. To lay concrete pipes, 3,700 kilometers of roads were built, allowing heavy equipment to move. Migrant labor 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 - into the Al-Ghardabiya 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 or IMF support. Recognizing the right to water supply as a fundamental human right, the Libyan government did not charge the population for water.
The government also tried not to purchase anything for the project in the “first world” countries, but to produce everything necessary within the country. 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 reinforced concrete.

Before the construction of the water pipeline began, 96% of Libya's territory was desert, and only 4% of the land was suitable for human life.
After the project was fully completed, it was planned to supply water and cultivate 155 thousand hectares of land.
By 2011, it was possible to establish supplies 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 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 entry into 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 ranging from 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 the farms created in the desert. However, not all of the local population moved willingly, preferring to live in the northern coastal areas.
Therefore, the country's government turned to 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 there are more than 80 million, living mainly along the Nile. The water pipeline also made it possible to organize resting places for people and animals with water trenches (aryks) brought to the surface on the routes of camel caravans in the Sahara.
Libya has even begun supplying 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, to irrigate Libyan agricultural land, a huge underground source was used, rather than a surface and relatively small, compared to the volumes taken. As everyone probably knows, the result of the Central Asian project was the Aral environmental disaster.
Secondly, in Libya, water losses during transportation were eliminated, since delivery took place in a closed way, which eliminated evaporation. Devoid of these shortcomings, the created water supply system became an advanced system for supplying water to arid regions.
When Gaddafi first started his project, he became the target of constant ridicule from the Western media. It was then that the derogatory stamp “dream in a pipe” appeared in the media of the 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 experience in hydraulic engineering.
Since 1990, UNESCO has provided assistance in supporting and training engineers and technicians. Gaddafi described the water project as “the strongest answer 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, while at the same time doing its best to slow down water projects that dry countries are trying to implement on their own, without the involvement of Western corporations. For example, over the past 20 years, the World Bank and the IMF have sabotaged several projects to improve irrigation and water supply in Egypt, and blocked the construction of a canal on the White Nile in South Sudan.
Against this background, the resources of the Nubian aquifer are of enormous 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 numbers: the world's fresh water reserves, concentrated in the Earth's rivers and lakes, are estimated at 200 thousand cubic kilometers. Of these, Baikal (the largest freshwater lake) contains 23 thousand cubic kilometers, and all five Great Lakes contain 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 planet’s rivers and lakes are heavily polluted. Scientists estimate the reserves of the Nubian Aquifer to be equivalent to two hundred years of 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 territories with 75 meters of water.
It is estimated that these reserves will be enough for 4-5 thousand years of consumption.

Before the water pipeline was put into operation, the cost of desalted seawater 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 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 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 the minimum 35 cents per cubic meter, Libyan water reserves amount to 10-15 trillion dollars (with a total cost of water in the Nubian layer of 55 trillion), that is, they are 5-7 times greater 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.

In addition to the political risks outlined 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 deplete. Concerns were expressed that the entire system would simply collapse under its own weight into the resulting voids, which would lead to large-scale ground failures in the territories of several African countries. On the other hand, it was unclear 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 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 humanity, but grew out of the dream of one single person “to make the desert green, like the flag of the Libyan Jamahiriya.”
Modern satellite images show that after the bloody American-European aggression, the round fields in Libya are now quickly turning into desert again...