Supervisor Elham AbolFateh
Editor in Chief Mohamed Wadie

A Look at Egypt's Massive Man-Made River


Tue 14 Mar 2023 | 04:06 PM
Ahmed Emam

Like Libyans, the Egyptians also are constructing an artificial river in the middle of the desert, to provide more green areas and to go with the New Delta farms, which will involve hundreds of workers and farmers.

The mega national project aims to treat water for, pump and convey water through a network of pipes to get it from the North Coast territory in the western desert to the New Delta area.

The massive project has been adopted and introduced by President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi as he ordered the government to cultivate about one million feddans west of the Nile Delta and plant the most strategic crops as well in these new areas in a bid to help Egypt’s agriculture system with tons of wheat, maize, vegetables, and fruits crops.

According to the Vice President of the General Authority for Construction Projects Ahmed Abdl-Aziz, the cultivation of an area of 200.000 feddans has been completed in New Delta by using the available groundwater, and the cultivated area is expected to reach 350.000 feddans by the beginning of 2022 with the use of 1.600 developed pivot irrigation devices.

One of the main axis of the project is the Hamam water plant, a giant wastewater treatment plant which is being built with a daily capacity of 7.5 million cubic meters, to reclaim and irrigate lands in the new project, spanning over 2.2 million feddans (one feddan equals 4,500 square meters).

In addition, the Dabaa Pumping Station in the Western Desert will be the project's centerpiece and will be inaugurated in 2022.

It's expected that Dabaa Pumping Station will pump pure water from natural water resources in North Coast to be transported by way of a canal through the valley to transform a range of feddans of desert into agricultural land.

It's worth mentioning that Egypt currently faces one of the highest water budget deficits in Africa after decades of compensating for dwindling water supplies with intensive, large-scale wastewater reuse, according to a new study by Egyptian and American experts at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering of the University of Southern California.