The Qattara Depression Project, or Qattara Project for short, is a

macro-engineering In engineering, macro-engineering (alternatively known as macroengineering or macro engineering and as mega engineering) is the implementation of extremely large-scale design projects. It can be seen as a branch of civil engineering or structural ...

project concept in

Egypt Egypt ( ar, مصر , ), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a transcontinental country spanning the northeast corner of Africa and southwest corner of Asia via a land bridge formed by the Sinai Peninsula. It is bordered by the Mediter ...

. Rivalling the

Aswan High Dam The Aswan Dam, or more specifically since the 1960s, the Aswan High Dam, is one of the world's largest embankment dams, which was built across the Nile in Aswan, Egypt, between 1960 and 1970. Its significance largely eclipsed the previous Aswan Lo ...

in scope, the intention is to develop the hydroelectric potential of the

Qattara Depression The Qattara Depression ( ar, منخفض القطارة, Munḫafaḍ al-Qaṭṭārah) is a depression in northwestern Egypt, specifically in the Matruh Governorate. The depression is part of the Western Desert of Egypt. The Qattara Depressi ...

by creating an artificial lake.

Location

The Qattara depression is a region that lies 60 m below sea level on average and is currently a vast, uninhabited desert. By connecting the region and the Mediterranean Sea with tunnels and/or canals, water could be let into the area. The inflowing water would then evaporate quickly because of the desert climate. This way a continuous flow of water could be created if inflow and evaporation were balanced out. With this continuously flowing water,

hydroelectricity Hydroelectricity, or hydroelectric power, is Electricity generation, electricity generated from hydropower (water power). Hydropower supplies one sixth of the world's electricity, almost 4500 TWh in 2020, which is more than all other Renewabl ...

could be generated. Eventually, this would result in a

hypersaline lake A hypersaline lake is a landlocked body of water that contains significant concentrations of sodium chloride, brines, and other salts, with saline levels surpassing that of ocean water (3.5%, i.e. ). Specific microbial species can thrive in ...

or a salt pan as the water evaporates and leaves the salt it contains behind. This would return the Qattara Depression to its current state but with its

sabkha A sabkha ( ar, سبخة) is a coastal, supratidal mudflat or sandflat in which evaporite-saline minerals accumulate as the result of semiarid to arid climate. Sabkhas are gradational between land and intertidal zone within restricted coastal p ...

soils tens of meters higher.

Construction proposals

The proposals call for a large canal or tunnel being excavated of about depending on the route chosen to the

Mediterranean Sea The Mediterranean Sea is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean, surrounded by the Mediterranean Basin and almost completely enclosed by land: on the north by Western and Southern Europe and Anatolia, on the south by North Africa, and on the ea ...

to bring seawater into the area. Or otherwise a 320 kilometre (200 mile) pipeline north-east to the freshwater

Nile River The Nile, , Bohairic , lg, Kiira , Nobiin: Áman Dawū is a major north-flowing river in northeastern Africa. It flows into the Mediterranean Sea. The Nile is the longest river in Africa and has historically been considered the longest rive ...

south of

Rosetta Rosetta or Rashid (; ar, رشيد ' ; french: Rosette ; cop, ϯⲣⲁϣⲓⲧ ''ti-Rashit'', Ancient Greek: Βολβιτίνη ''Bolbitinē'') is a port city of the Nile Delta, east of Alexandria, in Egypt's Beheira governorate. The Ro ...

.Mahmoud, Mohamed
''The River Nile – Qattara Depression Pipeline''
June 2009User:TGC
''Great Circle Mapper – Rosetta to Qattara''
!--using coordinates given-->, 2011 In comparison, Egypt's

Suez Canal The Suez Canal ( arz, قَنَاةُ ٱلسُّوَيْسِ, ') is an artificial sea-level waterway in Egypt, connecting the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea through the Isthmus of Suez and dividing Africa and Asia. The long canal is a popular ...

is currently 193 kilometres in length. By balancing the inflow and evaporation, the lake's water level can be held constant. Several proposed lake levels are 70, 60 and 50 meters below sea level.

History

The first documented person to suggest flooding large parts of the Sahara desert was French geographer François Élie Roudaire whose proposal inspired the writer

Jules Verne Jules Gabriel Verne (;''Longman Pronunciation Dictionary''. ; 8 February 1828 – 24 March 1905) was a French novelist, poet, and playwright. His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the ''Voyages extraor ...

's final book '' Invasion of the Sea''. Plans to use the Qattara Depression for the generation of electricity reportedly date back to 1912 from Berlin geographer

Albrecht Penck Albrecht Penck (25 September 1858 – 7 March 1945) was a German geographer and geologist and the father of Walther Penck. Biography Born in Reudnitz near Leipzig, Penck became a university professor in Vienna, Austria, from 1885 to 1906, ...

.Murakami M
''Managing water for peace in the Middle East''
United Nations University Press. p.64-66

Ball period

The subject was first discussed in more detail by Dr. John Ball in 1927. Dr. Ball also made the first preliminary calculations on the achievable filling rate, inflow rate, electricity production and salinity. Non-Egyptians seemed to be unaware of Qattara's existence until after the

First World War World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

. The credit for its "discovery" goes to Dr. John Ball, English director of the Survey of Egypt, who oversaw the mapping of the depression in 1927 and who first suggested using it to generate

. In 1957 the American

Central Intelligence Agency The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA ), known informally as the Agency and historically as the Company, is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, officially tasked with gathering, processing, ...

proposed to President

Dwight Eisenhower Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower (born David Dwight Eisenhower; ; October 14, 1890 – March 28, 1969) was an American military officer and statesman who served as the 34th president of the United States from 1953 to 1961. During World War II, ...

that peace in the Middle East could be achieved by flooding the Qattara Depression. The resulting lagoon, according to the CIA, would have four benefits: * It would be spectacular and peaceful. * It would materially alter the climate in adjacent areas. * It would provide work during construction and living areas after completion for the

Palestinian Palestinians ( ar, الفلسطينيون, ; he, פָלַסְטִינִים, ) or Palestinian people ( ar, الشعب الفلسطيني, label=none, ), also referred to as Palestinian Arabs ( ar, الفلسطينيين العرب, label=non ...

Arabs The Arabs (singular: Arab; singular ar, عَرَبِيٌّ, DIN 31635: , , plural ar, عَرَب, DIN 31635, DIN 31635: , Arabic pronunciation: ), also known as the Arab people, are an ethnic group mainly inhabiting the Arab world in Wester ...

. * It would get Egyptian president

Gamel Abdel Nasser Gamal Abdel Nasser Hussein, . (15 January 1918 – 28 September 1970) was an Egyptian politician who served as the second president of Egypt from 1954 until his death in 1970. Nasser led the Egyptian revolution of 1952 and introduced far-re ...

's "mind on other matters" because "he need dsome way to get off the

Soviet The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, ...

Hook A hook is a tool consisting of a length of material, typically metal, that contains a portion that is curved or indented, such that it can be used to grab onto, connect, or otherwise attach itself onto another object. In a number of uses, one e ...

Bassler period

From 1964 onward Prof.

Friedrich Bassler Friedrich Bassler (21 June 1909, Karlsruhe – 7 September 1992, Freiburg im Breisgau) was a German hydraulic engineer. From 1961 to 1977 he was director of the ''Institut für Wasserbau und Wasserwirtschaft'' (Department of water engineering ...

led the international "Board of Advisers" which was responsible for planning and financing activities of the project. He also advised the Egyptian government on the matter from 1975 onward. He was appointed to make a first preliminary feasibility study by the German Federal Ministry of Economics in Bonn. Bassler was the driving force behind the Qattara Project for nearly a decade. Half way through the seventies a team of eight mostly German scientists and technicians was working on the planning of the first hydro-solar depression power station in the world. The first "Bassler study" of 1973 laid the basis for the Egyptian government to commission a study of its own. It decided in 1975 that Bassler and a group of companies known as ''"Joint Venture Qattara"'' should conduct a feasibility study of the project. The project concept was: Mediterranean water should be channeled through a canal or tunnel towards the Qattara Depression, which lies below sea level. This water would then fall into the depression through

penstock A penstock is a sluice or gate or intake structure that controls water flow, or an enclosed pipe that delivers water to hydro turbines and sewerage systems. The term is inherited from the earlier technology of mill ponds and watermills. H ...

s for electricity generation. The water would evaporate quickly because of the very dry and hot weather once in the depression. This would allow for more water to enter the depression and would create a continuous source of electricity. A canal 60 meters deep would connect the Mediterranean with the depression's edge at this narrow isthmus. This canal would deliver water to the depression as well as being a shipping route towards the Qattara lake with a harbor and fishing grounds in the depression. The depression was to be filled to a height of 60 m below sea level. It would take a total of 10 years to fill to that level. After that the incoming flow would balance out against the outgoing evaporation and would cause the lake level to stop changing. In the first phase of the project the Qattara 1 station was to generate 670 megawatts. The second phase was to generate an additional 1,200 megawatts. A pumped-storage hydroelectricity facility would increase the peak production capacity with another 4,000 megawatts, totaling about 5,800 megawatts. The core problem of the project was the cost and technical difficulty of diverting seawater to the depression. Calculations showed that digging a canal or tunnel would be too expensive.

Demining Demining or mine clearance is the process of removing land mines from an area. In military operations, the object is to rapidly clear a path through a minefield, and this is often done with devices such as mine plows and blast waves. By contra ...

would be needed to remove some of the millions of unexploded ordnance left from

World War II World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

in Northern Egypt. Consequently, use of

nuclear explosives A nuclear explosive is an explosive device that derives its energy from nuclear reactions. Almost all nuclear explosive devices that have been designed and produced are nuclear weapons intended for warfare. Other, non-warfare, applications for nuc ...

to excavate the canal was another proposal by Bassler. This plan called for the detonation in boreholes of 213 nuclear devices, each yielding 1.5

megatons TNT equivalent is a convention for expressing energy, typically used to describe the energy released in an explosion. The is a unit of energy defined by that convention to be , which is the approximate energy released in the detonation of a m ...

(i.e. 100 times that of the atomic bomb used against Hiroshima). This fit within the

Atoms for Peace "Atoms for Peace" was the title of a speech delivered by U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower to the UN General Assembly in New York City on December 8, 1953. The United States then launched an "Atoms for Peace" program that supplied equipment ...

program proposed by President

in 1953. Evacuation plans cited numbers of at least 25,000 evacuees. The shock waves from the explosion might also affect the tectonically unstable

Red Sea Rift The Red Sea Rift is a spreading center between two tectonic plates, the African Plate and the Arabian Plate. It extends from the Dead Sea Transform fault system, and ends at an intersection with the Aden Ridge and the East African Rift, forming ...

located just 450 km away from the blast site. Another danger was increased coast erosion because sea currents could change in such a way that even very remote coastal areas would erode. Because of the concerns about using a nuclear solution the Egyptian government turned down the plan, and the project's stakeholders gave up on the project.

Continued interest

Since then, scientists and engineers still occasionally explore the viability of such a project, as a key to resolving economic, population, and ecological stresses in the area, but the project has yet to be undertaken.Kelada, Maher
''Global Hyper Saline Power Generation Qattara Depression Potential''
MIK Technology

References

* M. A. Eizel-Din and M. B. Khalil.: "Egypt's Qattara Depression potential hydropower". – In: Proceedings of the international conference "Handshake across the Jordan – Water and Understanding in the Middle East". In: Forum Umwelttechnik und Wasserbau, Nr. 10. IUP – Innsbruck University Press, Innsbruck, 2011, pp. 89-96 {{coord, 29.5000, N, 27.5000, E, source:wikidata, display=title Macro-engineering Proposed energy infrastructure in Africa