The fossil fuel you can get out of tap in Libya
In Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya, water was used as a political instrument. Libya’s capital city Tripoli, has insufficient rainfall to support its 1.1 million population. During Gadaffi’s rule, the easy access to and supply of readily available water was a privilege that could be bestowed only on people loyal to the regime.
In the 1950s, oil exploration in Libya revealed the presence of a huge aquifer spanning four countries in the Eastern Sahara. An aquifer is an underground layer of water-bearing rock or soil. This aquifer in the eastern Sahara, the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System (NSAS), is the world’s biggest source of ‘‘fossil’’ water, containing 150,000 cubic kilometres of groundwater. The water is ‘‘fossil’’ water because it was deposited thousands of years ago when North Africa had a temperate climate.
By 1983 the requirement for water was acute in the coastal cities of Libya where the desalination facilities were hard pushed to properly desalinate seawater and existing coastal aquifers had become brackish. To address the shortage, Muammar Gaddafi initiated the Great ManMade River project. The goal was to tap into the NSAS, the vast underground aquifer, treat the water and pump five million cubic metres per day to supply the coastal cities of Libya.
The project was scheduled to be carried out in five stages. In Phase I hundreds of wells were dug, each about 500 metres deep, in a region 1,600kms into the desert, south of the eastern port of Benghazi. This was completed in 1991 and delivers two million cubic metres of water per day. Phase I alone required
250,000 sections of pipe to be laid, each pipe 7 metres long and 4 metres in diameter.
Phase II, completed in 1996, involves several pipelines including one that delivers 1 million cubic metres per day to Tripoli from a region about
1,000kms south west of the city. In Phase III a further 1,200kms of pipeline was installed including
500kms to the port city of Tobruk near the Egyptian border. It was completed in 2009.
To date the project has involved the installation of about 3000kms of pipeline and has cost over US$15 billion. Further extensions and additions were planned but never completed. In 2011 fearing that the water treatment and pumping stations were being used to conceal missile sites, NATO aircraft bombed them. Then on
20th October 2011, Gaddafi was captured and killed by rebel forces after which Libya descended into civil war.
Fortunately the buried pipeline remains substantially intact and the pumping facilities have been repaired – without them much of Libya, particularly Benghazi, could not function. However, recently, the civil war and frequent electrical power cuts have affected the supply of water to the population centres. An additional problem is that drawing five million cubic metres per day from an aquifer which is not being renewed, means that it will last only 80-100 years, putting a further premium on that already precious commodity, fresh drinking water.
Given the limited life of the water source, the merits of the huge project are questionable, but in the short term at least, the importance of the NSAS is that Gaddafi initiated a project that succeeded in accessing and transporting desperately needed water. Furthermore, the aquifer water in Libya is only 10 per cent of the cost per litre of desalinated water.
In Australia, the Great Artesian Basin is a huge aquifer straddling four states, although extending over a greater area than the NSAS, it contains about half as much groundwater. The Great Artesian Basin (GAB) is a crucial supplier of water to outback cattle stations and mining operations. The water is up to 3000 metres underground so extraction involves ‘‘mining’’ the water. Today 2000 wells are free flowing and 9,000 require mechanical assistance. The supply of water to Australia’s cities is problematic with some relying on desalination plants.
However, using the GAB to meet Australia’s water requirements, long term, is probably not viable because of the life of the aquifer and the cost of pipelines and pumping facilities required to transport the water over huge distances. That’s a problem because with climate change, Australia’s water shortage is going to intensify.