Great Man-Made River Project in Libya

Great Man-Made River Project
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Great Man-Made River Project
The Libyan Great Man-Made River Project (GMRP) is the world's largest irrigation project. It consists of pipes that deliver freshwater from fossil water collected over 35,000 years ago in the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System across Libya. It was the largest civil engineering project globally, costing over $25 billion and entailing 4000 kilometers of prestressed concrete cylinders, 1,300 well fields (most of them over 500m deep), several pump stations, storage reservoirs, and water treatment facilities. The completed project delivers over 1.7 billion gallons of water every day to the municipal, agricultural, and industrial regions of North Libya (Gijsbers, 1999). The project employs the most extensive underground pipeline system to pump water from underground reservoirs from down south in Libya to the densely inhabited coastal cities of Benghazi and Tripoli. The water covers a distance of over 1,600 kilometers and provides nearly three-quarters of all freshwater used in the country.
Libya's expanding population and low rainfall put a tremendous strain on available water sources, especially the declining rain-fed aquifers. Because the cost of desalinating sea water was unsustainable in the long term, when large quantities of potable fossil water were discovered in the 50s and 60s during oil exploration expeditions, the Gaddafi government conceived the GMRP project to supplement the country’s traditional water supplies (Salem, 1989). The Libyan government had initially planned on developing large-scale agricultural projects in the desert near the aquifer system. However, when attempts at convincing the citizens in the populated northern cities to move south failed, designs were prepared for a massive network of pipelines to bring water to the coastal cities. The project was split into five phases and funded by the Gaddafi government and several private conglomerates.
In mid-1991, Dong Ah Consortium, a South Korean company and the prime contractor awarded the $3.3 billion tender, started the project's first phase, which involved 85 million cubic meters of excavation. This first phase of the project was the primary component of the project involving various large-scale civil engineering works. Dong Ah Consortium was responsible for building two large concrete pipe manufacturing plants to produce the more than 250,000 pieces of 4-meter and 2-meter large-diameter pipes required for conveying water and excavating the trenches for the pipeline network to a length of 1,900 kilometers (Gijsbers, 1999). Other activities included constructing two functioning water well fields in Sarir and Tazelbo, installing pumps where required, constructing a 4 million cubic meters of water reservoir at Ajdabiya, and building more than 1,500 kilometers of road. During the first phase of the project, other related act...