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Aswan High Dam impacts; fossil groundwaters in North

Africa
Professor Jim Simpson

Download Powerpoint to view figures.

List of Figures:
1. Motivation for construction of Aswan High Dam.
2. Short-term impacts of Aswan High Dam construction.
3. Long-term impacts of Aswan High Dam construction.
4. Map of Lake Nasser.
5. (a)Zone of sediment deposition in Lake Nasser. (b) Volume of water storage in Lake
Nasser (1968-1990).
6. Water demands per capita - I: drinking & domestic (NYC).
7. Water demands per capita - II: irrigation (Egypt).
8. Water demands per capita - III: summary of main use categories.
9. Land area required for per capita food production (Egypt).
10. Groundwaters in North Africa - fossil water from glacial period.
11. Irrigation water demand (Egypt) per unit of land - duration of fossil groundwater resource
if withdrawn for irrigation.

Key Concepts.
1. Long-term problems resulting from current surface water management practices, such as
reservoir siltation, present major difficulties for future generations, but are generally
ignored.
2. Irrigation demand for water is more than an order of magnitude greater than domestic use
demand in arid climates.
3. Fossil groundwaters in N Africa and elsewhere are being withdrawn to supply irrigation
demands in amounts far in excess of recharge rates.

OUTLINE OF SOME IMPACTS OF CONTROLS OF NILE RIVER


DISCHARGE.
With rapid increase of population in Egypt and very limited supplies of water and agricultural
land, the pressure to manage river water to the maximum extent feasible is very strong. When a
population is faced with the serious food-supply problems confronted by Egypt, and a number of
other countries, it is not likely that long-term environmental issues will have high priority.
However, those issues do not go away just because they are not currently factored into planning
decisions. Some of the positive reasons for construction of the High Dam at Aswan are quite
clear (Figure #1).
The most central argument for building a large reservoir on the Nile was to permit more
intensive irrigation in the Nile Delta and upstream along the main stem of the river in Egypt.
Storage of a total volume equivalent to two or three years of average discharge eliminated the
"loss" of fresh water to the Mediterranean Sea during annual flooding, permitting all to be used
for irrigation (except for evaporation losses from Lake Nasser). Secondly, in drought years of
low Nile discharge to Egypt stored irrigation water could be used to sustain food production,
assuming a limited number of low Q years. During the major drought in Africa of the mid to late
'80s, many countries in the Nile River basin, including Ethiopia and Sudan, experienced major
famine while Egypt did not, at least in part because of its ability to draw on irrigation water
stored in Lake Nasser.

Another argument for construction of the High Dam was for generation of electricity. In the first
decade after construction, there was sufficient supply of electricity to meet demands of urban
citizens in Cairo and also some rural populations, with a surplus for smelting of aluminum ore.
By the early 1980's, the demand for electricity had overtaken available supply, which was
dominated by High Dam hydroelectricity, and construction of new fossil fuel burning generating
stations began. Operation of these new generating stations will significantly shorten the lifetime
of petroleum resources in Egypt, the sale of which currently provides a major component of the
foreign currency for purchase of food imports.

Construction of the High Dam provided more options for location of homes and other buildings,
as well as other infrastructure that would not have been feasible due to the elimination of the
annual flooding cycle throughout the country. Thus it permitted many of the kinds of
investments that are assumed to be necessary in our modern world.

Some immediate negative impacts of the High Dam construction included (Figure #2): loss of
the coastal fishery for sardines and anchovies that were important food sources caught near the
mouths of the two branches of the Nile. The Mediterranean Sea can be generally considered as a
"desert" in terms of fish production, due to its very low supply of nutrients such as phosphorus
and nitrogen that are required for the microscopic marine green plants to accomplish
photosynthesis. As a result, marine fishing in Egypt had been important only in the immediate
vicinity of the Nile outflow, especially in the months following annual flooding. Immediately
after the High Dam was completed and the last Nile flood had occurred, the fishery of coastal
Egypt collapsed, and has never recovered.

The most important building material in rural Egypt has always been bricks made from Nile
River sediments, mostly obtained by dredging of the canal network following annual floods.
After the floods ceased in the mid 1960's, there was no new supply of sediments to be cleared
from the canals, and some farmers began to sell their top soil to small-scale brick manufacturing
plants. Although this gave an immediate return of cash to the farmer who mined his fields for
soil, it then took the land involved out of agricultural production, or made it much more difficult
to use because of the need for very careful land-level controls for flood irrigation practices. This
loss of land has been mostly arrested in the last two decades by mining clay deposits from
surrounding desert lands that are not feasible to use for agriculture and building much larger
brick factories that do not use Nile Delta soils as a raw material. However, this latter
development had the negative consequence of eliminating a major source of income to the small-
scale brick manufacturers, and transferring the income to large central government enterprises.

Much of the fertility of the agricultural soil in Egypt resulted from the continuous resupply of
rich volcanic sediments from the Ethiopian highlands during annual flooding. Since this no
longer occurs, it has become necessary to use much greater amounts of commercial fertilizers,
such as mineral phosphates and fixed nitrogen. The latter of these nutrient sources is very energy
intensive in terms of production so it represents another drain on Egypt's limited fossil fuel
reserves and on foreign currency sources. Total annual commercial fertilizer use per hectare of
agricultural land in Egypt during the early 1990's was about 340 kg, one of the highest in the
world for any country of appreciable population. The comparable values during the same years
for the USA and Japan were 100 kg and 390 kg, respectively. It appears unlikely that higher
application rates of commercial fertilizer would significantly improve crop yields in Egypt

LONG-TERM IMPACTS OF CONTROLS OF NILE RIVER DISCHARGE.


Long-term impacts of the construction of the Aswan High Dam include gradual inundation of
land areas near the Mediterranean Sea as the Delta slowly subsides (Figure #3). All river delta
areas are slowly sinking due to the weight of deposited sediments, and they remain in balance
only from delivery of new fluxes of sediments to offset subsidence. In the case of the Nile since
completion of the High Dam, subsidence has already been measurable, leading toward
destruction of the narrow land strips that form borders of large brackish lakes adjacent to the
coast. These are currently the most important remaining fishery resource in Egypt and are
increasingly at risk due to breaching of their seaward margins during winter storms. Despite the
lack of new sediments reaching the Delta, that area will continue to subside for many thousands
of years in the future.

Lake Nasser is now steadily filling with sediments (Figure #4) that formerly reached the Delta
and the coastal Mediterranean The current locus of deposition is far upstream of the High Dam
and does not immediately threaten operation of the power station (Figure #5A). However, the
reservoir will be sufficiently filled within less than a millennium to no longer be useful for
storage of irrigation water. Order of magnitude estimates suggest that within about 600 years,
about half of the current irrigation water storage value of Lake Nasser will have been lost. In
terms of the history of civilization in the Nile Valley, this is not very long. The quantities of
sediment filling up Lake Nasser are so huge (about 100 million tons per year) as to defy
currently feasible attempts at removal. No one currently has a plausible solution to this problem,
which has effectively been postponed for later generations to confront, as is true for many major
environmental issues in other countries. The largest sediment dredging operations in the world to
maintain some of the most valuable harbors, such as that for New York City, are one-two orders
of magnitude smaller than would be required to remove the annual influx of sediment to Lake
Nasser.

The record of monthly water volumes in Lake Nasser between 1968 and 1990 illustrate quite
dramatically the years of rapid filling which occurred during the 1970's, followed by the major
decline in storage volume associated with the drought of the 1980's (Figure #5B). By the time of
the large flood runoff from Ethiopia in the summer of 1988, the active storage volume in Lake
Nasser had decreased to less than 20 km3, only about 20% of the active volume available during
the late 1970's. If the drought had continued another year, there would have been major shortfalls
of water deliveries for irrigation agriculture in Egypt.

WATER DEMAND FOR DRINKING WATER: MINIMUM


REQUIREMENTS.
Many decisions that influence environmental policies involve assessing alternative uses of
critical resources such as water. For water there are very large differences in quantities required
for various purposes as well as differences in costs to provide water of the necessary quality.
Egypt provides clear examples of the types of conflicts in water use that evolve as supplies of a
critical resource becomes limited.

Amounts of drinking water needed by an individual depend upon age, weight, level of physical
activity, air temperature, humidity, elevation and many other factors. However, as an
approximation, about 4 liters of fluids per day is required for an adult living in a temperate
climate. This fresh (i.e. low dissolved salt content) water should be free of any disease-causing
bacteria or other pathogens, as well as chemical contamination. A small additional amount of
high-purity water is needed for cooking and other personal uses that could lead to disease if
contaminated supplies were used. Summing these high-purity water demands, the minimum for
each person can be approximated as about 10 liters per day (Figure #6). In situations of extreme
water shortage, such as those typical of droughts in North Africa where rural populations must
collect and transport all of their water over long distances, this quantity is about the minimum
that can sustain human life for an extended period. Converting units of volume and time, 10 liters
of water per day translates to about 4 cubic meters per year.

DOMESTIC WATER CONSUMPTION IN NEW YORK CITY.


Water is used in homes and apartments in the USA at rates far in excess of the minimum
required for drinking and cooking. In New York City, per capita use of water is of the order of
500 liters per day. Most of this water is used to flush toilets, to wash dishes and clothes and for
bathing, rather than for drinking or cooking. There are significant regional differences in per
capita water demand for domestic supplies in the USA, but this value can be considered as
generally representative for North America. In Europe and Japan, per capita use of domestic
supplies is appreciably lower (by about a factor of two), but still more than an order of
magnitude greater than the minimum required for drinking and cooking. The per capita amount
for total water use typical for NYC can be converted from 500 liters per day to about 200 cubic
meters per year.

Domestic water demands in Egypt are appreciably less than for NYC and other large cities in the
USA, but the differences are less than might be expected. Estimates of total domestic water use
in Egypt during 1976 were about 115 liters per capita per day. By 1982, per capita daily use had
grown to about 180 liters for the country, but the equivalent use amount for Cairo was about 320
liters, slightly more than typical for European cities (300 liters per day per capita). Thus urban
domestic water use does not vary as much as might be expected for large differences in
economic circumstances.
IRRIGATION DEMAND FOR WATER IN EGYPT.
Quantities of water used for irrigation are dependent on many factors such as types of crop,
climate and methods of irrigation. Lowland rice, which involves flooding of entire cultivated
fields to a depth of about 20 cm for a number of months, uses large amounts of water per unit of
land. Other crops, such as high economic-value vegetables that are suitable for drip irrigation
instead of flood irrigation, may require much smaller amounts of water per unit of crop land but
much greater investments in irrigation infrastructure such as pumps, plastic tubing and drippers.
As an approximation of water use in a large, complex irrigation network, water budgets in Egypt
can be considered as representative of a mixture of crops grown in an arid climate throughout the
year. Since nearly all of the Nile River water released from the High Dam at Aswan (55 cubic
kilometers per year) is eventually used for irrigation within the country, the mean annual
discharge at Aswan can be divided by the current population of the country in the early 1990s
(about 60 million) to yield a per capita demand for irrigation water of about 1000 cubic meters
per year (Figure #7). This estimate excludes water losses associated with storage in Lake Nasser,
mostly from evaporation, which account for about another 12 cubic kilometers per year.

Egypt is currently able to produce food crops plus export crops such as cotton that are equivalent
to only about half of food demand from the resident population. Thus, to obtain a value of
irrigation water equivalent to total per capita food demand, the number derived above can be
multiplied by two, suggesting that a more appropriate per capita irrigation water requirement is
about 2000 cubic meters per year, assuming all food production occurs from irrigated crops.

SUMMARY OF WATER DEMAND (PER CAPITA) BY CATEGORY OF


USE.
Each of the above estimates for water demand by category of use was derived from a different
approach, using very general indicators for quite different populations in the case of domestic
supplies (New York City) and irrigation usage (Egypt), and thus should not be considered as
accurate in detail for a given country. However, these representative values do provide a basis
for general considerations about scales of demand for various end uses. Using units of cubic
meters per year per capita, demands for drinking water, domestic water supplies and irrigation
water are of the order of 4, 200 and 2,000, respectively (Figure #8). These estimates indicate that
irrigation water requirements are about a factor of ten greater than those for domestic supplies.
Assuming similar amounts of money were available to provide each of these two resource types,
the cost of irrigation water would be about an order of magnitude less per unit of water. In
situations where total demand exceeds available water, as was the case for California during a
multi-year drought that ended in 1993, there is a shift of the resource away from irrigation to
domestic water supplies because the latter can command much greater prices. This situation is
likely to occur again in the future and evolve toward less guaranteed irrigation supply in much of
the arid western USA in the 21st century. The large urban centers of the Los Angeles, San
Francisco, Phoenix, and Las Vegas are able to pay much more per cubic meter of the limited
water available than can irrigation agriculture interests.

The high ratio of per capita irrigation use to that for minimum drinking plus cooking water
(about 500 to 1) is indicative of the large amounts of water required for transpiration fluxes of
crop plants, compared to those needed for direct consumption of humans. For Egypt, with the
only significant source of renewable water supply being the Nile River, the largest quantities of
water demand are always likely to remain in the category of irrigation. On the other hand, with
diseases transmitted by contaminated water as a major health issue in the country, the quantities
of clean water required to improve conditions of the population are much less than the total water
demand for irrigation.

LAND AREA REQUIRED FOR FOOD PRODUCTION (PER CAPITA).


Total crop area and population data for Egypt can provide some indication of the minimum size
of cultivated land required to produce food in an environment with temperatures suitable for crop
plant growth throughout the year. The ratio of population (1982) to cultivated crop land area in
Egypt was about 1600 per square kilometer, more than a factor of five greater than the mean for
the world population. This ratio can be inverted to yield a value of about 6.3 x 102 square meters
per capita (Figure #9). Taking the square root, this indicates that each person in Egypt currently
has the equivalent of a square plot of land 25 meters on a side being cultivated to produce crops.
Since agricultural production within Egypt can only supply about half of food demand, it is
appropriate to double the area of cultivated land area needed to grow food crops to a square plot
of land 35 meters on a side, in an environment with almost optimum conditions for continuous
plant growth throughout the year (equivalent to about 103 square meters per capita). For a
climate suitable for crops during only about half of the year, such as the large grain crop regions
of North America, this value should probably be doubled to 2 x 103 square meters per capita. The
ratio of world crop land use to current world population is about 3 x 103 m2/capita, about a factor
of five greater than for Egypt today. Thus, to the first approximation, food production in Egypt
appears to be limited by land with soils suitable for intensive crop cultivation, at least as much as
by surface waters for irrigation.

GROUNDWATER RESOURCES IN NORTH AFRICA.


With these representative values of approximate demands for various uses of water, we can
consider some policy issues about an important additional resource of water that could
potentially be exploited in Egypt. Over the past several decades, it has been established that there
is a thin layer of high-quality groundwater lying about 100 meters below the surface of much of
the Sahara Desert (Figure #10). The thickness of this layer of water averages about 10 meters
within the aquifer, which is equivalent to about 3 meters when the volume occupied by solid-
phase minerals is excluded. One of the most critical issues for consideration of possible uses of
this water resource is the time-scale for recharge of the aquifer. From several lines of evidence,
this water was derived from precipitation during the period of 25,000 to 5,000 years before the
present, when the climate of North Africa was quite different from that of today. This water
probably was recharged at rates that were less than 1 millimeter per year, which is extremely
slow. Since no appreciable groundwater recharge occurs in this region in modern climate
conditions, this resource must be considered as nonrenewable, similar to the situation for fossil
fuels such as petroleum.

Some of the evidence that establishes the likely periods of groundwater recharge involve
measurements of the isotopic composition of the water molecules themselves. There are several
stable isotopes of both hydrogen and oxygen in the natural environment, including deuterium
(hydrogen with 1 neutron and 1 proton in the nucleus, as opposed to the most abundant hydrogen
atom which has 1 proton and 0 neutrons in the nucleus) and oxygen-18 (oxygen with 10 neutrons
and 8 protons as opposed to the most common form of oxygen which has 8 neutrons and 8
protons). The proportion of "heavy" isotopes (those with "extra" neutrons) in natural waters
varies significantly from one area to another, due primarily to atmospheric processes involving
evaporation and condensation. However, once water passes below the surface, away from
influence of the atmosphere and into groundwaters, its stable isotopic composition no longer
changes and it can retain the same relative proportion of "heavy" isotopes for millions of years.
In contrast, the chemical composition of groundwaters can be modified substantially in the
subsurface by dissolution of aquifer minerals or chemical precipitation of new mineral from
solution. Thus much about the atmospheric transport history of water which recharged a
particular aquifer is preserved indefinitely in the stable isotope composition of the water
molecules and can serve as a "fingerprint" of that particular water resource. The stable isotope
compositions of deep groundwaters beneath the Sahara are completely different from those of
the modern Nile River, and are relics of a past climate that differed dramatically from that of the
present.

A second line of evidence about the time of recharge of deep North African groundwaters
involves the amount of carbon-14 (radioactive carbon with a half-life of 5600 years) remaining
in the dissolved bicarbonate ion of these waters. The carbon-14 "age" of these water range from
about 5000 to 25,000 years, based on the very low amounts of this radioactive isotope remaining
dissolved in the water. Thus a consistent picture exists of the time of recharge of these waters
that excludes the possibility of their being related to the "modern" hydrologic cycle of the region.
They should be considered as being "fossil" waters that receive no significant recharge today.

The total amounts of water present in these deep groundwaters beneath the Sahara are large
compared to the volume of water flowing in the Nile River each year, but actually represent a
very limited resource when considered for potential use over an extended period since they are
not being renewed in today's climate. With this knowledge in mind, some potential uses of this
resource can be considered: irrigation, drinking water, other?

POSSIBLE USES OF FOSSIL GROUNDWATER IN NORTH AFRICA.


With the current large shortfall in agricultural production in Egypt relative to food demand, one
generally assumed need is for additional irrigation water. Some indication of the amount of
irrigation water required per unit of land in Egypt can be gained by dividing the amount of water
released from the High Dam at Aswan each year (55 cubic kilometers) with the total area of
cultivated crop land in the country (about 38 thousand square kilometer). After converting units,
the total amount of irrigation water applied to crop lands is equivalent to about 1.4 meters per
year (Figure #11). For comparison, the annual rate of precipitation in New York City is about 1.1
meters per year and the mean rate of precipitation over all continental areas is about 0.8 meters
per year. To provide some indication of how long the fossil groundwaters under the deserts of
Egypt outside the Nile Valley might last if they were used exclusively for irrigation, an order of
magnitude calculation can be made. The area of available fossil groundwater will be assumed to
be about 10 times that of the cultivated land area of the Nile Delta plus Nile Valley, equivalent to
about 40% of the total area of Egypt. If these groundwaters have a total equivalent water depth of
about 3 meters, drawn from an area 10 times that of the cropping area and applied at a rate of
about 1.4 meters per year, they would be totally exploited in about 20 years and no longer
available for any other purpose. This rate of consumption is approximately three orders of
magnitude greater than the rate at which the resource originally accumulated over a period
probably in excess of 10,000 years. Clearly this groundwater resource represents a very limited
addition to potential long-term irrigation waters in Egypt, and would be depleted very quickly if
used exclusively for that purpose.

Although this simple calculation suggests that extensive pumping of fossil groundwaters for
irrigation supplies probably should be considered as the least economically valuable potential use
of the resource, this policy has been exactly that planned in Libya. The same type of deep
groundwater resource that lies under Egypt is also found beneath large areas of Libya and
definite construction proposals have been made to pump that water out and into a large pipeline
for irrigation of crops near the Mediterranean Sea in northeastern Libya. The wisdom of such a
choice appears to be no less shortsighted for that country than it would be for Egypt, yet it
remains as a major development goal for Libya. During the 1980s Saudi Arabia initiated large
irrigation projects for grain production based on pumping of old groundwaters from beneath the
deserts of that country. Thus despite the lack of a sustainable supply of irrigation water, large
investments have been or are planned in the Middle East based on "mining" of fossil
groundwaters.

Such shortsighted practices are not confined to oil-rich states with arid climates. Much of the
irrigation expansion which occurred in the mid continent of the USA during the 20th century in
the states of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas and
New Mexico is based on withdrawals from the largest continuous groundwater resource in North
America, the Ogallala Aquifer. Although this groundwater resource currently does receive some
limited recharge, the rate for most of the aquifer is less than half of current irrigation pumping.
As the resource becomes depleted, beginning first with the states towards the southern end of the
region, large investments in irrigation infrastructure will be abandoned and economic returns
from farming in the region will contract dramatically. The process of rapid groundwater resource
depletion has already reached the point that large areas producing high economic value crops
based on "temporary" irrigation in the central USA have already been lost.

Without going into details, some other potential uses of fossil groundwaters in Egypt are worth
exploring. One would be to use this water resource as a temporary source of high quality
drinking water for populations that currently receive only untreated contaminated surface waters
(about half of those living in the country). At present, USAID is heavily involved in delivering
small-scale treatment plants for villages of 2000 to 3000 people that are based on filtration and
chlorination of contaminated surface waters. These treatment facilities cost more than $50
thousand to install for each village unit, appreciable ongoing costs to operate and the necessity of
expensive supplies such as chlorine to be purchased. Because of many difficulties of maintaining
such equipment and obtaining chemical supplies, many of these small-scale domestic water
treatment facilities were not operating as designed within a few years of construction, or are
likely to go out of service completely. In contrast, if the same capital investments were made in
providing groundwaters as a source of drinking water, a factor to ten greater population could be
served with a supply that would not need to be treated at all to eliminate bacterial contamination
because this water is already completely free of such organisms. If these high-purity "fossil"
resources were used exclusively for drinking and cooking, the resource lifetime would be about a
factor of 500 longer than for irrigation. By not having sufficient understanding of the natural
environment to permit taking advantage of favorable circumstances for development, agencies
that are intended to improve the lives of low-income populations in countries such as Egypt often
use their limited economic resources very inefficiently. This is definitely the situation for rural
water supplies in Egypt.

Considering some options for long-term sustainable energy resources for the world, another
possible use of the fossil groundwaters in Egypt and other countries in North Africa could be
considered. The Sahara Desert is the largest continuous area of intense solar radiation to the
surface on the planet. Essentially cloudless for most of the year and having high influx of energy
from the sun, this huge area would be ideal for construction of solar-electricity facilities. One
proposal for storage of energy from solar-generated electricity is to split water molecules into
hydrogen and oxygen by electrolysis. The hydrogen gas then becomes a valuable fuel that could
be transported by pipelines or other means to sites of energy consumption, similar to current
practice for natural gas. If such a possibility were to be pursued for the Sahara, the presence of
high quality groundwater would probably make it more economically favorable. The total
economic value of these groundwater resources might be many orders of magnitude greater as
part of a large solar electric generation network for production of hydrogen as a portable fuel
than for any of the currently proposed uses for irrigation?

OTHER DEVELOPMENT ISSUES RELATED TO RESOURCES IN


EGYPT.
As an example of how some kinds of development policies in one economic or resource sphere
intrude on other areas, it is useful to consider another current trend in Egypt that is influenced by
policies of foreign aid agencies. As electricity demand in the country has grown over the past
five decades, the supply of hydroelectricity is no longer sufficient to meet most of the needs of
the country and cannot be expanded appreciably. Thus there has been considerable pressure to
construct new fossil fuel combustion power stations, many of which are dependent upon
petroleum for a fuel source. Egypt does not have the economic resources to build these power
stations without borrowing money from elsewhere. For many years, most foreign aid agencies
would not loan money for this purpose, at least in part because of artificially low electricity costs
(heavily subsidized) within the country. However, in recent years that policy of the aid agencies
has been relaxed and major construction of fossil fuel power stations has occurred.

Egypt has a very limited supply of domestic petroleum resources, the sale of which on the
international market is the greatest single source of foreign currency to the government of Egypt.
Revenues from these sales of petroleum are used in large part for purchase of wheat and other
basic foods. Completion of new oil-fired power stations will shorten the number of years until
this source of purchasing power is eliminated and there will no longer be sufficient money to buy
food that cannot be produced domestically. Here is a situation where the net effect of providing
loans from international sources may make it more difficult for Egypt to adapt to the severe
limits of its natural resources by shortening the period over which changes must be
accomplished.

Updated January 14, 2007

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