Great Man-Made River

▪ 1997

 One of the largest water-transmission projects in the world, the Great Man-Made River (GMR) in Libya was aimed at bringing high-quality sweet water from underground aquifers deep in the Sahara to the populated areas along the Libyan coast for drinking water and irrigation. The project had several arms, some of which would be under construction until about 2007.

      Water was first discovered in the Al-Kufrah area in Libya's southeastern desert in the 1970s during exploration drilling for oil. Initially, the government planned to set up a large-scale agricultural project in the desert where the water was found, but plans were changed in the early 1980s, and designs were prepared for a massive pipeline to the coast. In 1983 the South Korean company Dong Ah was awarded a contract for the construction, and in 1991 the first arm of the pipeline, known as GMR1, was completed. Hundreds of water wells were drilled at two fields, Tazirbu and Sarir, where water was pumped up from an underground reservoir at a depth of between 80 and 400 m (260 and 1,300 ft). The water, which did not need purification, was then transported by gravity through a 1,900-km (1,200-mi) pipeline to a holding reservoir at Ajdabiya and to the coastal cities of Surt and Banghazi.

      The pipeline itself was the largest in the world with a diameter of 4 m (13 ft). It was being manufactured on-site in Libya at a factory that had been built especially for the purpose. The pipe, manufactured in 7-m (23-ft) sections, was made up of layers of concrete and steel plates, and the sections were laid by specially made cranes, which were capable of lifting as much as 200 metric tons. Some 13,000 people were working in Libya on the project at any one time, 2,500 of them in the pipeline-construction plant. GMR1 was capable of transporting 2 million cu m (70.6 million cu ft) of water per day. In 1996 only a quarter of the capacity was used, but volumes were expected to increase with the completion of an ongoing program to drill more water wells.

      A second pipeline, GMR2 in western Libya, was completed in September 1996 and started supplying Libya's capital, Tripoli, with drinking water from three well fields in the Jabal Nafusah mountain region. Additional well drilling and reservoir construction was scheduled to be completed in 1999. The pipeline's capacity was to be 2.5 million cu m (88.3 million cu ft) of water a day, but only some 600,000-1 million cu m (21 million-35 million cu ft) would be needed for drinking water in Tripoli. The additional capacity in GMR1 and 2 was to be used for agriculture. For this purpose the GMR project included large-scale investments in irrigation infrastructure, which had yet to be started at the year's end. (CHARLOTTE BLUM)

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