GREEN LIGHT FOR RED-DEAD SEA PIPELINE PROJECT
GREEN LIGHT FOR RED-DEAD SEA PIPELINE PROJECT
Approved before the end of the year, the $10 billion Red Sea-Dead Sea project will see the joining of two oceans in the Middle East to transport millions of cubic metres of seawater. Could the 180km pipeline and world's largest desalination plant bring peace to the region?
Red Sea source Smithsonian Journeys
By Jeremy Josephs.
It took a miracle for Moses to part the waters of the Red Sea. But as if to adduce evidence that divine intervention is not always required, the ambitious $10 billion Red Sea-Dead Sea conduit project was recently signed between Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian authorities.
The historic agreement received its official seal of approval through the World Bank just two weeks before Christmas and has been heralded as the solution to Jordan's water deficit and the Dead Sea's ongoing and dramatic environmental degradation.
The multinational proposal is to build a 180 km pipeline engineered to carry up to two billion cubic metres of seawater per year from the Gulf of Aqaba on the Red Sea through Jordanian territory to the Red Sea.
In fact the notion of connecting the two seas by a conduit or canal is nothing new. Back in the late 19th century planners had pondered how to use the Jordan River for irrigation and to bring water to the Dead Sea. But like many well-intentioned projects in the Middle East and much talk of 'saving the Dead Sea' nothing actually happened.
Meanwhile the Dead Sea itself, considered by some as both the cradle of human culture and civilisation, has fallen from 394 meters below sea level in the 1960s to 423 meters below sea level today. The water surface has also shrunk dramatically - from 950 km2 square kilometres to 637 km2. Unlikely to dry up completely, it is predicted that its surface will diminish to an estimated 300 km2, with the water level continuing to drop at the alarming pace of one meter per year.
Yet Friends of the Earth Middle East (FoEME) and other environmental groups have countered that the mega-project was fatally flawed from the outset. They argued that the only sustainable solution is to tackle the source of the problem by rehabilitating the Jordan river which, since time immemorial, has fed the Dead Sea with fresh water. Such fresh water is now singularly lacking courtesy of massive diversions in the form of dams, canals and pumping stations constructed by Israel, Syria, Jordan and the Palestinian Authority alike.
Jordan's support
Standing pensively on the shores of the Dead Sea Gidon Bromberg, Israeli director of FoEME, points to a now defunct hotel which had originally been built by the shoreline.
"You see that building. It's now over one kilometre away," he laments. "And you know why? Because 98% of the flow of the Jordan River, which feeds the Dead Sea, has been diverted. Plus the World Bank is talking about three pipelines, a very large pipe according to the bank's own report that would be some 60 meters in width – so we are also talking about a major scar on the landscape, massive pipes which would run above ground for the best part of 200 kms."
Grand designs: the multinational proposal is to build a 180-kilometre pipeline engineered to carry up to two billion cubic metres of seawater per year from the Gulf of Aqaba on the Red Sea through Jordanian territory to the Red Sea
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