Ethiopian Dam

East Africa: Ethiopian Dam Plans Spark Regional Tensions

The project's potential impact on water supplies in Egypt and Sudan is causing friction, finds Rehab Abd Almohsen.
A group of Egyptian academics and experts have declared their opposition to the current plans for the US$4.8 billion Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam - on which work has started, and which will be Africa's largest hydroelectric power plant when completed - because they believe it will damage their country.
Egypt's Nile Basin Group was set up to assess the possible threat from the dam, which will lie close to Ethiopia's border with Sudan. Its members warn that the structure could slash the Nile's flow, especially in Egypt and Sudan, which depend on the river's waters.
Haider Yusuf Bakheit, a Sudanese hydrologist, was reported in an article in Infrastructure News as saying that the dam "will hold back nearly one-and-a-half times the average annual flow" of the Blue Nile, one of the Nile's two main tributaries, and "drastically affect the downstream nations' agriculture, electricity and water supply".
"Given the massive size of the dam, it could lose as much as three billion cubic metres of water to evaporation each year," he warned.
Enlarged plans
There was alarm in Egypt when the plan to build the dam was announced in 2011 - with some MPs talking off the record about Egypt's right to retaliate militarily - but much of the opposition now focuses on Ethiopia's decision to increase the size of the reservoir behind the dam.
"The original plan was to create a lake that would store 14 billion cubic metres of water, which is enough to generate electricity, but then the lake's capacity was increased to 74 billion cubic metres," Nader Noureddin, a member of the Nile Basin Group and professor of soil and water resources at Cairo University, tells SciDev.Net. Planned electricity output has also risen, from 5,250 to 6,000 megawatts.
Noureddin says that when Ethiopia decided to increase the height of the primary dam from the 90 metres in the original design to 170 metres, the planners were forced to include a secondary 'saddle dam' to help confine the vast reservoir created by the main dam and prevent stored water from escaping back to the Blue Nile.
"For the first time in history, we find a secondary dam that is four times as large as the original dam, which indicates the aim behind building such a huge dam is not generating electricity, but to use the dam as a way to control Egypt," argues Noureddin. In effect, he says, it would enable Ethiopia to turn off Egypt's water supply.
He favours sticking to the dam's original height and scrapping the idea for the saddle dam.