Huge Dam to be Built in Ethiopia Nile Cutting Water Supply From Egypt

The latest threat is a massive dam scheduled to be completed this year on the headwaters of the Blue Nile, which supplies 59 percent of Egypt’s water. Ethiopia’s national government has largely self-financed the $5 billion Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), with the promise that it will generate 6,000 megawatts of power. That’s a big deal for Ethiopians, three-quarters of whom now lack access to electricity. The sale of excess electricity to other countries in the region could also bring in $1 billion a year in badly needed foreign exchange revenue.

The dam will create a reservoir more than twice the size of the Hoover Dam’s Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the United States. It will ultimately store 74 billion cubic meters of Blue Nile water. (That’s about 64 million acre-feet, or the amount of water need to cover 100,000 square miles of land one foot deep.) Filling it could take anywhere from five to 15 years.

“During this period of fill,” a new study in the Geological Society of America’s journal GSA Today reports, “the Nile’s freshwater flow to Egypt may be cut by 25 percent, with a loss of a third of the electricity generated by the Aswan High Dam.” That is, of course, Egypt’s own massive dam on the Nile, completed in 1965, roughly 1,500 miles downstream. The GSA study, led by Smithsonian Institution geologist Jean-Daniel Stanley, says Egypt faces “serious country-wide freshwater and energy shortage by 2025.” Agriculture in the delta, which produces up to 60 percent of Egypt’s food, could also suffer from shortages of irrigation water.