Survey of Sustainable Development to Make Great Man-Made River Producing Energy and Food

Abstract

The Great Man-Made River (GMR) is the world largest irrigation project, consisting of a network of pipes that supplies water from Libyan desert in the south to the coastal areas in the north. This paper studies the possibility of taking advantage of GMR to generate energy and produce food through agriculture. Hydro-kinetic power generation would be carried out by generating energy from water movements across Great Man-Made River pipelines using appropriate sizes of turbines. It's known that the length of the GMR pipeline is about 4000 km with a diameter of 4 m. Pipeline of such magnitude with great water flow rate would make a turbine to produce hundreds of Kilowatts of clean energy. The most significant reasons that force us to take advantage of GMR to generate energy are: a) The needs to sustainable environmental energy source; b) Power System uses energy of flowing water to provide a consistent, controllable, non-weather-dependent source of electricity, such as other types of renewable energy, which are depend on the weather. The conversion of GMR, from supplying freshwater to coastal cities, to huge agricultural project after the establishment of many seawater desalination plants (solar powered) would cover the needs of cities for fresh water. Thus it would become possible to convert thousands of desert hectares around the pipelines to huge agricultural project irrigated from GMR.