How Egypt Is Digging a 310 km River Into the Sahara Desert
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283,137 views
How Egypt is digging a 310 km river into the Sahara Desert, and why it has taken almost thirty years.
Egypt has a problem that no other large country has quite so severely. Around 95% of Egyptians live on roughly 5% of Egypt's land. Everyone is packed into the Nile valley and the Nile delta, a green strip a few kilometres wide cutting through a nation that is otherwise Sahara Desert. The population keeps growing. The green strip does not.
So Egypt started digging a second river.
The Toshka Project, also known as the New Valley Project, pulls water from Lake Nasser behind the Aswan High Dam, lifts it with the Mubarak Pumping Station, and pushes it west into open Sahara Desert through the Sheikh Zayed Canal. The plan is to irrigate desert, create farmland where none has ever existed, and build a second inhabited valley parallel to the Nile.
Construction on this 310 km desert river began in the 1990s. It is still underway today.
This documentary explains how Egypt is digging a river into the Sahara Desert, what the engineering actually involves, and why the results have fallen so far short of what was promised.
THE TOSHKA PROJECT DEBATE
The engineering behind Egypt's 310 km Sahara river is genuinely impressive. The harder question is whether the Toshka Project works.
Original targets for reclaimed desert farmland and resettled population were enormous. Actual delivery has come in far below those targets, over a much longer timeline, at very high cost. Persuading private investors to farm remote Sahara Desert has proven difficult. Several reclaimed areas have struggled with soil quality and salinity.
And underneath the whole Toshka Project sits the water question. Digging a river into the Sahara does not create new water. It relocates Nile water that was already allocated, into a desert where evaporation rates are extreme, in a country whose Nile share is fixed by agreement and increasingly contested as upstream nations build their own dams.
That argument about Egypt, the Nile and the Sahara is not settled, and this documentary presents both sides of it.
CHAPTERS:
00:00 - Introduction: A River in the Sahara
01:40 - Egypt's Farmland & Population Crisis
03:27 - The Toshka Project Plan
05:24 - Building the Lake Nasser Pumping Station
08:50 - Excavating 310 km of Desert Canal
12:06 - Blasting Through the Granite Ridge
13:48 - Blocking Saline Groundwater
15:43 - Concrete Lining in 50°C Heat
18:07 - Desert Irrigation & Soil Preparation
21:16 - Water Reaches Toshka: The First Harvest
23:03 - Battling Soil Salinization & Drainage
25:52 - Transforming the Sahara (Satellite View)
26:52 - Project Delays, Costs & Reality Check
27:54 - Conclusion & Next Megaproject
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How Egypt Is Digging a 310 km River Into the Sahara Desert
Overengineered
283,137 views
How Egypt is digging a 310 km river into the Sahara Desert, and why it has taken almost thirty years.
Egypt has a problem that no other large country has quite so severely. Around 95% of Egyptians live on roughly 5% of Egypt's land. Everyone is packed into the Nile valley and the Nile delta, a green strip a few kilometres wide cutting through a nation that is otherwise Sahara Desert. The population keeps growing. The green strip does not.
So Egypt started digging a second river.
The Toshka Project, also known as the New Valley Project, pulls water from Lake Nasser behind the Aswan High Dam, lifts it with the Mubarak Pumping Station, and pushes it west into open Sahara Desert through the Sheikh Zayed Canal. The plan is to irrigate desert, create farmland where none has ever existed, and build a second inhabited valley parallel to the Nile.
Construction on this 310 km desert river began in the 1990s. It is still underway today.
This documentary explains how Egypt is digging a river into the Sahara Desert, what the engineering actually involves, and why the results have fallen so far short of what was promised.
THE TOSHKA PROJECT DEBATE
The engineering behind Egypt's 310 km Sahara river is genuinely impressive. The harder question is whether the Toshka Project works.
Original targets for reclaimed desert farmland and resettled population were enormous. Actual delivery has come in far below those targets, over a much longer timeline, at very high cost. Persuading private investors to farm remote Sahara Desert has proven difficult. Several reclaimed areas have struggled with soil quality and salinity.
And underneath the whole Toshka Project sits the water question. Digging a river into the Sahara does not create new water. It relocates Nile water that was already allocated, into a desert where evaporation rates are extreme, in a country whose Nile share is fixed by agreement and increasingly contested as upstream nations build their own dams.
That argument about Egypt, the Nile and the Sahara is not settled, and this documentary presents both sides of it.
CHAPTERS:
00:00 - Introduction: A River in the Sahara
01:40 - Egypt's Farmland & Population Crisis
03:27 - The Toshka Project Plan
05:24 - Building the Lake Nasser Pumping Station
08:50 - Excavating 310 km of Desert Canal
12:06 - Blasting Through the Granite Ridge
13:48 - Blocking Saline Groundwater
15:43 - Concrete Lining in 50°C Heat
18:07 - Desert Irrigation & Soil Preparation
21:16 - Water Reaches Toshka: The First Harvest
23:03 - Battling Soil Salinization & Drainage
25:52 - Transforming the Sahara (Satellite View)
26:52 - Project Delays, Costs & Reality Check
27:54 - Conclusion & Next Megaproject