http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nubian_Sandstone_Aquifer_System
the GREAT MADMAN’S RIVER PROJECT
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MC30Ak01.html
The Water Privatizers
by Pepe Escobar / Mar 30, 2011
Few in the West may know that Libya – along with Egypt – sits over the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer; that is, an ocean of extremely valuable fresh water. Control of the aquifer is priceless. This Water Pipelineistan – buried underground deep in the desert along 4,000 km – is the Great Man-Made River Project (GMMRP), which Gaddafi built for $25 billion without borrowing a single cent from the IMF or the World Bank (what a bad example for the developing world). The GMMRP supplies Tripoli, Benghazi and the whole Libyan coastline. The amount of water is estimated by scientists to be the equivalent to 200 years of water flowing down the Nile. Compare this to the so-called three sisters – Veolia (formerly Vivendi), Suez Ondeo (formerly Generale des Eaux) and Saur – the French companies that control over 40% of the global water market. All eyes must imperatively focus on whether these pipelines are bombed. An extremely possible scenario is that if they are, juicy “reconstruction” contracts will benefit France. That will be the final step to privatize all this – for the moment free – water.
GREAT MAN-MADE RIVER PROJECT (GMMRP)
http://www.gmmra.org/en/
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Africa/2010/0823/Libya-s-Qaddafi-taps-fossil-water-to-irrigate-desert-farms
by Sarah A. Topol / August 23, 2010
In the middle of the Libyan Desert’s scorched yellow sands, rows of green grapes dangle off vines; almond trees blossom in neat lines, and pear tree orchards stretch into the distance. Libya is one of the driest countries on Earth, bereft of rivers, lakes, and rain. But here the desert is blooming. In the Middle East and North Africa, the quest to turn thousands of miles of desert into arable land has taken a backseat to containing an impending water shortage. While many countries in the region bicker over water rights, Libya has taken it upon itself to change its topography – turning sand into soil.
The Great Man-Made River, which is leader Muammar Qaddafi’s ambitious answer to the country’s water problems, irrigates Libya’s large desert farms. The 2,333-mile network of pipes ferry water from four major underground aquifers in southern Libya to the northern population centers. Wells punctuate the water’s path, allowing farmers to utilize the water network in their fields. The Libyan government says the 26-year project has cost $19.58 billion. Nearing completion, the Great Man-Made River is the largest irrigation project in the world and the government says it intends to use it to develop 160,000 hectares (395,000 acres) of farmland. It is also the cheapest available option to irrigate fields in the water-scarce country, which has an average annual rainfall of about one inch. “Rainfall is just concentrated in 5 percent of the [country’s] area, so more or less, 95 percent or 90 percent of our land is desert,” says Abdul Magid al-Kaot, minister of agriculture, during a PowerPoint presentation that accompanied a recent several-hour government tour of the project and farms outside the capital of Tripoli. “Water is more precious for us than oil. … Water here in Libya, it’s life.”
Just as Libya mines the desert for crude; they are doing the same for ‘fossil water’ – ice age water preserved in the porous holes of the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer. The massive aquifer stretches under Libya, Egypt, Chad, and Sudan. It includes four freshwater basins inside Libya that contain approximately 10,000 to 12,000 cubic kilometers (480 cubic miles) of ancient water buried as deep as 600 meters (2,000 feet) below the surface of the desert, reporters were told during the government presentation. Libya moves the precious resource from the ground to five giant above-ground reservoirs through pre-stressed concrete pipes, weighing 75-86 tons, that run 20 feet underground. Cranes weighing 450 tons operated on specially constructed roads to install the mammoth cylinders.
Other countries also drill for underground water, but none do so as intensely as Libya. The country is pulling up 2.5 million cubic meters per day, with the expectation of eventually pumping 6.5 million. Experts liken the project to moving 2.5 million Volkswagen Beetles more than 2000 miles every day – one car weighs roughly the same as a cubic meter of water, which is 2200 pounds. New drip irrigation techniques are being used to ensure water does not go to waste. More than 70 percent of the water is intended for subsided domestic agriculture, with the rest for citizen consumption. None is reserved for heavy industry, according to the government.
Although it is cheaper for Libya to pump the underground water than use desalination or import the substance, experts are wary of Libya’s decision to irrigate large scale farms with fossil water. “For Libya this is pretty expensive water. It’s not as expensive as desalinated water, but to irrigate with it is probably not cost effective at the purest sense,” says Aaron Wolf, professor and chair of the department of geosciences at Oregon State University. “If the farmer had to pay the full cost of pumping and shipping the water to them, they wouldn’t break even on their agriculture, that’s why other countries aren’t doing it.”
The Libyan government heavily subsidizes the water for farmers who pay about $0.62 for one cubic meter; slightly less than half the price citizens pay to drink it. “This is basically a wonder of the world, because it’s exactly like the pyramids – it’s huge and massive and probably not cost effective,” says Mr. Wolf. The Libyan government says reserves will last the country 4,625 years according to current rates of demand. But independent estimates indicate that the aquifer could be depleted in as soon as 60 to 100 years, says Stephen Lonergan, a professor of geography at the University of Victoria in Canada. “The main concerns with any non-renewable resource are the depletion rate and the dependency that is built up by using the resource,” he wrote in an e-mail to the Monitor. “The knock on these projects is that once the water runs out, there is a dependency that can only be met in the future by desalination or importing water,” Mr. Lonergan continues. Projects like this create “a legacy that may have short term gains but ultimately makes the country or region very vulnerable in the future.” For now, as giant sprinklers mist a 100,000 olive tree nursery in a greenhouse surrounded by sand on the outskirts of Tripoli, Libyan fields are flourishing.
8th WONDER of the WORLD
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4814988.stm
by John Watkins / 18 March 2006
Libyans like to call it “the eighth wonder of the world”. The description might be flattering, but the Great Man-Made River Project has the potential to transform Libyan life in all sorts of ways. Libya is a desert country, and finding fresh water has always been a problem. Following the Great Al-Fatah Revolution in 1969, when an army coup led by Muammar Al Qadhafi deposed King Idris, industrialisation put even more strain on water supplies. Coastal aquifers became contaminated with sea water, to such an extent that the water in Benghazi (Libya’s second city) was undrinkable. Finding a supply of fresh, clean water became a government priority. Oil exploration in the 1950s had revealed vast aquifers beneath Libya’s southern desert. According to radiocarbon analysis, some of the water in the aquifers was 40,000 years old. Libyans call it “fossil water”. After weighing up the relative costs of desalination or transporting water from Europe, Libyan economists decided that the cheapest option was to construct a network of pipelines to transport water from the desert to the coastal cities, where most Libyans live.
In August 1984, Muammar Al Qadhafi laid the foundation stone for the pipe production plant at Brega. The Great Man-Made River Project had begun. Libya had oil money to pay for the project, but it did not have the technical or engineering expertise for such a massive undertaking. Foreign companies from South Korea, Turkey, Germany, Japan, the Philippines and the UK were invited to help. In September 1993, Phase I water from eastern well-fields at Sarir and Tazerbo reached Benghazi. Three years later, Phase II, bringing water to Tripoli from western well-fields at Jebel Hassouna, was completed. Phase III which links the first two Phases is still under construction. Adam Kuwairi, a senior figure in the Great Man-Made River Authority (GMRA), vividly remembers the impact the fresh water had on him and his family. “The water changed lives. For the first time in our history, there was water in the tap for washing, shaving and showering,” he told the BBC World Service’s Discovery programme.
To get an idea of the scale of the Great Man-Made River Project, you have to visit some of the sites. Libya is opening up, but it’s still hard for foreign journalists to get visas. We had to wait almost six months for ours; but once we arrived in Libya, Libyans were eager to tell us about the project. They took us to see a reservoir under construction at Suluq. When it’s finished, the Grand Omar Mukhtar will be Libya’s largest man-made reservoir. Standing on the floor of such a huge, empty space is an awesome experience. Concrete walls rise steeply to the sky; tarring machines descend on wires to lay a waterproof coating over the concrete. Further west along the coast is the Pre-Stressed Concrete Cylinder Pipe factory at Brega. This is where they make the 4m-diameter pipes that transport water from the desert to the coast. It’s a modern, well-equipped factory, built specially for the Great Man-Made River Project. So far, the factory has made more than half a million pipes. The pipes are designed to last 50 years, and each pipe has a unique identification mark, so if anything goes wrong, engineers can quickly establish when the pipe was made. The engineer in charge of the Brega pipe factory is Ali Ibrahim. He is proud that Libyans are now running the factory: “At first, we had to rely on foreign-owned companies to do the work. “But now it’s government policy to involve Libyans in the project. Libyans are gaining experience and know-how, and now more than 70% of the manufacturing is done by Libyans. With time, we hope we can decrease the foreign percentage from 30% to 10%.”
Opening markets
With fossil water available in most of Libya’s coastal cities, the government is now beginning to use its water for agriculture. Over the country as a whole, 130,000 hectares of land will be irrigated for new farms. Some land will be given to small farmers who will grow produce for the domestic market. Large farms, run at first with foreign help, will concentrate on the crops that Libya currently has to import: wheat, oats, corn and barley. Libya also hopes to make inroads into European and Middle-Eastern markets. An organic grape farm has been set up near Benghazi. Because the soil is so fertile, agronomists hope to grow two cereal crops a year. It is hard to fault the Libyans on their commitment. They estimate that when the Great Man-Made River is completed, they will have spent almost $20bn. So far, that money has bought 5,000km of pipeline that can transport 6.5 million cubic metres of water a day from over 1,000 desert wells. As a result, Libya is now a world leader in hydrological engineering, and it wants to export its expertise to other African and Middle-Eastern countries facing the same problems with their water. Through its agriculture, Libya hopes to gain a foothold in Europe’s consumer market. But the Great Man-Made River Project is much more than an extraordinary piece of engineering. Adam Kuwairi argues that the success of the Great Man-Made River Project has increased Libya’s standing in the world: “It’s another addition to our independence; it gives us the confidence to survive.” Of course, there are questions. No-one is sure how long the water will last. And until the farms are working, it’s impossible to say whether they will be able to deliver the quantity and quality of produce for which the planners are hoping. But the combination of water and oil has given Libya a sound economic platform. Ideally placed as the “Gateway to Africa”, Libya is in a good position to play an increasingly influential role in the global economy.
GREAT MAN-MADE RIVER AUTHORITY (GMRA)
http://www.water-technology.net/projects/gmr/specs.html
http://www.water-technology.net/projects/gmr/
Contracts were awarded in 2001-02 for the next phase of Libya’s Great Man-Made River Project, an enormous, long-term undertaking to supply the country’s needs by drawing water from aquifers beneath the Sahara and conveying it along a network of huge underground pipes. In October 2001, the Great Man-Made River Authority (GMRA) awarded an $82 million contract for the construction of major new pumping facilities to a consortium led by Frankenthal KSB Fluid Systems. In January the following year, the Nippon Koei / Halcrow consortium was selected to provide the preliminary engineering and design works for Phase III of the operation, worth $15.5 million. The pumping station is scheduled to be completed in the summer of 2004 and KSB will subsequently be responsible for servicing the plant and providing technical support for one year after completion. The preliminary stages of phase III run until June 2005, though it is anticipated that GMRA will invite tenders for the detailed design and construction works towards the end of 2004. When completed, phase III, which requires an additional 1,200km of pipeline, will ultimately increase the total daily supply capacity of the existing system to 3.68 million m³ and provide a further 138,000m³/day to Tobruk and the coast.
Background
In 1953, the search for new oilfields in the deserts of southern Libya led to the discovery not only of the significant oil reserves, but also vast quantities of fresh water trapped in the underlying strata. The majority of this water was collected between 38,000 and 14,000 years ago, though some pockets are only 7,000 years old. There are four major underground basins. The Kufra basin, lying in the south east, near the Egyptian border, covers an area of 350,000km², forming an aquifer layer over 2,000m deep, with an estimated capacity of 20,000km³ in the Libyan sector. The 600m-deep aquifer in the Sirt basin is estimated to hold over 10,000km³ of water, while the 450,000km² Murzuk basin, south of Jabal Fezzan, is estimated to hold 4,800km³. Further water lies in the Hamadah and Jufrah basins, which extend from the Qargaf Arch and Jabal Sawda to the coast.
The GMR project – the world’s largest engineering venture – is intended to transport water from these aquifers to the northern coastal belt, to provide for the country’s 5.6 million inhabitants and for irrigation. Intended to be the showpiece of the Libyan revolution, Colonel Moammar Gaddafi called it the “eighth wonder of the world”. First conceived in the late 1960s, the initial feasibility studies were conducted in 1974 and work began ten years later. The project, which still has an estimated 25 years to run, was designed in five phases. Each one is largely separate in itself but will eventually combine to form an integrated system.
Pipe sections for the Great Man-made River Project, 1987, photo by Jaap Berk via WikiCommons
Phases I and II
The first and largest phase, providing 2 million m³/day along a 1,200km pipeline from As-Sarir and Tazerbo to Benghazi and Sirt, via the Ajdabiya reservoir, was formally inaugurated in August 1991. This was a massive undertaking, using a quarter of a million sections of concrete pipe, 2.5 million t of cement, 13 million t of aggregate, 2 million km of pre-stressed wire and requiring 85 million m³ of excavation, for a finished cost of $14 billion. The Tazerbo wellfield consists of both production and piezometric observation wells and yields around 1 million m³/day at a rate of 120L/s per well. Only 98 of the 108 production wells are used, with the others on stand-by. A collection network conveys the water to a 170,000m³ off-line steel header tank. From here, the main conveyance system is routed 256km to the north, to two similar header tanks at Sarir, where the second Phase I wellfield is located. A further 1 million m³ is produced here, using 114 of the 126 production wells, at an average flow rate of 102L/s per well. The wells at both Tazerbo and Sarir are about 450m deep and are equipped with submersible pumps at a depth of 145m.
From Sarir, two parallel, 4m-diameter pipelines convey the now chlorine-treated water to the 4 million m³ Ajdabiya holding reservoir, 380km to the north. The water flows from this 900m-diameter reservoir through two pipelines, one heading west to Sirt and the other north to Benghazi. Each pipeline discharges into a circular earth embankment end reservoir, with a storage capacity of 6.8 million m³ at Sirt and 4.7 million m³ at Benghazi, which have been designed to balance fluctuations in supply and demand. In addition, large reservoirs – 37 million m³ in the Sirt area and 76 million m³ in Benghazi – have been built to act as storage facilities for summer or drought conditions. Phase II delivers 1 million m³/day from the Fezzan region to the fertile Jeffara plain in the western coastal belt and also supplies Tripoli. The system starts at a wellfield at Sarir Qattusah, consisting of 127 wells distributed along three east-west collector pipelines and ultimately feeds a 28 million m³ terminal reservoir at Suq El Ahad.
Phase III
Phase III falls into two main parts. Firstly, it will provide the planned expansion of the existing Phase I system, adding an additional 1.68 million m³/day along with 700km of new pipeline and new pumping stations to produce a final total capacity to 3.68 million m³/day. Secondly, it will supply 138,000m³/day to Tobruk and the coast from a new wellfield at Al Jaghboub. This will require the construction of a reservoir south of Tobruk and the laying of a further 500km of pipeline. The preliminary engineering and design contract runs for 41 months and includes geotechnical and topographic surveys. The conceptual designs phase features extensive consideration of pipeline routing and profiling, hydraulics, pumping stations, M&E, control / communications system, reservoirs and other structures, corrosion control, power, operational support and maintenance provision. The evaluation of tenders for the detailed design is expected in the first quarter of 2005. The last two phases of the project involve the extension of the distribution network together with the construction of a pipeline linking the Ajdabiya reservoir to Tobruk and finally the connection at Sirt of the eastern and western systems into a single network. When completed, irrigation water from the GMR will enable about 155,000ha of land to be cultivated – echoing the Libyan leader’s original prediction that the project would make the desert as green as the country’s flag.
Key Players
The project is owned by the Great Man-made River Authority and funded by the Libyan Government. Brown & Root and Price Brothers produced the original project design and the main contractor for the initial phases was Dong Ah, with Enka Construction and Al Nah acting as sub-contractors. The preliminary engineering and design contractor for Phase III is Nippon Koei / Halcrow consortium. The Frankenthal KSB consortium won the pumping station construction and technical support contract and SNC-Lavalin are responsible for the pipe production plant O&M. Libyan Cement supplied the concrete. Thane-Coat and Harkmel provided pipeline coating services and Corrintec supplied the cathodic protection system. Thyssen Krupp Fördertechnik provided technical services for the excavation planning and a number of local companies carried out elements of the construction and ancillary work.
SUSPICIONS
http://www.fas.org/news/libya/971202-nyt.htm
Mysterious Libyan Pipeline Could Be Conduit for Troops
by Raymond Bonner / December 2, 1997 / NYTimes
In the sandy expanse of Libya’s desert, where temperatures climb above 100 degrees on a winter’s day, an army of more than 12,000 foreign workers is toiling on one of the world’s most audacious and mysterious public works projects. Drilling rigs rise 60 feet in the air, their gigantic hammers and powerful drilling bits boring more than a quarter mile into the earth. Hundreds of trucks haul 75-ton sections of concrete pipe, 13 feet in diameter, which are then lowered into place by huge cranes and buried beneath the sand. Libya calls it the Great Man-Made River Project, and says the gargantuan lattice work of underground pipes, wells and pumping stations will someday make the desert bloom from Tripoli to Kufra.
But in separate interviews, three engineers working on the $25-billion project said the official explanation was improbable or incomplete. They said they suspect the system of underground pipes and reservoirs, which is being built largely with American equipment, has some clandestine military purpose. “If Saddam Hussein said he was building a 4-meter pipe to 100 miles from Kuwait, 100 miles from Iran, 100 miles from Turkey, for the purpose of moving water, would you believe him?” asked one European engineer. A tunnel of pipes 4 meters, or 13 feet, in diameter is large enough to accommodate military vehicles, even a rail line. When the project is completed, Libya will have more than 2,000 miles of tunnel stretching from Tunisia to Egypt. In the south, it will reach almost to Sudan and Chad, a country with which Libya has tense relations.
Every 50 to 60 miles along the pipeline, huge underground storage areas are being constructed, and the engineers said they are more elaborate than would be needed for holding water. The facilities, made of reinforced concrete, would be suitable for bivouacking troops or storing military supplies, including poison gas, the engineers said. While the system of pipelines does not by itself change the military balance in the region, it provides Col. Moammar Gadhafi, the Libyan leader, extensive opportunities to conceal his activities from the American spy satellites that pass overhead each day. “This is the first real evidence of something which has been suspected for several years,” Paul Beaver, a defense and intelligence analyst with Jane’s Defense Weekly, said when told of the engineers’ descriptions of the project. “Gadhafi seems to have taken a leaf out of Kim Il Sung’s book and created a potential military arsenal underground,” he added, referring to the late North Korean dictator.
North Korea has an elaborate underground military system with storage facilities and tunnel routes for vehicles and troops. Beaver, a former British army officer with intelligence expertise, said that the tunnel system would allow Gadhafi to conceal troop movements, gain an element of surprise over an enemy, and protect his own troops from pre-emptive strikes. Other analysts are alarmed because the pipeline runs through a mountain called Tarhuna. This is where Gadhafi is constructing a chemical and biological weapons plant, American and European intelligence officials have said. The tunnel system would be an “extension of Tarhuna,” said Robert Waller, an American expert on Libyan national security policy. It would provide Gadhafi with more places to store his chemical and biological weapons, protecting them from destruction or detection by overhead surveillance, said Waller, who worked at the National Security Council last summer.
The engineers who described the project were interviewed in different countries. They said they felt their jobs, and lives, would be at risk if they were identified. One of the men approached The New York Times after reading an article in the newspaper about industrial sales to Libya; he has also taken his observations and concerns to American officials. The other two men, residents of different countries, were located and interviewed separately; neither have spoken with American officials. All of the men have had considerable experience on oil and water drilling projects around the world. How so much American equipment has reached Libya for the project is unclear. An embargo on trade with Libya has been in place since 1986 when President Ronald Reagan imposed it in in response to evidence that Gadhafi was behind numerous terrorist attacks. Yet, the desert is awash with American equipment. “I see so many American products in Libya,” said Alberto Bertoli, a senior manager with Il Nuovo Castoro, an Italian construction company that is a major subcontractor on the project. “I don’t know how they got there.”
The engineers, and Bertoli, said the project was relying on Cummins engines, Caterpillar earth-moving equipment, Baker Hughes drilling bits, Dowell Schlumberger cementing units and chemicals, as well as mining and drilling equipment from other American companies. One of the engineers said he had seen more than 400 Caterpillars. In a response to questions, the Peoria, Ill.-based company issued a statement saying that it went to “great lengths to comply with U.S. law,” and that, “Specific shipments of Caterpillar products to customers in Libya have taken place with full approval of the U.S. government. Caterpillar does not condone any transactions involving our equipment by third parties that do not comply with U.S. law.”
“We won’t be providing any additional information,” the company said. A senior official at the Treasury Department, which enforces the embargo on Libya, said the department had issued no licenses for export of any heavy equipment from the United States to Libya. Cummins Engine, based in Indiana, said in a statement that it “is fully aware of the legal restrictions on dealing with Libya, and to our knowledge, there are no Cummins engines in Libya unlawfully.” Bertoli and the three engineers asserted that most of the dozen Soilmec drilling rigs in Libya were outfitted with Cummins engines.
Soilmec, an Italian manufacturer, said that indeed it had bought engines from Cummins and that it had sold a dozen drilling rigs to Libya. It declined to say, however, if any had Cummins engines. The European Union does not bar commercial trade with Libya, largely because many European countries rely on Libya for their oil and gas. It is revenue from this trade that finances the Great Man-Made River Project. And one way that Libya acquires American equipment is by routing it through a European company — with or without the American company’s knowledge of the ultimate destination. American companies also get around the sanctions by having the work in Libya done by their foreign subsidiaries, Bertoli and the engineers said. Such transactions are beyond the reach of the sanctions law only if the subsidiary acts strictly on its own, without any guidance from its American parent, U.S. officials said.
When the Great Man-Made River Project was begun in 1984, Brown and Root, the Houston construction company, prepared the feasibility studies and drafted the specifications. Price Brothers, a pipe-manufacturing company in Ohio, supplied the pipe-making machinery. Brown and Root, which is now owned by Halliburton, is still the project manager, and the huge pipes are manufactured at Brega, near Benghazi, under license from Price Brothers, a privately owned company. But after the sanctions were imposed, Brown and Root transferred the work being done in Houston to its British office, said Ken Beedle, a spokesman for Brown and Root in Britain. He said the company had 200 people working on the contract in Libya and another 200 in Britain. He declined to say how much the contract was worth. Price Brothers did not respond to requests for comment, made to its American and British offices. But in the past, news reports have said that it, too, transferred work to its British office after sanctions were imposed.
The primary contractor for the multi-billion-dollar Great Man-Made River Project is Dong Ah, a South Korean construction conglomerate. It has recruited its engineers from Europe and its laborers from Asia — to feed them, Dong Ah has farms near Benghazi, one for eggs and chickens, another for vegetables and a third for beef.The company buys its equipment from the United States when it can. Last year, the company and two employees, Je Han-lee and Glen Ainsworth, pleaded guilty before a federal court in Louisville, Ky., to charges of illegally exporting drilling equipment from the United States to Libya. The company paid a $3 million fine while the employees received probation and fines of $5,000 each. Dong Ah is currently under investigation in Texas, on charges of having violated the embargo by buying anti-corrosive pipe chemicals for the Libyan project, and of money-laundering, American law enforcement officials said.
Companies that violate the embargo are subject to having their export licenses revoked by the Commerce Department. It is not clear why Dong Ah has not had sanctions imposed on it, and a Commerce Department spokesman declined to comment, saying that the department would not comment on any investigations that “may or may not be under way.” Dong Ah did not respond to a fax with questions about the project, including how the company was able to buy equipment from American companies.
One of the engineers said that Dong Ah was currently bringing to Libya a piece of equipment made by Dowell Schlumberger which is used to pour cement into holes and that Ainsworth had arranged it. The engineers said the unit, which may be reconditioned, came via Hamburg, Germany. Ainsworth was in Libya, and could not be reached. A spokesman for Schlumberger, who asked not to be identified by name, said that it was the company’s “policy in all parts of the world to adhere to all U.S. laws as well as all other applicable laws regarding such situations.” The company, which is registered in the Netherlands Antilles and has its headquarters in Paris and New York, declined to comment further.
A division of one of Schlumberger’s competitors, Baker Hughes, has also been supplying the Great Man-Made River Project, according to the engineers. Hughes Christensen, a division of the Baker Hughes in Belfast, offered to sell Dong Ah, 20 rock bits, at $20,000 each, according to a fax provided to The New York Times. The offer was sent to Dong Ah’s Je Han-lee, one of the men who pled guilty in the Kentucky case. Baker Hughes has its headquarters in Houston and a spokesman for the company, Arthur Downey, said its policy on trade with Libya was “stricter than U.S. law requires. It is well within the law for Hughes Christensen in the U.K. to have a transaction with Libya,” Downey said, referring to Britain.
The Great Man-Made River Project is intended primarily to supply water for irrigation, not drinking, said Bertoli, the manager with Il Nuovo Castoro. After more than a decade of work, however, almost no irrigation work has been done, such as digging ditches or running pipes from the main line, according to the three engineers and a French consultant on the project. At the same time, about 70 percent of the 13-foot pipe has been laid, and one third of the wells have been dug, the consultant said. This reinforces the engineers’ doubts that it is an irrigation project. Moreover, if it were, one of the engineers said, there would be no need to lay a 13-foot pipe from Tripoli and Benghazi. A pipe half that diameter would be adequate for hundreds of miles, because there would be less water to carry if water were being diverted along the way for irrigation.
In conventional military terms, the investment of $25 billion in an underground tunnel system seems excessive, said Waller, the Libyan security expert, who is studying for a doctorate in the Department of War Studies at King’s College, London. But, Gadhafi does not always act rationally on military matters, said Waller. For example, the Libyan leader has spent billions of dollars fortifying his Mediterranean coastline, as if he were preparing for a repeat of the Normandy invasion, Waller said. “It is in keeping with his siege mentality,” he added. Bertoli said it was “not logical” for Gadhafi to spend $25 billion in this way if his aims were military. Then again, he observed, it was not entirely rational for Libya, which has suffered economic difficulties, to spend that amount of money to move water through the desert. “It is not an economical project,” he said.