- welcome everyone towednesday nite @ the lab . i'm tom zinnen, i workhere at the uw-madison biotechnology center. i also work for uw-extensioncooperative extension. and on behalf of those folksand our other co-organizers, wisconsin public television,wisconsin alumni association, and uw-madison and sciencealliance, thanks again for coming towednesday nite @ the lab . we do this every wednesdaynight, 50 times a year.
tonight it's my pleasure tointroduce to you, paul block. he's a professor here inthe civil and environmental engineering department. he'll be talking to us about the grand ethiopianrenaissance dam. and for a state that inits constitution says that the waters of wisconsinshall remain forever free, it's a big deal to talkabout dams and what they do to communities, to countriesand to international relations.
paul was born inwinfield, kansas, grew up in seward, nebraska, went to undergraduateat valparaisouniversity in indiana, then spent severalyears teaching ineurope and in africa. and he spent several yearsin minnesota at rochester, then got his phd atthe university ofcolorado in boulder, then post-doc-ed atcolumbia university, went on to drexeluniversity in philadelphia. and then three years ago, hecame here for an interview
in january. (audience laughing) and we thought we wereputting him through something and then somebody said, "ohyeah, he's lived four years "in minnesota," hmmm. so i'm delighted tohave paul here tonight to talk about the grand ethiopian renaissance dam in africa, thank you.
- thank you very much, tom. (audience applause) thank you, i appreciate that. thank you very much forcoming this evening. it's a really nicechance and opportunity to be able to present someof the research activities that are happeningin my research group. and i should very muchstate clearly up front that my students and post-docs
have done most of this work. so if this is an enjoyablepresentation for you, we can give them the credit. if it falls flat on its knees, then we can blame me for that. so i'm in civil andenvironmental engineering. i think mostly about waterresources management. much of my work isinternationally focused. some of that workis in ethiopia.
some of that work is insouth america as well, although, i do have somestudents that are focusing on projects here in wisconsin, even as close as lake mendota. some students that arefocusing in texas as well. and then others thatare focused on a more global approach. so i want to emphasize thefact that i'm an engineer. and although i'm goingto be talking broadly
about ethiopia and about thenile and the nile river basin, i'm not going to inundate youtonight with facts and figures about hydropower generation. so if you came to hear that,i'm sorry to disappoint you. but i'm also not a historian, and i'm not anexpert on ethiopia. but what i'd like to doto start out is provide a little context. so how is it that ethiopiacame to be in the state
that it is in now? the decisions that arebeing made by ethiopians and ethiopian government,the context of ethiopia within the nile basin,what has lead up to that? and again, this could bean hours-long presentation, and i will have oneslide or so on that. but let's begin with that. i think many of us, whenwe think about ethiopia, we think about this.
we think about starvation,we think about famine. and i think thisreally came into play from this 1984 drought, verysevere drought and famine in ethiopia. and not only that, it wasone of the first times that pictures weretaken such as this, of these direconditions and broadcast on american televisions. and that, in manyways, set the tone
for how many of us dothink about ethiopia. and this is not inappropriate,because there is poverty and there is struggleand there is hardship. but ethiopia is a diverse place, and it has many other aspectsto it much beyond this. this is ethiopia. it's very green in many places, and these crops look quite lush. i think this is maybe sorghumor something like that
in the front. in the back, it's a greengrass that looks a lot like a wheat andthey call that teff, and this is the main grainthat they use in their bread, injera. so so you will find teffplanted many places in ethiopia. ethiopia is a mountainouscountry, also. some very high mountains. people don't oftentimesthink about that.
it can be very rocky, which makes agriculturalpractices difficult. many places are de-forested,like this one has been. so the trees aremuch more sparse. other places, there arethese old-growth forests that haven't been destroyed. although, estimates sayabout 97 percent of ethiopia has been de-forested. so it's a very important part
of their ecological condition. there are moderncities in ethiopia. this the capital, addis-ababa. it sits at about8,000 feet elevation. in a trip there i tookthere this summer, i had a colleagueor friend who said, "well, i hope it's not toohot for you in africa," as i left madison, whereit was maybe 90 degrees. it was 72 degrees there, right?
and it was the rainy season. so it was cool, and itwas actually very damp. but lots ofconstruction happening. lots of people thatlook quite modern. and we can contract thatwith some of the rural areas, which are much, muchdifferent, and people living in very different kindsof homes or dwellings. also in the rural areas,it's not uncommon to find something like this,where you have people
and you have livestock sharingthe same resource, right, for drinking, forcleaning clothes, animals defecating in this. and this has causedsome real, real problems in terms of disease with people. well, in animals,as far as that goes. and then you have a mix ofthe two at times, right? so this is a moderncity in ethiopia, beautiful buildingin the background, abrand-new building,
bahir dar university. and in the front we have a herd of cattle, or notcattle, a herd of goats moving through. so it's not uncommon to bewalking down the street, on your feet or on abike or in the car, and have to stop suddenlyfor some livestock to pass through. and that's common every day.
it doesn't come as a surpriseto anyone living in ethiopia. and contrast that withother parts of ethiopia that look like this,desert and flat. and this is a salt caravan. still very common to seethese in certain parts of ethiopia, movingacross the landscape, transporting salt. so a few figuresnow just to, again, set the context for ethiopia.
this is topography. so this is ethiopia. these are mountainson either side, and then the rift valleyruns through the center of ethiopia. so we have somevery low elevations, some deserts and hot areas here, but some high mountainsin these regions as well. here's a zoomed-inpart of the rift valley
at the awash valley, andit's a endorheic basin which means its one of thefew major basins in the world where there's no outletfor its lakes and streams. so the water essentially flowsin but then has no outlet. it never actuallyreaches the sea. in terms of land cover, youcan see that the western and the eastern side ofethiopia are quite different. it's much more green and,again, it was mountainous on the western side.
the eastern side, muchmore flat, dry and desert. the dark green hereare old growth forests. you can see that thereare not as many left in the highlands asthere were historically. then just thinking a littlebit about precipitation and temperature, what aresome of the meteorological conditions like in ethiopia? and again, they arevery diverse as well. so in the western side,the darker blue colors
means more precipitation. and on an annual average,you can see that some places are getting upwardsof two meters of precipitation every year. that's a lot, that's alot of precipitations. more than we get onaverage here in wisconsin. other places hardly getany, only a few inches. so as you might guess, the western half is more ofthe breadbasket of ethiopia.
it's where most of theagricultural lands are. 85 percent of all peoplein ethiopia are farmers. this is a huge partof their economic situation, and part of their gdp is the agricultural sector. so 85 percent ofethiopians are farmers, and about 99 percent ofthose are rain-fed farmers, meaning there's very,very little irrigation. i'm not showing it here,
but the year-to-yearamount of precipitation can vary a lot. so in some years, theyget sufficient amounts of precipitation togrow their crops. in other years, there'sinsufficient amounts. and so what happens inthose circumstances, it becomes very important. many of these farmersare subsistence farmers, meaning they're growingjust enough food for them
to live on. and so after theseason, they harvest and they store some ofthat food and eat that throughout theremainder of the year. and then they have whatthey call the lean season, where, while they'replanting their crops and waiting for the harvest, they're hoping that theirstores from the past year have not run out.
there are lots ofdifferent programs. since the 1984 drought, manyngos have set-up in africa, especially in ethiopiaand provided work, labor for food-type programs, where if there is afailure of the rains, many of these farmersdo go into the cities and other places andlabor and are able to earn some income that way. but it's a real, a realconcern in ethiopia.
temperature, on the right, kind of goes alongwith the precipitation. speaking of food securityor food insecurity, there is thisorganization called the famine early warningcenter, or system. and they have a network wherethey're continually doing monitoring of thecrop situation, what do yields looklike, et cetera, during the growing season, totry to have a good head's up
if possible about where someof the points of concern or places of concern might be so that we don't encounterconditions again like 1984. and a big challengewith something like 1984 was everything wasvery re-active, right? so the idea here is to try to be a little bit more pro-active, although it's not simple;it's still complex. what's happened historicallyin places like this?
well, for example,if there's a famine or insufficient amountof food in ethiopia or other africanplaces, historically, grain from thewest, from europe, from the united states hasbeen freely given to people in that country. and that's a wonderfulgesture, right? and it's important forthose people that are impoverished or starving.
but maybe all of thosepeople happen to be in this part of ethiopia, and the farmers that areup here are actually having a relatively normal yearfrom a climate perspective, and they're able to grow a crop. well now, with all this freefood flowing into the country, their crop is really of novalue, they can't sell it. they can eat it themselves,but they can't sell it, right? so in some situations, they'renot a whole lot better off
than their compatriots inanother part of the country. so these thingsare very complex. i'm an engineer, right, soi don't have any of these economic answers. but we do know that thesituation is very complex. so these type of tools thatare monitoring the situations are quite important. so what about some of theinfrastructure in ethiopia? here i'm thinkingspecifically about storage
and water storage. so reservoirs andthose types of things. and there's a prettystrong correlation between the amount of storagethat you have in your country and your economic well-being. so here on the right, wehave how many cubic meters of storage areavailable per capita. in the united states, wehave a very high number. so we have a lot of storage.
we have many reservoirs. those might be usedfor energy production. they might be used forirrigation for agriculture, for other reasonsas well, right? but you can see someof these top countries are some of thecountries with the larger economic or gdps. in ethiopia, on this graph,happens to be way down here. so that's the context,that's part of the situation.
a low amount ofstorage per capital. ethiopia is about 90million people right now, just to put that into context. water storage can be good,because it can buffer this variability. if you irrigate your cropand you have a reservoir, in some sense, maybethis sounds crass, but you don't care how muchit rains or doesn't rain, because you're justgoing to irrigate
the difference, anyway right? so you buffer that variability. it's a little bitlike insurance, but it's expensive andit's controversial, right? well, that is very muchchanging the riparian situation if you're storing the water. it's changing the ecology. it's fish habitat thatmight no longer be able to... be the same as it was before.
so what about energy comparisons for sub-saharan african? how do these compare for someof the different countries in sub-saharan african? i'm sorry, you probablycan't read these, but there are a number ofcountries up here, ghana, cote d'ivoire, cameroon,that have a fair amount of energy production. this is megawattsper million people.
so just to give youa bit of context, our hoover dam inthe united states is rated at about2,000 megawatts. that's how much power ithas in terms of capacity. so many of these countries aredoing better than ethiopia. ethiopia is down here. and this is a little bitof an older statistic, so i tried to extend that line to show where they are now.
and they're doinga little bit better in terms of energy production. and when they bring onlinethe hydro-power facility that i'm going to present onand speak mostly about tonight, this is how that will change. so it's going to changethings drastically... in comparison to othersub-saharan countries. it's going to be animportant piece of not just ethiopia's infrastructure, butthe regional infrastructure
and arguably, the africaninfrastructure as well. so what aboutethiopia's energy needs? here's a graphic from the worldwater assessment programme in which they're classifying different countries interms of global physical water scarcity oreconomic water scarcity. so if you have physicalwater scarcity, it simply means thatyou don't have enough. your demands areout-pacing your supplies.
on the other hand, if youhave economic water scarcity, that means that you don'thave sufficient infrastructure in place to be ableto take advantage of the water resourcesthat you do have. and that's where ethiopia falls. ethiopia falls intothat economic waterscarcity category. and as you can see, much ofsub-saharan africa does as well, which maybe doesn't comeas a large surprise. climate change maychange this eventually,
but there is still a lotthat needs to be done in terms of infrastructuredevelopment, that point aside. so what about some ofethiopia's energy needs or capabilities? they have a wealth ofhydropower potential, about 30,000 megawatts. remember, i said hoover damwas about 2,000 megawatts. so they have about15 hoover dams worth of potential hydropower.
that's a lot. and that's theeconomically-feasiblehydropower. they could actuallydevelop more, it just may not pay itself back. there's only one country,actually, in africa, the democraticrepublic of congo, that has morehydropower potential. so ethiopia-- of course.
so ethiopia sees this as its oil, if you will. they see this as theirmechanism to spur their economy. and they have goalsand ambitions of being a mid-level economy bysome time in the 2020s. and they're attachingtheir wagon to... they're hitching theirwagon to hydropower as a way to do that. so as of the present, theyhave less than 10 percent
of that hydropower developed. the context within ethiopiais about 80-some percent of ethiopians still lackaccess to electricity. there are some studies thattalk about correlations of education and literacy to access to electricity. so that's a verypositive development that has externalities beyondjust turning on a light bulb and being able tosee where you are.
and many, many people withinethiopia are still relying on wood and biomass fortheir cooking fuels, where that may transitionif they have access to electricity. okay, still setting the context, i promise i'll getto some of the other, more technical details. so with that, i'm goingto move out a little bit from ethiopia and talk a littlebit about the nile river,
the nile basin and how ethiopiafits into the context there. so the nile river isformed by two main rivers. the first one, here's ethiopia,is the blue nile river, and it starts at this lakehere called lake tana. so this is at fairlyhigh elevation, and it flows through these,through the ethiopia highlands through a fairlystark, steep channel out of ethiopia and into sudan. and the other halfof the nile river
is the white nile river,and it starts farther south, generally at lake victoria, although there are sometributaries to lake victoria. that travels north throughuganda and then through the swamps of sudan whereit slows down considerably and has large lateralflow and extent. and then continues onto khartoum in sudan, where it meets the blue nile, and then it forms themain nile through sudan,
through egypt and out intothe mediterranean sea. so just a few statistics, then: it's about 6,700kilometers long, and there are ten countriesthat fall within the basin, including southsudan now as well. why the blue nileand the white nile? i think they wereprobably aptly named. the blue nile maybe shouldbe the brown or black nile. so in the summertime, theirsummertime is the same as ours,
is when they get the majorityof their precipitation, and that's when theriver rises to its peak. and i think you can see this,but it carries a lot of, a lot of sediment with it. so it becomes very brown,very heavy with this sediment. whereas, the white nilecarries very little sediment. and if you recall, i saidit goes through these swamps where, if thereis some sediment, a lot of that settles out.
so i probably shouldhave put a picture, but if you look at aphoto, an aerial photo of where the two rivers cometogether, you can clearly see which one is the blue nileand which one is the white nile. they look starkly different due to the sediment load. so again, the nile river, avery long and rich history. we could spend hourstalking about this. egypt is the gift of the nile,
and there's a lot offounding civilizations. civilizations, i shouldsay, were found along the nile river anddepended on it. very much even sotoday, alright? a lot of religiousconnotations with the nile, long historical, you know,searches for the sources of the nile that carried onfor centuries and centuries. and then colonialism,we have to remember, is a part of this story as well.
so all of the countries, minusone, that are in the space were colonized at some point. the country that wasnot was ethiopia. and they're actuallyvery, very proud of this, if you talk to them. their sovereignty is somethingthat, that they hold up. they were occupied duringthe second world war for maybe four yearsor so by the italians, but they were never colonized.
if you go to ethiopianow, sometimes you can see some storefront that doesn'tlook like anything reputable on the outsideand you go inside, and maybe still there'snothing really to attract your attention, but oneof the chief outputs, agricultural outputsof ethiopia is coffee, so coffee beans. and then i don't know if thisis completely true or not, but then you had thisitalian influence, right?
so you go into one of theseshops and you see this beautiful stainless-steelitalian espresso maker, bring in the ethiopiancoffee beans, and you have a wonderfulbeverage there. so i don't know that ethiopianswere excited about this, this period in their history, but they do make goodcoffee, that's for sure. okay, so my only slideon the background there. what i'd really like tofocus a little bit more on
is the nile river allocations. how is the water used or parsedout between these countries? and this forms a hugetopic in the literature on hydro-politics. so hydro-politics,across many, many different disciplines. so speeding up and skippinga lot of different things, there's this very importantagreement of 1959, or treaty of 1959,
where the waters ofthe nile were allocated to egypt and to sudan. and this was still under aperiod of colonialism for sudan. so egypt negotiatedthis with sudan, who was a british colony, right? and egypt, a formerbritish colony, so there's a little bit of that history as well, okay? but the wateressentially is allocated
between these two countries. and so this agreement, according to thecountries of the basin, was only agreed upon,or signed-off on, by the sudanese and bythe egyptians themselves. so what this says is, all thewater coming from these rivers shall be kept in the river, and sudan will have accessto 25 percent of that flow and egypt will have accessto 75 percent of that flow,
which essentially has leftthe upstream countries with zero rights, or zero allocation by name. now that doesn't meanthat they couldn't, the upstream countriescould do no development, and they have donesome development, but it's been limited. it's been limited. and of course, egypt hasbeen the strongest country
in terms of economyin the region, and so that has playedinto this as well. well, if we fast-forwardthen to just a few years ago, there's this entebbe agreement, where the otherupstream countries, minus about one or two of them, have signed on to this to say, "we officially call this1959 treaty invalid. "we are not goingto abide by this.
"we don't believe that wewere ever party to that." and so that's thecontext right now. as you can believe,sudan and egypt have not signedon to that, right? and it's probably not in theirbest interest to do that. i don't know that i wouldeither if i were in their shoes. so without tryingto lay any judgment, that is the context andthat is the situation. but what does ethiopia actuallycontribute to the blue nile?
what do they contributeto what goes to egypt? so here's the blue nileand here's the border with egypt and sudan. and about 45billion cubic meters per year on averagepasses that point, okay? and this turns out to be about,there are other tributaries, and of course the white nile,but this turns out to be about 60 percentof the total flow that makes it tothe high aswan dam.
okay, so about 60percent of that comes from the bluenile from ethiopia. well, ethiopia also hassome other tributaries, both north and southof the blue nile that are part of the nile basin. and it turns out, overall,ethiopia contributes about 85 percent of the totalflow that makes it to egypt. again, just setting the context. okay, is that a pointfor contention or tension?
probably so, right?probably so. is it unique in the world? no, right? there are many, many differentinternational basins. as a matter of fact,there are 260 different international basins globally. and about 40 percent ofthe world's population live in those basins. a decade and a halfago, kofi annan,
i'm sure most ofyou know, said that, "fierce competitionfor fresh water "may well become a sourceof conflict and even wars "in the future." and that very wellis and could be true. however, to date, therereally are no wars, according to a research scholar, a professor, aaron wolf,at oregon state university, over water.
there are no wars that havebeen fought over water. but there are somenotable exceptions. and when i saynotable exceptions, sometimes where, perhaps,we've gotten close, right? but things haven'tescalated to that level. just a few of them, quickly: some of you may be familiarwith the picnic talks in israel, betweenisrael and jordan, where there was acontentious period,
i want to say inthe 1950s or '60s, about allocations ofthe jordan river itself. and they actually workedout an agreement informally... to alleviate someof these tensions, and the escalationbefore anything, long before anythingformally was decided. the mekong river, there's themekong river basin commission, i believe it's called, and that hascontracts and compacts
between the countries. and this compactcontinued to function throughout the vietnam war,even though those countries, i guess one could say, werebitter enemies at the time. and then the last example,which i appreciate... thinking aboutindia and pakistan, there's the indus riverwhich flows from india to pakistan, andthey have a compact that is set up that indiamust let so much water
pass per month or per year. and this was in placein the 1950s and '60s when they had many conflicts. it was during oneof those conflicts that india failed on its part to pass a certain amountof water to pakistan. but even though there wasthis conflict or this war that was happening betweenthese two countries,
india paid its fine topakistan for that happening. so the big context here is, i think there's someappreciation forwater internationally. and there's someappreciation for... the internationaltrans-boundary rivers and the compacts thathave been set up. but at some point, thismay not hold, right? at some point, wemay see conflict. let's hope that's notin the nile basin.
so back to the nile basin. so this is the situation. in 2011, ethiopia announced, literallyannounced to the world, that project x was underway. and what this turns outto be is this is the grand ethiopian renaissance dam. and they had startedconstruction, and it really came asa surprise to everyone.
it was maybe one ofthe best-kept secrets, at least regionally. what else was happening? well, coincidentallymaybe, if you say, what happened or was announcedduring the arab spring time. so egypt was, perhaps, in abit more situation of turmoil. so maybe it was opportunistic. i can't say for sure. but it is the firstdam in ethiopia
that is being constructedright on the main stem of the blue nile. so ethiopia does have someother much, much smaller facilities that are builton these tributaries. but this is truly important, because it's the first onethat will actually block the river on this mainstem of the blue nile. so as you can imagine,this got attention of downstream countries.
and the downstream countriesthat we now are going to be talking about aresudan and egypt. and those are the twocountries that are downstream of ethiopia that utilize thesewaters from the blue nile. so there have been on-again,off-again discussions and talks by thistripartite committee, which constitutesthese three countries. and i will say it's beenanywhere from handshakes and agreement on partsto military threats.
there's the famous story of,maybe a couple years ago, where there was ahigh-level diplomatic-- just a high-level governmentmeeting of egyptians, and they didn't realizethey were being mic-ed and on television, and one of thesehigh-ranking officials said, "well, if they don'tstop construction, "we may just have totake military action "and fly in there and bomb it."
and of course, that gotlots of attention, right, once that got out. so it's gone from thatto all the way to now where we hope we're inmuch more of an agreeable, amicable situation. and there's some ways forward. so we'll talk alittle bit about what some of those issues are. so very quickly, what aresome of the advantages
and disadvantages oflarge-scale storage, in general? well, storage canprovide flood protection, hydropower generation,regularization of flow. so instead of this big floodwave that comes in the summer, more even flows throughoutthe year, a reliable supply, recreation, navigation,many of these things. well, what are someof the drawbacks? these are generalities,right, for all storage, large-scale storage.
you're inundating now. the reservoir is inundatinga large swath of land. you may be relocating people, trapping lots of sedimentbehind this reservoir, changing the flows of the river, the ecology of the river. and then if it fails, of course, that is of huge concern tothe inhabitants downstream. okay, so finally, half anhour into the presentation,
we get to therenaissance dam itself. and this is a schematic ofwhat the renaissance dam is to look like, and thenthis blue outline is the expected reservoir boundaries. and it's been underconstruction, as i said, since about 2011, andis expected to finish in probably 2018 as of now. the chief engineer, as of now, says that they are about 45percent of the way completed
with construction. it's going to have alarge generating capacity, about 6,000 megawatts. so again, for my comparisonwith the hoover dam, that's about three hoover dams. it will be thelargest dam in africa, in terms of size and interms of generating capacity. its reservoir size is enormous, we'll say that, it's enormous.
and it's going tobe very expensive. now so far, ethiopia hasdecided to self-finance this themselves. so they are asking forbonds from their people and from the ex-pats thatlive, you know, in the u.s. and in other placesto help fund this. there's a great sense ofpride in ethiopia about this. government employees areasked to give one month of their salarytowards this project,
and we certainly hope that itcan continue to be financed. but that's a realquestion, right? can it be financedthe whole way through? so just a couple picturesyou might be able to see, or not so well. so you can see this ingoogle earth quite well. so this is a googleearth zoomed-in picture. and this is the dam itself. okay, so you can see theriver still continues
to flow through, and they'rebuilding on both sides. from this point, thiswill be one abutment. all the way over here willbe about another abutment. that's about a mile, okay? so it's a very, very long dam. i'll show you somemore pictures. but this is the dam. well, what else happens ona dam construction site? this is the blasting area,
and they built a wholecement factory, of course, enormous amounts ofcement that go into this. and this is the community,right, that's been built. about 9,000 peopleare working on the dam at any given time. here's the cement factory,and just to show you the scale of what has to happen forsuch a large infrastructure project to take place. we zoom in a little bit.
again, this is the dam here. the water will flow throughboth sides, here it will divert. so eventually, thiswill be blocked off. this will be the finalpiece of construction, and water will be divertedthrough both sides. and one power housewill be on this side, and another power housewill be on that side. here's a picture just to startto give scale a little bit of one side of that facility.
i had to show onepicture of myself there. you probably can't see it, but i actually have my eyesclosed, it was a very bright day but this down here,if you can see that, is one of those enormous trucks. it's not a typical-sizedump truck, it's an enormous truck thatyou might find at a mine or something like that. so this is just to giveyou an idea of scale.
and they're about, again,50 percent of the way, so they're going tobe all the way up here by the time that they're done. i'm going to try to playthis just very briefly, if i can. okay, maybe it won'tplay, which is fine. but this is looking upstream, and then it just pannedacross to show you what downstreamlooked like as well.
but even though thisis looking upstream, it's a similar scenelooking downstream. and there are mountains atabout this point downstream, and those mountainsare in sudan. so we're talking about, on theorder of 15 to 20 kilometers from the sudanese border. so this dam is right on theborder with ethiopia and sudan. one more picture here. again, here's thedam zoomed out.
and over here, we have asecond dam that's being built. it's called a saddle dam. and this is five kilometersor about three miles long. just piles and piles of rock, and it'll have aconcrete face on it. and the reason forthis is so that they, this is the lowspot in the area. so they can raise it, and itallows them to get a lot more volume in their reservoir.
i also don't knowif you can see this, but you can see that there'sa slightly different color between here and here. so this area is still treed. all of this hasbeen de-forested. and so this line between thetwo different shades of grey is where essentiallythe boundaries of the reservoir willbe, or the shoreline. so they've deforested andcollected all these trees.
one, so they can use them, but also, so that there'sa reduction in the amount in methane that's releasedonce inundation starts. okay, so what does this allmean for downstream countries? what do sudan andegypt think about this? is there an agreeableway forward, or not? so some of the benefitsand costs to ethiopia, they're veryinterested, obviously in generating hydropowerfor themselves.
but they are also going tohave to export much of that to the neighboring countries. presumably, this will be ahumanitarian boost to ethiopia, as well, but the financing isa real question mark, okay? so $5 billion is a lot of money. some of the benefitsand costs to sudan. well, there will bethis idea of regulated or more even stream flowwhich is a good thing, in some ways, fortheir hydropower.
they might be able to irrigatea second cropping season in some places, and sudan isvery interested in doing that. and it provides someflood control as well. it's going to be a silt trapand it's going to hold back a lot of the sediment. that's good and that's bad. it's good in terms of thehydropower facilities downstream in sudan, now won't haveto deal with this problem. they have a lot less sediment.
but there's ahistorical practice of flood recession agriculture, where this flood wavecomes down and lays out these nutrients on thebanks of the river, right? and the floodwaters recede,and farmers come down and plant on this nutrient-richsoil, get wonderful harvests and then they move back upand the cycle repeats itself. that practice willcompletely go away. the reservoir here isa much higher elevation
at the reservoir, say, behindsome of egypt's facilities, specifically the high aswandam, which is in the middle of the desert. and so the evaporativelosses are going to be quite differentbetween those two. there might be cheapelectricity available to downstream countries,but they also may be subject to less control of the river. so one piece in particular
that some of my students,one who is here, has been focusing on is, well, not only how dowe operate this thing in the long-run, but how dowe fill this reservoir up? not physicallyhow do we fill it, we know how to do that,but how do we fill it? ethiopia has sunk lots ofmoney into building this dam. and just by pureeconomics, they would like to fill this up more quicklyso that they can start
generating electricity,sooner than later. if they wait 20 years from now, economics say they're notgoing to be able to get as much return on theirinvestment, right? downstream countriesprobably are not in favor of ethiopia filling itup so quickly, right? their lives andlivelihoods are dependent upon these waters. so what's anagreeable way forward?
and so we looked at threedifferent things here, okay. ethiopia is interestedin hydropower generation. sudan, somewhat, butthey're really interested in irrigation water. and egypt is really interestedin in-flow to lake nassir, which is behindtheir high aswan dam, which is their main storagefacility for hydropower and for irrigationdownstream as well. so how do some ofthese different...
how would different optionsfor filling the reservoir play out for these threedifferent countries? maybe i'm giving thisaway a little bit, but it turns out now that sudan, that's the firstcountry downstream is very much infavor of this dam. they see a lot ofbenefits coming from this. so they essentially areon-board with ethiopia building this dam.
egypt, on the other hand,still has some challenges with this constructiongoing forward. so again, this is the area, the basin that drains to theethiopian renaissance dam. and this is generally whatthe precipitation looks like, if you say januarythrough december. so most of the precipitationin their summertime. and this big floodwave that also comes in late summer as well.
this is maybe notan intuitive figure, but what this is is streamflowat that point every year. and so what i wantto point out here is, we have some periods ofvery high stream flow and some periods ofvery low stream flow. so i'm not going toget into too much here in this presentation, butwhen they close the gates and start filling the reservoir, it's a very, verydifferent situation
if we get some years likethis than if we get some years like this, all right? it's a very different situation. okay, so just real quickly for those of you that mightnot be hydropower buffs, what are we interested in? well, to generate power,we need two things. we need to have head, andthat's this difference behind the levelin your reservoir,
behind the level of thesurface water in the reservoir and the level downstream. so you want to get thatas high as you can. and flow, how much water canyou get through your pipes to generate electricity? so those are the two thingsthat we're most concerned with. so we have a systemof models that we use. we take a hydrology modeland put that through a reservoir model.
it's a decision-making model. so this is therenaissance dam model. and then how does thatplay out downstream? so modeling that as well. so just one slide onour hydrology model. we take many of thesemeteorological conditions and we're able to say, "okay. what isstream flow, then, "coming into the reservoirbehind the renaissance dam?"
jumping over to thewater balance model, this is therenaissance dam itself. but then we have alsothese other, the white nile and other contributions as well, so that we can see what doesthat mean for stream flow at different pointsalong our system. and then thinking a littlebit about some of these reservoir-filling policies. we can come up with many,many different policies.
we've looked at twodifferent varieties. there are twodifferent varieties that i'm going to present here. one is that ethiopiacould simply decide to impound a certainfraction of water that passes by everymonth or every year. so they could say, "well,we'll take five percent "or 10 percent or 25 percentof the water that passes. "we'll keep that amount.
"the difference willbe passed downstream." that's one type of policy. another type of policycould be such that, well, what if we take thelong-term, historical average, so what on average passes? and if there wasmore water than that, ethiopia or thatamount can be impounded behind the renaissance dam? if it's less than that,we have to pass all of it.
so what does that look like? well, in a year like this,where you get lots of water, and here's thehistorical average, ethiopia would get tokeep that much water, whatever that amount is, okay? if it's less, theycould impound none. so looking at a few of these. one thing that people mightbe interested in then, is, well, how longdoes it actually take
to fill this reservoir? are we talking twoyears, fifty years? and under some of thesedifferent filling polices, we've run out some of thesescenarios where this is months. and it turns out insome of the policies where you'reimpounding more water, it takes about six orseven years, on average, to fill the reservoir. now remember, and i'memphasizing "on average",
if there are a few successivedry years, it may take longer. if there are somesuccessive very wet years, it could take less time. it turns out that ifyou only filled it at about fivepercent each month, i don't think it wouldever fill up, right? and that's becausewe have some losses just due to evaporation as well. so that's probably a policythat's not going to be selected.
so on average, it'sabout six years after filling hasstarted in earnest. and so then we canstart to think about what does thismean for ethiopia? so we can look at someof the different policies and how much hydropoweris generated. and no surprise, forsome of the policies where we're able toimpound more quickly, the renaissance damis able to generate
hydropower more quickly. and we can start to thinkabout what this means in terms of downstreamflows as well. so the black line hereis historical flows. each of these differentpolicies has more or has less downstream flow,but to what extent? sudan and egypt are going tobe very interested in this for their planning purposes. maybe not the best kindof graphic to show,
but what i'd like to sayhere is, we looked at two different locations. one in sudan, where there'sthis extremely large crop-irrigation scheme. and what would it looklike in terms of reductions there of water, dependingon how much we reduced it at the renaissance dam? so remember, a 10 percentreduction at the renaissance dam doesn't mean 10percent in sudan,
because there are othertributaries along the way. so in general, a 10percent reduction there means about an eightpercent reduction, what about this 25percent filling policy? maybe it means 22percent reduction. but at some point, maybeafter about six years, that tails off, right? but there will alwaysbe some reduction due to evaporative lossesfrom this reservoir.
and what does that meanfor egypt downstream? believe me, egyptiansare very, very interested in these types ofnumbers, right? so for a 25 percent flow policyduring that filling stage, our calculation are saying that's about a 12percent reduction. so it's a very real number that egyptians would like to re-operate orat least plan for.
one figure only to saythat climate change will come to bear on this, it's unclear how rightnow, but many of the models are projecting a general wettingin this part of the world, which will hopefully workin favor of those countries. and in the end we can say, "how much water does that mean "will reach lakenassir, in this case?" okay, so just a coupleof thoughts here.
some of the majorremaining challenges. right now there is noagreement between these three countries onthe filling policy. and we and many otherssee this as a real gap because this lack ofplanning, in the end, will probably harm all thecountries to some extent, some maybe more thanothers if there's not this agreed-upon policy. so i think it'scertainly in the interest
of the countries to do this. there have been talksand negotiations, but as of yet, no formal policy. and we are not thatmany years away from fillinghappening in earnest. further analysis needsto be done on what some of the downstream impacts are, chiefly, of course,in sudan and egypt. what is this going tomean for those countries?
there's notrans-boundary agreement. we have thesehistorical agreements. but with this new dam going in, we have a whole newhydroclimatic regime, or at least a wholenew hydrology regime. and there's really no, noinstance that i know of where you have or will havethese two major, major assets, the renaissance dam in ethiopia and the high aswan dam in egypt
that are uncoordinated, okay? that their actionsand their operations are uncoordinated. so there's very littleevidence that i'm aware of and that could be arecipe for disaster. and then this idea of ethiopia is going to generatea whole lot more hydropower than they're goingto be able to absorb. i think there's noquestion about that,
at least in the near term. so they're going to needto export a lot of this. so that means a lot interms of transmission, in terms of setting upthese contracts, et cetera. so the bottom line is,there's a lot happening, but there's a lot morethat needs to happen in terms ofcooperation, i believe, to address some ofthese major challenges. and so with that, i will behappy to take any questions.
but thank you foryour attention, and i have someinformation there if you'd like to be in contact.