How it began
Water was found in the Al-Kufrah area of southeastern Libya in the 1950s during exploratory drilling for oil. It proved to be part of the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System. The government first planned farms in the desert at the source, then changed course in the early 1980s and had a pipeline network to the coast designed. The Great Man-Made River Authority awarded the first construction contract in 1983, and the foundation stone was laid at Sarir on August 28, 1984.
Before it existed
The populous cities and farming areas of northern Libya depended on desalination plants and on rain-fed aquifers near the coast, which were declining. The water in the southern aquifer is fossil water, between 10,000 and 1,000,000 years old, which percolated into the sandstone before the end of the last ice age, when the Sahara had a temperate climate.
How it works
In the first phase hundreds of wells at the Tazirbu and Sarir fields pump water from about 500 meters down. It travels north through a buried double pipeline to a holding reservoir at Ajdabiya and on to Benghazi and Surt. The phase used 250,000 pipe sections of steel-reinforced prestressed concrete, each 4 meters in diameter and 7 meters long, made in two factories in Libya and said at the time to be the largest in the world. They were laid in trenches 7 meters deep and sealed with rubber O-rings and grout.
Who pushed back
Libyan officials have claimed the reservoirs could supply water for thousands of years. Critics call those claims greatly overstated, and some hold that the system might not last through the 21st century. The aquifer is not rechargeable, so its supply is finite, and its depletion would leave the region facing severe water scarcity unless enough desalination capacity is built.
What changed first
The Ajdabiya reservoir received its first water in 1989, and completion of Phase I was celebrated at Benghazi in 1991. That phase can move 2 million cubic meters of water a day through about 1,600 kilometers of double pipeline. A second system began supplying Tripoli with drinking water in 1996, drawing on well fields in the Jabal al-Hasawinah region. A third phase, completed in 2009, added 1,200 kilometers of pipeline and extended supply to Tobruk.
Where it stands today
The system remains the main source of fresh water for Libya, providing about 70 percent of the fresh water used in the country according to a figure cited by Wikipedia. It has suffered from conflict. One of the two pipe factories, at Brega, was hit by an air strike in July 2011. By July 2019, 101 of 479 wells on the western system had been dismantled, and in April 2020 an armed group seized a station and cut water to more than two million people.
