Sustainable Groundwater Management for New Reclamation Areas in Egypt
Yahya Mohamed Abdelwahab Ragab Elmansy;
Abstract
Sustainable Groundwater Management for New Reclamation Areas in Egypt
Egypt’s agricultural land is very limited with respect to its population food demand. This leads Egypt to be a heavily dependent on imported food products. To fulfil the expanding demand of agricultural products, successive governments have initiated many land reclamation projects since 1930s. In 2014, the Egyptian government initiated an ambitious horizontal expansion plan through reclamation of about 1.5 million feddans (1 feddan = 4200.83 m2) as part of sustainable economic development aligned with Egypt’s vision towards 2030. The majority of this project areas depend on groundwater as the only source of irrigation water. There is a great concern about groundwater sustainability which considered the main challenge to this project.
The Western Desert of Egypt is one of the main regions of the 1.5 million feddan project, including oases and southern area. These oases are characterized by artesian wells with high flow rate of fresh water which extracted from the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer (NSA), a huge nonrenewable aquifer. It stores about 150,000 BCM (km3) and it is considered the main water source for this region.
Intensive well-drilling process in NSA area has been going on since 2014. This may result in developing huge drawdown around the well fields which leads to lowering the groundwater potentiometric (piezometric) level (GWLpotent.) and occurrence of undesirable consequences. It is extremely important to sustainably manage groundwater extraction from this aquifer. Sustainable extraction rates and the most beneficial sustainable extraction rate have to be determined.
However, safe yield concept, outflow equals inflow, is not applicable for NSA. Sustainable groundwater management definition for nonrenewable aquifers is not unique because compromising between benefits of groundwater exploitation and its negative side effects is different from case to another. Hence, groundwater sustainability assessment and management criteria are determined on case by case basis.
Egypt’s agricultural land is very limited with respect to its population food demand. This leads Egypt to be a heavily dependent on imported food products. To fulfil the expanding demand of agricultural products, successive governments have initiated many land reclamation projects since 1930s. In 2014, the Egyptian government initiated an ambitious horizontal expansion plan through reclamation of about 1.5 million feddans (1 feddan = 4200.83 m2) as part of sustainable economic development aligned with Egypt’s vision towards 2030. The majority of this project areas depend on groundwater as the only source of irrigation water. There is a great concern about groundwater sustainability which considered the main challenge to this project.
The Western Desert of Egypt is one of the main regions of the 1.5 million feddan project, including oases and southern area. These oases are characterized by artesian wells with high flow rate of fresh water which extracted from the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer (NSA), a huge nonrenewable aquifer. It stores about 150,000 BCM (km3) and it is considered the main water source for this region.
Intensive well-drilling process in NSA area has been going on since 2014. This may result in developing huge drawdown around the well fields which leads to lowering the groundwater potentiometric (piezometric) level (GWLpotent.) and occurrence of undesirable consequences. It is extremely important to sustainably manage groundwater extraction from this aquifer. Sustainable extraction rates and the most beneficial sustainable extraction rate have to be determined.
However, safe yield concept, outflow equals inflow, is not applicable for NSA. Sustainable groundwater management definition for nonrenewable aquifers is not unique because compromising between benefits of groundwater exploitation and its negative side effects is different from case to another. Hence, groundwater sustainability assessment and management criteria are determined on case by case basis.
Other data
| Title | Sustainable Groundwater Management for New Reclamation Areas in Egypt | Authors | Yahya Mohamed Abdelwahab Ragab Elmansy | Issue Date | 2021 |
Attached Files
| File | Size | Format | |
|---|---|---|---|
| BB8548.pdf | 1.14 MB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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