It's practically a project of the Egyptian military who will mostly own the land. They will grow cash crops for export to gain a source of income.
This will also drain the ancient and non-renewable Nubian Sandstone Aquifer. This is water that has been trapped for thousands of years. It is the world's largest fossil water system and is of immense scientific value.
Not to mention the historic Nile Delta wetlands that will be lost from diversion and the massive increases in CO2 emissions necessary to pump the water at the elevation of the desert (which is higher than the Nile basin). Also the inevitable salination of soil means any economic benefits to this project are on a countdown.
> It's practically a project of the Egyptian military who will mostly own the land
It's a public-private project with Gulf and Asian financing and execution.
Sisi is a dictator, but he can and does execute. Look at how Egypt's developmental indicators have shot up over the past decade - that was not guaranteed, and he deftly took advantage of non-Western partners to push the reforms Egypt needs.
Which developmental indicators are you referring to? Almost all economical numbers mean nothing if the country is a dictatorship because the admin can straight up fabricate all of them. Administrations in democracies have to manipulate the numbers, introduce new ones, etc while dictatorships can just say "Nah, make that number 20% higher". You can look at the EGP exchange rate over the last 10 years and tell me if that chart looks organic to you.
That's not how it works. Egypt is not a closed country. International organizations can get in and get numbers.
It's also worth keeping in mind that many European countries, and every non-European country that's now developed, went through a phase of authoritarianism or one-party rule during which the organs of state developed. Germany's and Italy's modern democratic governments date to the end of WWII, and Spain and Greece's date only to the 1970s. By contrast, efforts to jump straight to multi-party democracy have largely failed.
"Better off" is too vague a criterion because it suggests some comparison with a counter-factual hypothetical. Instead, I think it's important to observe that the modern organs of state, rule of law, etc., were developed under (pre-constitutional) monarchs and dictators in most western European countries. For example in Germany, much of the bureaucracy was developed by the Prussians and the court system was developed under the Kaiser. Germany's 1949 Basic Law did not create a state from scratch, but instead largely subjected pre-existing institutions to democratic rule.
Uh, it isn't. GERD's operation's negative effect on the Nile's yield are minimal, and they could be even positive with coordinated, basin-wide, water management, but that's something Egypt has been continusouly against. They've never really looked at the other nine/ten as equalls...
The problems are that the Nile is a modest River and that Egypt has a population problem in a resources-strapped region, coupled with extremely unsustainable government policies (a topic in itself is an amalgum of compounding issues).
There's a way the desert states can export and store their solar energy production cheaply, easily, at scale, without needing any rare earths (nothing that is hard to obtain / limited supply / is dirty to extract). And as part of the process, they get clean water as a side effect. Unlike e.g. export via electrolysing water and shipping the hydrogen gas which requires clean water and thus requires spending more energy on desalinization which is a dead end, literally: desalinisation is ecologically speaking terrible, and e.g. the persian gulf is already becoming saltier due to the many desal plants dumping their brine.
How?
Re-invent the Castner Process: An endlessly repeatable process.
Step 1: Combine energy + Caustic Soda (NaOH); out comes Na2 (sodium metal, ready to export), H2O, and O2. The water is clean, the oxygen you gas off (not exactly an environmental disaster, gassing off waste oxygen), the process is essentially perfect - nothing is lost, and the anode and cathode use cheap materials (iron, mostly). Ship the sodium bars in a big boat (wrap em in some oiled up paper first. Yes, if the boat sinks, it'll explode; if an H2 carrying boat springs a leak you also get fireworks. Energy storage mechanics have nasty failure modes, it's pretty much inherent in the concept).
Step 2: Once the sodium bars have arrived at some industrial port that wants energy, all they have to do is chuck a proverbial bucket of water at it; doesn't have to be particularly pure. The Na reacts, turning back into NaOH + H2 gas (useful feedstock gas! Don't ship it - ship the sodium, use the sodium to make H2 gas out of water at the site of the plant that needs hydrogen! If you don't need the hydrogen, burn it for energy) - and this reaction is highly exotermic on its own (let alone if you also burn the H2). Ship the NaOH back to the desert-based solar panels.
A boat loaded soup to nuts with sodium metal is about as energy dense as half of the energy in a boat loaded to the gills with hypercooled, hypercompressed H2. Except you can ship this stuff on any old creaky vessel vs the extremely expensive H2 carriers.
You can store the energy in any old warehouse, requiring pennies at best for safety - no need to store under pressure, nothing is particularly toxic, stuff lasts for years and doesn't lose appreciable amounts of energy during storage. Yes, if some catastrophe causes a flood to go through a warehouse full of sodium that's gonna be a nasty surprise, so preferably you don't build this stuff in the middle of town square, but it's orders of magnitude less scary than MIC, nuclear waste, a tank full of pressurized H2, and so on. This stuff is no more scary than an oil depot, really.
So.. why in the blazes isn't this a thing? Shouldn't the middle east be spending their money on a modern take on the Castner Cell instead of The Line or a pet war in Yemen?
Win win win. It can't even be patented. The only thing that needs to be done is to update/reinvent the castner cell: We haven't electrolysed caustic soda in about a century, because chlorine gas is a valuable feedstock for industry, and the Downs Cell (electrolysing salt into sodium + chlorine) is therefore the way it is done today. The sodium is a lucky byproduct (the process is run to fulfill the need for chlorine gas as feedstock). Due to this there's plenty of sodium to fulfil industrial needs and therefore no need to run Castner Cells. That's the only reason nobody's run one in many decades.
I'm sure I'm missing some key chemistry but I can't figure this one out.
I do love GP's excitement about the energy potential of violent exothermic reaction upon contact with water ... and the proposal mere sentences later to ship industrial quantities thereof on creaky old ships
They have been quite common - they just aren’t typically in the middle of a major metro with 1000 cameras on them, because most governments aren’t that dysfunctional.
I’m not aware of anyone crazy enough to stockpile pure metallic sodium to anything like this scale. Here is the gov’t dumping a barrel of it in a lake though [https://youtu.be/HY7mTCMvpEM?si=aSJ2dPLrXsUuGOOJ].
Any large government project in Egypt is a project of the Egyptian military. That’s the result of being under a military dictatorship with a fake civilian president.
What are you talking about? This is literally every single major infrastructure project in the world. In the U.S. for example, every major waterway and roadway is built by the govt (local or federal). There is even the “Army Corp of Engineers”.
You can dislike the project, but take your political beaf elsewhere. Your statements are irrational.
Tbh I think your point is overstated but you do bring up an interesting point that affords me the opportunity to plug a really interesting relevant book called Standardizing Empire: The US Military, Korea, and the Origins of Military-Industrial Capitalism. It traces the origins of both global capitalism and the US military's involvement in massive infrastructure projects back to post-war South Korea. In the 50s, about 60-70% of all oceanic shipments were movement of goods to and from SE Asia by the US military. You can, arguably, thank this economic/infrastructure project for the standardized shipping container.
Besides Israel and, as of recently, Ukraine, Egypt is the biggest receiver of US military "assistance". Most military officials have attended elite U.S. military academies and the two forces work closely together.
The 2011 revolution successfully outed Hosni Mubarak (another Egyptian dictator propped up by the US). Following the 2012 elections came the 2013 coup by Sisi. Except, the US was one of the few countries in the world that refused to label this a "coup". The Rabaa Massacre marked the definitive end to the Arab Spring in Egypt
Which exact part of the state of affairs? Because if your point is that the current regime is propped by US assistance, it sounds fair, but would Egypt be a democracy if this military dictatorship disappears? If anything, revolution of 2011 suggests it's unlikely.
Besides, your sources need to be updated as you seem to believe that Ukraine is within top 3 receivers of the US military aid, and it's definitely not true.
The revolution that overthrew a US-backed authoritarian lead to a democratic election. The results of that election were thrown out the window when another coup brought in another US-backed authoritarian
> Besides, your sources need to be updated as you seem to believe that Ukraine is within top 3 receivers of the US military aid, and it's definitely not true.
As of 2026 Q2, the U.S. disbursed over $116 billion in aid to Ukraine and is obligated for a total of $177b. Yes the rest is being disbursed despite Trump's political antics
> As of 2026 Q2, the U.S. disbursed over $116 billion in aid to Ukraine and is obligated for a total of $177b. Yes the rest is being disbursed despite Trump's political antics
$135b of it is from the "Department of War". What percentage do you believe is not "military" spending and why do you think that?
Also the distinction seems silly for a country in total war. Funding their medical or food system or whatever means they can re-allocate money to defense
The results of that election were thrown out the window
Might be good to mention the result of that election were Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood (the originator of many jihadist movements like Al-Qaeda).
The parent correctly noted that the elected president represented ideology with ideals of is violent theocracy, and he almost immediately started powergrabbing, trying to gain non-supervised judicial and legislative powers in addition to executive. How vague is that? I don't know, to me it looks rather clear that this was a path from one authoritarianism to another.
The result was definitely unfortunate. He was a neoliberal that was friendly to Israel, China, and even the Iran (to the dismay of the Brotherhood). He only won by about 4 percentage points. Definitely not what I would've wanted for Egypt (I don't think Egypt needed to further the failed neoliberal project) but it was a democratic election nonetheless.
To be clear, Egypt receives on average $1.3 billion annually and Israel in a normal year receives about $3.8 billion. Ukraine has received $116 billion since the invasion and averaged about $250m before it.
Egypt was a military dictatorship long before they were American allies. You can thank Nasser for that. Repproachment with Egypt in the 1970s was a diplomatic effort to stop the fighting between the Arabs and Israel, and to win over a Soviet ally.
The US supported the democratic movement and even helped ease the way. In fact, alot of Middle Eastern countries are still resentful for American support of the Arab Spring. But it couldn't stop, and admittedly wasn't particularly interested in stopping, the regression back to a military dictatorship in Egypt given the elected president was about as democratic as Turkish president Erdogan. But it never intervened, AFAIU, because while dysfunctional, Egypt is relatively stable from an international perspective and a reliable-enough American ally either way.
Draining (or even using) the aquifer was never part of the plan. The goal has always been to have two streams of water come in from treated sewage/desal plants and the Nile itself. The problem being that the area they are trying to irrigate is higher than where they are pumping it from so they have something like 13 pump stations pumping the water uphill. Hopefully they figure it out and can eventually power the pump stations with solar+batteries so they don’t have to drain the aquifers. For alignment, the current status is dismal with almost all the water coming from just the aquifers.
I’m not sure why the military running it makes this project inherently bad.
You can always point to some geological or ecological reason why a resource shouldn’t be developed. Here in western Kansas there is some endangered chicken grouse that is constantly used to prevent wind turbines from being constructed. It’s just an excuse to block development, as is the concern you’re raising.
I doubt the people who need water to survive give a damn about CO2 emissions. There will be environmental damage, for sure. It will be worth it to these people who will live better lives because of it. Ultimately, Egyptian leadership gets to make that call, not you or I.
If you really care about the environment, you should support these kinds of projects that will raise incomes to the level where Egyptians can afford to care about environmental conservation.
"A feddan (Arabic: فدّان, romanized: faddān) is a unit of area used in Egypt, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, and Oman. In Classical Arabic, the word means 'a yoke of oxen', implying the area of ground that could be tilled by oxen in a certain time. In Egypt, the feddan is the only non-metric unit which remained in use following the adoption of the metric system. A feddan is divided into 24 kirat (Arabic: قيراط, qīrāt), with one kirat equalling 175 square metres."
So 2.2M feddan works out to 9240 km^2. That is: roughly same area as a square with 96 km sides.
"Officials indicate the system will utilise roughly 10 million cubic metres of surface water daily alongside approximately 7.5 million cubic metres of treated drainage water per day, reflecting Egypt’s growing reliance on advanced water-recycling and smart-irrigation technologies amid mounting regional water pressures."
Article isn't clear on where either component comes from. Not an amount you could divert from somewhere without huge environmental effects elsewhere.
(Edit: quote is from the ME Observer article a commenter linked below. Original post seems to have more details)
Anyway sounds like an ambitious project. And understandable given Egypt's population vs. resources pressures (esp. water).
A lot of where they are getting water from right now is an ancient underground aquifer - there's not a lot of water there though, so the plan was it was a stopgap while the water recycling plan comes online.
Although the aquifer water plan itself is largely failing. The underground water was much more saline than they originally thought, so from space you can see lots of failed irrigation circles.
This article has several passages repeated verbatim. Either bad AI or bad editing, not really a great advertisement for the product (“Brilliant”) it seems to be selling.
Example: “The construction of the Aswan High Dam, completed in 1970, brought clear benefits. It provided a steady supply of hydroelectric power and allowed water to be regulated for year-round irrigation.” appears twice, word for word.
I skimmed through the article. Several pictures are also repeated. Would this kind of thing happen before 2020? I don't think so.
Either way, I got taught in high school geography that parts of rivers get rebuild all the time. The Maas (Meuse, as Dutch is my native language I say Maas) gets longer due to the corners getting more sharp (due to water and wind erosion). Then at some point, the water might actually go straight between two corners, leading to the part between the two corners (an extra 180 degrees of two corners, though might look like one) getting cut. Sometimes, that doesn't happen (quick enough) and humans need to help nature a bit. Because sometimes, the new part of river tends to reach villages or other parts of society humans want to preserve. So, we interfere. Near Maastricht, there's also a canal next to the Maas, and this can help with deficit or excess water in the Maas. But sometimes, even an extra part of river next to the old river is build. IIRC they do that because the erosion destroyed such parts, that the outcome of the erosion keeps coming back and back in too short amounts of time. So then, it makes more sense to look for a more long term solution.
The water and wind erosion were interesting to me back in the days. So, from memory (and I surely am forgetting something here, possibly related to the chemistry of the water/earth), the way it works on low water level the wind on the corners erodes the corners, while on high water level the water pressurizes against the corner, leading to basins in the (wind eroded) corner which itself is part of the domino effect. In other words, it is bound to happen, given time. The river snaking around is bound to happen, and the breach is bound to happen as well. But the breach usually means the river goes to its original pathway (although temporarily).
So for a large river as the Nile, it also comes as no surprise Egyptian government (Egypt being the country who benefit from the Nile delta) invests in the Nile. But the main problem the Nile faces is AFAIK related to drought which is related to climate. I'm not sure how they want to fix that.
I believe you are [trying to?] dedcribe typical river morphodynamics; meandering and oxbow lake formation. While yes, they do happen, rivers like the Nile, especially in its milder sloped ends in Egypt, don't see the dramatical versions of these phenomena. And even rivers/reaches that do braid/meander a lot tend to do that within a limited corridor. The topic at hand speaks more of inter-basin conveyance.
State and financial capacity is much stronger in Egypt today versus previous attempts.
Egypt's developmental indicators have finally caught up to where the CEE was 5-10 years ago but with a better demographic profile, and Gulf and Asian capital and technology partners are much more hands-on.
If you look at UNDP historical HDI data [1] you will see that Egypt barely caught up with the HDI levels of poorest Eastern European countries like Moldova from 10 years ago and is still well behind the HDI levels of better-off Eastern European countries like Czechia from 1990.
And there was no guarantee that Egypt would have reached this point today in 2026.
A decade ago, the safer bet would have been that Egypt would collapse just like it's then developmental peer Syria.
The fact that Egypt is at this point today is a testament to the fact that it's has robust enough state capacity that it was able to execute on projects.
> better-off Eastern European countries like Czechia from 1990
Czechia is not Eastern Europe and was a very developed country. I'll wait for inglor_cz to eventually jump into this convo and give context around Czechoslovakia and Central Europe in the 1980s to 90s.
Syria had an extremely destructive civil war and one of the worst collapses in living standards ever of any country (measured by however you want to look at it - HDI, GDP/capita...)
Meanwhile Egypt was overtaken by Vietnam and performed similarly to peers like Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Algeria, Philippines.
Egypt's and Sisi's performance is decidedly average.
And if you remember 2010-13 Egypt was also on the verge of collapsing into a civil war like Syria and Yemen yet didn't. That took a Herculean amount of effort.
I've been in Egypt and India - they aren't that different, and it's Indian companies that are working on and helping financing these megaprojects in Egypt via the credit line established after the pandemic [0] and it's Indian companies like Wabag that are implementing water treatment projects in Egypt [1].
Yes. And they're the same companies that were contracted and subcontracted infrastructure across the Khaleej and ASEAN.
Larsen & Toubro, Wabag, SP Group, EIL, Afcons, and others tend to have a chokehold on implementing and executing these kinds of projects in MENA because they co-finance projects with Gulf capital players who tend to have capital stakes in these Indian players as well.
India uses something like a quarter of the world's groundwater. 20 years ago, it was all open channels, which lose 40-80% of water due to evaporation and seepage. Mexico and Egypt fixed this decades ago.
Nowadays, farmers have shifted to directly using groundwater, and just pump as much water as possible from wells (thus depleting them). This is exacerbated by:
1) Relying on flood irrigation (ie just let water flow across the field and evaporate, vs drip)
2) As temperatures rise, using even more water
The situation was already pretty dire, and despite various efforts, it's getting much worse.
India relies on groundwater and its strategy has been to use the monsoons to replenish the groundwater under the Jal Shakti Abhyan. The monsoons come like clockwork so it’s a solid strategy.
No, it is deeply stupid strategy, because groundwater is being depleted much faster than it can be replenished:
"We reviewed 160 journal articles, along with supplementary data and reports from GW, agriculture, and meteorological authorities. Our focus was on GW depletion in India, with particular emphasis on GRACE satellite data, in situ observations, and the influence of hydrogeological conditions, anthropogenic activities, and climatic disturbances. GRACE observations reveal significant depletion, particularly in Eastern Uttar Pradesh at 7 cm/yr rate from 2002 to 2022, while localized in situ data highlight Punjab as the most rapidly depleting area, with a rate of 46 cm/yr (2003–2012)."*
It is clearly not working. Groundwater in India is being drained faster than it is being replenished. Wells have gone so deep that people are now worried about heavy metals like arsenic.
The article makes a good point about food imports to Egypt. I think a lot of people don't realize that Egypt has been an innocent victim of Russia's invasion of Ukraine which disrupted wheat exports.
Recent strikes by Ukraine on Russian oil refineries are in turn disrupting Russian grain harvests due to shortages of diesel fuel. While this is a legitimate defensive tactic by Ukraine, as a side effect it's likely to cause further food price inflation in Egypt.
Maybe the Egyptian government could pressure Putin to stop killing innocent people and sending young men to the front to needlessly die, how about that ?
Sounds good, I hope they do. But as a practical matter Egypt is in a difficult spot because they import wheat from both Ukraine and Russia. And Egypt has no real leverage with Putin.
It's a great channel if you don't care about any degree of technical debt and wanna see someone glaze over human rights violations in order to celebrate mega projects. I'd at least highly recommend the DeArrow extensions to de-clickbait this channel's titles.
As much as I criticize the channel, I admit I can't look away
He quite often gets into problematic areas of many projects - see his series on Billionaires row in New York.
There's just an exceeding amount of signal to noise ratio when it comes to big projects. Criticism of foreign projects comes out of the woodwork by non-local sources, and yet we seem to accept the human toll on Western projects like the Hoover Dam or the Channel Tunnel. Him taking a neutral tone and accepting source materials at face value is fair.
Mega-projects have been a defining feature of human civilization since its inception, so there's ultimately not a way to cover them that is not either glamorizing or unbearably self-loathing.
That's true for now, although their rate of population growth appears to have peaked several years ago and like most other countries the birth rate has since declined sharply.
Given this unsustainable population growth, I wonder how serious the refugee issue will become for Europe and the Americas over the next 30 to 40 years.
Egypt is also hard at work transforming the Sinai Plain and the vicinity of Mount Sinai itself, into a tourist magnet, and a thriving hotel/resort region. The monks of St. Katherine's monastery are nonplussed about these developments.
(Many monasteries and convents in modern times are renowned, and/or an open secret, for their peaceful hospitality, and gladly welcome pilgrims and tourists for overnight stays, especially in places where the hotels are in short supply, and especially in places like Republic of Ireland, where the monasteries' populations are dwindling, and losing donors, while the tourist trade is stronger every day...)
It's practically a project of the Egyptian military who will mostly own the land. They will grow cash crops for export to gain a source of income.
This will also drain the ancient and non-renewable Nubian Sandstone Aquifer. This is water that has been trapped for thousands of years. It is the world's largest fossil water system and is of immense scientific value.
Not to mention the historic Nile Delta wetlands that will be lost from diversion and the massive increases in CO2 emissions necessary to pump the water at the elevation of the desert (which is higher than the Nile basin). Also the inevitable salination of soil means any economic benefits to this project are on a countdown.
> It's practically a project of the Egyptian military who will mostly own the land
It's a public-private project with Gulf and Asian financing and execution.
Sisi is a dictator, but he can and does execute. Look at how Egypt's developmental indicators have shot up over the past decade - that was not guaranteed, and he deftly took advantage of non-Western partners to push the reforms Egypt needs.
Which developmental indicators are you referring to? Almost all economical numbers mean nothing if the country is a dictatorship because the admin can straight up fabricate all of them. Administrations in democracies have to manipulate the numbers, introduce new ones, etc while dictatorships can just say "Nah, make that number 20% higher". You can look at the EGP exchange rate over the last 10 years and tell me if that chart looks organic to you.
That's not how it works. Egypt is not a closed country. International organizations can get in and get numbers.
It's also worth keeping in mind that many European countries, and every non-European country that's now developed, went through a phase of authoritarianism or one-party rule during which the organs of state developed. Germany's and Italy's modern democratic governments date to the end of WWII, and Spain and Greece's date only to the 1970s. By contrast, efforts to jump straight to multi-party democracy have largely failed.
Which european dictatorship left their country better off?
"Better off" is too vague a criterion because it suggests some comparison with a counter-factual hypothetical. Instead, I think it's important to observe that the modern organs of state, rule of law, etc., were developed under (pre-constitutional) monarchs and dictators in most western European countries. For example in Germany, much of the bureaucracy was developed by the Prussians and the court system was developed under the Kaiser. Germany's 1949 Basic Law did not create a state from scratch, but instead largely subjected pre-existing institutions to democratic rule.
Yeah, Frederick the Great is the closest thing I can think of to a European analogue to Lee Kwan Yew. Maybe Napoleon to a lesser extent.
> Which european dictatorship left their country better off?
If monarchs count as dictators, and monarchic states as dictatorship, then almost all economic progress in Europe upto the 1840s
The UK for one. By the time it became a democracy, it was already stable, peaceful and the wealthiest country per capita that had ever existed.
It was a narrow miss. There was a time the crown wanted everyone farming cotton, but entrepreneurs pitched arbitrage instead.
Do you mean raising sheep for wool? The UK has never grown a significant amount of cotton.
Franco, at least in the sense of GDP per capita indicators and escaping WW2.
Here’s the source of the problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Ethiopian_Renaissance_Da...
Uh, it isn't. GERD's operation's negative effect on the Nile's yield are minimal, and they could be even positive with coordinated, basin-wide, water management, but that's something Egypt has been continusouly against. They've never really looked at the other nine/ten as equalls...
The problems are that the Nile is a modest River and that Egypt has a population problem in a resources-strapped region, coupled with extremely unsustainable government policies (a topic in itself is an amalgum of compounding issues).
I'm curious as to why they aren't considering (solar powered) desalinization as an additional source of water, to pump water directly from the ocean?
Hear me out:
There's a way the desert states can export and store their solar energy production cheaply, easily, at scale, without needing any rare earths (nothing that is hard to obtain / limited supply / is dirty to extract). And as part of the process, they get clean water as a side effect. Unlike e.g. export via electrolysing water and shipping the hydrogen gas which requires clean water and thus requires spending more energy on desalinization which is a dead end, literally: desalinisation is ecologically speaking terrible, and e.g. the persian gulf is already becoming saltier due to the many desal plants dumping their brine.
How?
Re-invent the Castner Process: An endlessly repeatable process.
Step 1: Combine energy + Caustic Soda (NaOH); out comes Na2 (sodium metal, ready to export), H2O, and O2. The water is clean, the oxygen you gas off (not exactly an environmental disaster, gassing off waste oxygen), the process is essentially perfect - nothing is lost, and the anode and cathode use cheap materials (iron, mostly). Ship the sodium bars in a big boat (wrap em in some oiled up paper first. Yes, if the boat sinks, it'll explode; if an H2 carrying boat springs a leak you also get fireworks. Energy storage mechanics have nasty failure modes, it's pretty much inherent in the concept).
Step 2: Once the sodium bars have arrived at some industrial port that wants energy, all they have to do is chuck a proverbial bucket of water at it; doesn't have to be particularly pure. The Na reacts, turning back into NaOH + H2 gas (useful feedstock gas! Don't ship it - ship the sodium, use the sodium to make H2 gas out of water at the site of the plant that needs hydrogen! If you don't need the hydrogen, burn it for energy) - and this reaction is highly exotermic on its own (let alone if you also burn the H2). Ship the NaOH back to the desert-based solar panels.
A boat loaded soup to nuts with sodium metal is about as energy dense as half of the energy in a boat loaded to the gills with hypercooled, hypercompressed H2. Except you can ship this stuff on any old creaky vessel vs the extremely expensive H2 carriers.
You can store the energy in any old warehouse, requiring pennies at best for safety - no need to store under pressure, nothing is particularly toxic, stuff lasts for years and doesn't lose appreciable amounts of energy during storage. Yes, if some catastrophe causes a flood to go through a warehouse full of sodium that's gonna be a nasty surprise, so preferably you don't build this stuff in the middle of town square, but it's orders of magnitude less scary than MIC, nuclear waste, a tank full of pressurized H2, and so on. This stuff is no more scary than an oil depot, really.
So.. why in the blazes isn't this a thing? Shouldn't the middle east be spending their money on a modern take on the Castner Cell instead of The Line or a pet war in Yemen?
Win win win. It can't even be patented. The only thing that needs to be done is to update/reinvent the castner cell: We haven't electrolysed caustic soda in about a century, because chlorine gas is a valuable feedstock for industry, and the Downs Cell (electrolysing salt into sodium + chlorine) is therefore the way it is done today. The sodium is a lucky byproduct (the process is run to fulfill the need for chlorine gas as feedstock). Due to this there's plenty of sodium to fulfil industrial needs and therefore no need to run Castner Cells. That's the only reason nobody's run one in many decades.
I'm sure I'm missing some key chemistry but I can't figure this one out.
Have you ever dealt with metallic sodium? You are dramatically underestimating how dangerous it is at scale. Hard no.
I do love GP's excitement about the energy potential of violent exothermic reaction upon contact with water ... and the proposal mere sentences later to ship industrial quantities thereof on creaky old ships
Beirut would like a word about "any old warehouse"
That, at least, needed only to keep out heat and combustion, and could have been extinguished with water had there been enough, and in time.
Instead, consider the absolute PITA that is an EV fire, but worse, and floating in an ocean of the only thing that could make it worse.
Hey, if it explodes then no more worries about trying to put it out?
Which stands out because it is now uncommon. I'd expect warehouse tragedies to be more common in the past?
They have been quite common - they just aren’t typically in the middle of a major metro with 1000 cameras on them, because most governments aren’t that dysfunctional.
Notably, metallic sodium at scale would be way worse than this [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_City_disaster].
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Fertilizer_Company_explos...].
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PEPCON_disaster]
I’m not aware of anyone crazy enough to stockpile pure metallic sodium to anything like this scale. Here is the gov’t dumping a barrel of it in a lake though [https://youtu.be/HY7mTCMvpEM?si=aSJ2dPLrXsUuGOOJ].
Love that disposal - lucky the lake has no fish. Here's the link without the tracking (ShareInsights &si)
"The Disposal of Sodium, 1947 Washington" 20000 lbs of Sodium
https://youtu.be/HY7mTCMvpEM
I'm too lazy to look up all the potentials, but in general, having an exothermic process in the loop means that your efficiency is going to suck.
If you want a compact efficient store of energy, then power-to-methane exists. Ammonia is also an option.
It's too expensive for agriculture.
Any large government project in Egypt is a project of the Egyptian military. That’s the result of being under a military dictatorship with a fake civilian president.
What are you talking about? This is literally every single major infrastructure project in the world. In the U.S. for example, every major waterway and roadway is built by the govt (local or federal). There is even the “Army Corp of Engineers”.
You can dislike the project, but take your political beaf elsewhere. Your statements are irrational.
Tbh I think your point is overstated but you do bring up an interesting point that affords me the opportunity to plug a really interesting relevant book called Standardizing Empire: The US Military, Korea, and the Origins of Military-Industrial Capitalism. It traces the origins of both global capitalism and the US military's involvement in massive infrastructure projects back to post-war South Korea. In the 50s, about 60-70% of all oceanic shipments were movement of goods to and from SE Asia by the US military. You can, arguably, thank this economic/infrastructure project for the standardized shipping container.
https://bookshop.org/p/books/-/dd8603df55055d43
Here's a good interview with the author:
https://www.listennotes.com/podcasts/new-books-network/patri...
A state of affairs you can thank the US for.
Besides Israel and, as of recently, Ukraine, Egypt is the biggest receiver of US military "assistance". Most military officials have attended elite U.S. military academies and the two forces work closely together.
The 2011 revolution successfully outed Hosni Mubarak (another Egyptian dictator propped up by the US). Following the 2012 elections came the 2013 coup by Sisi. Except, the US was one of the few countries in the world that refused to label this a "coup". The Rabaa Massacre marked the definitive end to the Arab Spring in Egypt
Which exact part of the state of affairs? Because if your point is that the current regime is propped by US assistance, it sounds fair, but would Egypt be a democracy if this military dictatorship disappears? If anything, revolution of 2011 suggests it's unlikely.
Besides, your sources need to be updated as you seem to believe that Ukraine is within top 3 receivers of the US military aid, and it's definitely not true.
The revolution that overthrew a US-backed authoritarian lead to a democratic election. The results of that election were thrown out the window when another coup brought in another US-backed authoritarian
> Besides, your sources need to be updated as you seem to believe that Ukraine is within top 3 receivers of the US military aid, and it's definitely not true.
As of 2026 Q2, the U.S. disbursed over $116 billion in aid to Ukraine and is obligated for a total of $177b. Yes the rest is being disbursed despite Trump's political antics
https://www.ukraineoversight.gov/Funding/
> As of 2026 Q2, the U.S. disbursed over $116 billion in aid to Ukraine and is obligated for a total of $177b. Yes the rest is being disbursed despite Trump's political antics
Where are you getting those numbers from?
https://www.ukraineoversight.gov/Funding/
Here's the Congressional Budget Justification for FY-2026 if you wanna dig in https://www.state.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/FY-2026-Sta...
Total Appropriated: $195.03 billion
Total Obligated: $177.76 billion
Total Disbursed: $116.02 billion
This does not look to be “military” spending on Ukraine, it’s all spending.
$135b of it is from the "Department of War". What percentage do you believe is not "military" spending and why do you think that?
Also the distinction seems silly for a country in total war. Funding their medical or food system or whatever means they can re-allocate money to defense
Might be good to mention the result of that election were Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood (the originator of many jihadist movements like Al-Qaeda).
And that vague connection justifies what exactly ?
The parent correctly noted that the elected president represented ideology with ideals of is violent theocracy, and he almost immediately started powergrabbing, trying to gain non-supervised judicial and legislative powers in addition to executive. How vague is that? I don't know, to me it looks rather clear that this was a path from one authoritarianism to another.
The result was definitely unfortunate. He was a neoliberal that was friendly to Israel, China, and even the Iran (to the dismay of the Brotherhood). He only won by about 4 percentage points. Definitely not what I would've wanted for Egypt (I don't think Egypt needed to further the failed neoliberal project) but it was a democratic election nonetheless.
The phenomenon of mostly democratic elections installing the next authoritarianism is not unknown. And Morsi was clearly not a democrat.
You are comparing multi-year overall aid with one-year specifically military assistance which is not how it works.
To be clear, Egypt receives on average $1.3 billion annually and Israel in a normal year receives about $3.8 billion. Ukraine has received $116 billion since the invasion and averaged about $250m before it.
> A state of affairs you can thank the US for.
Egypt was a military dictatorship long before they were American allies. You can thank Nasser for that. Repproachment with Egypt in the 1970s was a diplomatic effort to stop the fighting between the Arabs and Israel, and to win over a Soviet ally.
The US supported the democratic movement and even helped ease the way. In fact, alot of Middle Eastern countries are still resentful for American support of the Arab Spring. But it couldn't stop, and admittedly wasn't particularly interested in stopping, the regression back to a military dictatorship in Egypt given the elected president was about as democratic as Turkish president Erdogan. But it never intervened, AFAIU, because while dysfunctional, Egypt is relatively stable from an international perspective and a reliable-enough American ally either way.
Draining (or even using) the aquifer was never part of the plan. The goal has always been to have two streams of water come in from treated sewage/desal plants and the Nile itself. The problem being that the area they are trying to irrigate is higher than where they are pumping it from so they have something like 13 pump stations pumping the water uphill. Hopefully they figure it out and can eventually power the pump stations with solar+batteries so they don’t have to drain the aquifers. For alignment, the current status is dismal with almost all the water coming from just the aquifers.
"Sounds like a great idea" -- Modern Humans
I’m not sure why the military running it makes this project inherently bad.
You can always point to some geological or ecological reason why a resource shouldn’t be developed. Here in western Kansas there is some endangered chicken grouse that is constantly used to prevent wind turbines from being constructed. It’s just an excuse to block development, as is the concern you’re raising.
I doubt the people who need water to survive give a damn about CO2 emissions. There will be environmental damage, for sure. It will be worth it to these people who will live better lives because of it. Ultimately, Egyptian leadership gets to make that call, not you or I.
If you really care about the environment, you should support these kinds of projects that will raise incomes to the level where Egyptians can afford to care about environmental conservation.
Wiki:
"A feddan (Arabic: فدّان, romanized: faddān) is a unit of area used in Egypt, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, and Oman. In Classical Arabic, the word means 'a yoke of oxen', implying the area of ground that could be tilled by oxen in a certain time. In Egypt, the feddan is the only non-metric unit which remained in use following the adoption of the metric system. A feddan is divided into 24 kirat (Arabic: قيراط, qīrāt), with one kirat equalling 175 square metres."
So 2.2M feddan works out to 9240 km^2. That is: roughly same area as a square with 96 km sides.
"Officials indicate the system will utilise roughly 10 million cubic metres of surface water daily alongside approximately 7.5 million cubic metres of treated drainage water per day, reflecting Egypt’s growing reliance on advanced water-recycling and smart-irrigation technologies amid mounting regional water pressures."
Article isn't clear on where either component comes from. Not an amount you could divert from somewhere without huge environmental effects elsewhere.
(Edit: quote is from the ME Observer article a commenter linked below. Original post seems to have more details)
Anyway sounds like an ambitious project. And understandable given Egypt's population vs. resources pressures (esp. water).
So similar origin to the Imperial acre; which it is very close in size to:
A lot of where they are getting water from right now is an ancient underground aquifer - there's not a lot of water there though, so the plan was it was a stopgap while the water recycling plan comes online.
Although the aquifer water plan itself is largely failing. The underground water was much more saline than they originally thought, so from space you can see lots of failed irrigation circles.
10 million cubic meters per day is roughly 100 cubic meters per second. Aswan discharges 2800 m3/s on average. So around 4% of the flow
This article has several passages repeated verbatim. Either bad AI or bad editing, not really a great advertisement for the product (“Brilliant”) it seems to be selling.
Example: “The construction of the Aswan High Dam, completed in 1970, brought clear benefits. It provided a steady supply of hydroelectric power and allowed water to be regulated for year-round irrigation.” appears twice, word for word.
I skimmed through the article. Several pictures are also repeated. Would this kind of thing happen before 2020? I don't think so.
Either way, I got taught in high school geography that parts of rivers get rebuild all the time. The Maas (Meuse, as Dutch is my native language I say Maas) gets longer due to the corners getting more sharp (due to water and wind erosion). Then at some point, the water might actually go straight between two corners, leading to the part between the two corners (an extra 180 degrees of two corners, though might look like one) getting cut. Sometimes, that doesn't happen (quick enough) and humans need to help nature a bit. Because sometimes, the new part of river tends to reach villages or other parts of society humans want to preserve. So, we interfere. Near Maastricht, there's also a canal next to the Maas, and this can help with deficit or excess water in the Maas. But sometimes, even an extra part of river next to the old river is build. IIRC they do that because the erosion destroyed such parts, that the outcome of the erosion keeps coming back and back in too short amounts of time. So then, it makes more sense to look for a more long term solution.
The water and wind erosion were interesting to me back in the days. So, from memory (and I surely am forgetting something here, possibly related to the chemistry of the water/earth), the way it works on low water level the wind on the corners erodes the corners, while on high water level the water pressurizes against the corner, leading to basins in the (wind eroded) corner which itself is part of the domino effect. In other words, it is bound to happen, given time. The river snaking around is bound to happen, and the breach is bound to happen as well. But the breach usually means the river goes to its original pathway (although temporarily).
So for a large river as the Nile, it also comes as no surprise Egyptian government (Egypt being the country who benefit from the Nile delta) invests in the Nile. But the main problem the Nile faces is AFAIK related to drought which is related to climate. I'm not sure how they want to fix that.
I believe you are [trying to?] dedcribe typical river morphodynamics; meandering and oxbow lake formation. While yes, they do happen, rivers like the Nile, especially in its milder sloped ends in Egypt, don't see the dramatical versions of these phenomena. And even rivers/reaches that do braid/meander a lot tend to do that within a limited corridor. The topic at hand speaks more of inter-basin conveyance.
This is not the first project like this Egypt has tried. All have failed
State and financial capacity is much stronger in Egypt today versus previous attempts.
Egypt's developmental indicators have finally caught up to where the CEE was 5-10 years ago but with a better demographic profile, and Gulf and Asian capital and technology partners are much more hands-on.
If you look at UNDP historical HDI data [1] you will see that Egypt barely caught up with the HDI levels of poorest Eastern European countries like Moldova from 10 years ago and is still well behind the HDI levels of better-off Eastern European countries like Czechia from 1990.
[1] https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/human-development-index#/in...
And there was no guarantee that Egypt would have reached this point today in 2026.
A decade ago, the safer bet would have been that Egypt would collapse just like it's then developmental peer Syria.
The fact that Egypt is at this point today is a testament to the fact that it's has robust enough state capacity that it was able to execute on projects.
> better-off Eastern European countries like Czechia from 1990
Czechia is not Eastern Europe and was a very developed country. I'll wait for inglor_cz to eventually jump into this convo and give context around Czechoslovakia and Central Europe in the 1980s to 90s.
Syria had an extremely destructive civil war and one of the worst collapses in living standards ever of any country (measured by however you want to look at it - HDI, GDP/capita...)
Meanwhile Egypt was overtaken by Vietnam and performed similarly to peers like Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Algeria, Philippines.
Egypt's and Sisi's performance is decidedly average.
And if you remember 2010-13 Egypt was also on the verge of collapsing into a civil war like Syria and Yemen yet didn't. That took a Herculean amount of effort.
Yeah, Ottoman rule sucked.
Yugo wasn't doing so bad in 1990 before it imploded for other reasons (read: was "suicided")
To be fair, Egypt and Mexico made major reforms to their water usage in the past and succeeded. Compared to India, which failed abjectly.
How did India's water usage reforms fail?
I've been in Egypt and India - they aren't that different, and it's Indian companies that are working on and helping financing these megaprojects in Egypt via the credit line established after the pandemic [0] and it's Indian companies like Wabag that are implementing water treatment projects in Egypt [1].
[0] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-12/egypt-say...
[1] - https://www.arabnews.com/node/2130826/middle-east
Do these Indian companies implement things in India?
Yes. And they're the same companies that were contracted and subcontracted infrastructure across the Khaleej and ASEAN.
Larsen & Toubro, Wabag, SP Group, EIL, Afcons, and others tend to have a chokehold on implementing and executing these kinds of projects in MENA because they co-finance projects with Gulf capital players who tend to have capital stakes in these Indian players as well.
Yes, you may have to update your knowledge on the insane infrastructure boom going on in India right now.
And, they aren't doing in sustainable way, worst than China.
Yes, but they are building up a bunch of companies that can do complex infrastructure work from soup to nuts. One step at a time.
India uses something like a quarter of the world's groundwater. 20 years ago, it was all open channels, which lose 40-80% of water due to evaporation and seepage. Mexico and Egypt fixed this decades ago.
Nowadays, farmers have shifted to directly using groundwater, and just pump as much water as possible from wells (thus depleting them). This is exacerbated by: 1) Relying on flood irrigation (ie just let water flow across the field and evaporate, vs drip) 2) As temperatures rise, using even more water
The situation was already pretty dire, and despite various efforts, it's getting much worse.
</i>https://fse.fsi.stanford.edu/news/indian-groundwater-depleti...
India relies on groundwater and its strategy has been to use the monsoons to replenish the groundwater under the Jal Shakti Abhyan. The monsoons come like clockwork so it’s a solid strategy.
No, it is deeply stupid strategy, because groundwater is being depleted much faster than it can be replenished:
"We reviewed 160 journal articles, along with supplementary data and reports from GW, agriculture, and meteorological authorities. Our focus was on GW depletion in India, with particular emphasis on GRACE satellite data, in situ observations, and the influence of hydrogeological conditions, anthropogenic activities, and climatic disturbances. GRACE observations reveal significant depletion, particularly in Eastern Uttar Pradesh at 7 cm/yr rate from 2002 to 2022, while localized in situ data highlight Punjab as the most rapidly depleting area, with a rate of 46 cm/yr (2003–2012)."*
*https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S23528...
It is clearly not working. Groundwater in India is being drained faster than it is being replenished. Wells have gone so deep that people are now worried about heavy metals like arsenic.
The article makes a good point about food imports to Egypt. I think a lot of people don't realize that Egypt has been an innocent victim of Russia's invasion of Ukraine which disrupted wheat exports.
Recent strikes by Ukraine on Russian oil refineries are in turn disrupting Russian grain harvests due to shortages of diesel fuel. While this is a legitimate defensive tactic by Ukraine, as a side effect it's likely to cause further food price inflation in Egypt.
Maybe the Egyptian government could pressure Putin to stop killing innocent people and sending young men to the front to needlessly die, how about that ?
Sounds good, I hope they do. But as a practical matter Egypt is in a difficult spot because they import wheat from both Ukraine and Russia. And Egypt has no real leverage with Putin.
Do we have a better source? This article contains repeating text which makes me suspect copy-pasted slop.
EDIT: This [1] is better.
[1] https://meobserver.org/nutrition/2026/05/18/egypts-new-delta...
I'd suspect it's a transcript of a video on his (excellent) YouTube[0], hence the repetition.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/@TheB1M
It's a great channel if you don't care about any degree of technical debt and wanna see someone glaze over human rights violations in order to celebrate mega projects. I'd at least highly recommend the DeArrow extensions to de-clickbait this channel's titles.
As much as I criticize the channel, I admit I can't look away
He quite often gets into problematic areas of many projects - see his series on Billionaires row in New York.
There's just an exceeding amount of signal to noise ratio when it comes to big projects. Criticism of foreign projects comes out of the woodwork by non-local sources, and yet we seem to accept the human toll on Western projects like the Hoover Dam or the Channel Tunnel. Him taking a neutral tone and accepting source materials at face value is fair.
Mega-projects have been a defining feature of human civilization since its inception, so there's ultimately not a way to cover them that is not either glamorizing or unbearably self-loathing.
> we seem to accept the human toll on Western projects like the Hoover Dam or the Channel Tunnel
The human toll of both is commonly brought up, including at the sites.
I meant depth* not debt. Too late to edit but to embarrassing to not address.
With a such rapid demographic growth they have no choice. The population of Egypt doubled in last ~35 years. (quadrupled in the last ~60 years)
That's true for now, although their rate of population growth appears to have peaked several years ago and like most other countries the birth rate has since declined sharply.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Egypt
People born yesterday are alive today and will be alive in the next ~70 years mostly.
Given this unsustainable population growth, I wonder how serious the refugee issue will become for Europe and the Americas over the next 30 to 40 years.
How is that even sustainable, like housing, education, electricity, running water, etc. how can they scale those with that fast growing population
Grow more crops, build more dams, etc?
Until they are out of room anyway, but they have a lot of unused desert right now.
Typically, people produce about as much as they consume, so a growing population normally sustains itself.
Egypt is trapped in mega projects death spiral
This could completely terraform the weather for the entire region. Possibly even increasing the amount of rain in the middle east overall.
Aren't they already on Terra, or did I miss something?
I don't believe it.
Egypt is also hard at work transforming the Sinai Plain and the vicinity of Mount Sinai itself, into a tourist magnet, and a thriving hotel/resort region. The monks of St. Katherine's monastery are nonplussed about these developments.
(Many monasteries and convents in modern times are renowned, and/or an open secret, for their peaceful hospitality, and gladly welcome pilgrims and tourists for overnight stays, especially in places where the hotels are in short supply, and especially in places like Republic of Ireland, where the monasteries' populations are dwindling, and losing donors, while the tourist trade is stronger every day...)
Possibly better source: https://www.arabnews.com/node/2619542/business-economy
Huh? Different project.