alt.hn

7/3/2026 at 8:00:34 PM

Egypt Is Building a New Nile

 https://www.theb1m.com/video/egypt-is-building-a-new-nile

by geox

7/6/2026 at 7:33:54 PM

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.

by culi

7/6/2026 at 9:08:27 PM

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.

by Revanche1367

7/6/2026 at 9:57:47 PM

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.

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

by culi

7/6/2026 at 9:38:55 PM

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.

by codeddesign

7/6/2026 at 10:14:28 PM

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, arguable, 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...

by culi

7/6/2026 at 8:27:40 PM

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?

by atonse

7/6/2026 at 9:54:42 PM

It's too expensive for agriculture.

by cyberax

7/6/2026 at 9:18:30 PM

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.

by rzwitserloot

7/6/2026 at 9:51:22 PM

Have you ever dealt with metallic sodium? You are dramatically underestimating how dangerous it is at scale. Hard no.

by lazide

7/6/2026 at 9:19:11 PM

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.

by dyauspitr

7/6/2026 at 7:50:37 PM

> 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.

by alephnerd

7/6/2026 at 8:46:57 PM

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.

by eddythompson80

7/6/2026 at 9:28:08 PM

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.

by rayiner

7/6/2026 at 9:41:49 PM

Which european dictatorship left their country better off?

by krior

7/6/2026 at 10:03:34 PM

"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.

by rayiner

7/6/2026 at 8:43:12 PM

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.

by ojbyrne

7/6/2026 at 6:19:11 PM

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).

by RetroTechie

7/6/2026 at 7:35:26 PM

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.

by legitster

7/6/2026 at 7:08:28 PM

So similar origin to the Imperial acre; which it is very close in size to:

  You have: 175*24m^2
  You want: acre
   * 1.0378426
   / 0.96353724

by aidenn0

7/6/2026 at 8:18:30 PM

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

by yread

7/6/2026 at 9:37:46 PM

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.

by nradov

7/6/2026 at 7:10:52 PM

This is not the first project like this Egypt has tried. All have failed

by daedrdev

7/6/2026 at 7:28:05 PM

To be fair, Egypt and Mexico made major reforms to their water usage in the past and succeeded. Compared to India, which failed abjectly.

by a34729t

7/6/2026 at 9:27:51 PM

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.

by dyauspitr

7/6/2026 at 7:29:21 PM

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

by alephnerd

7/6/2026 at 8:11:58 PM

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.

https://fse.fsi.stanford.edu/news/indian-groundwater-depleti...

by a34729t

7/6/2026 at 7:43:47 PM

Do these Indian companies implement things in India?

by vjvjvjvjghv

7/6/2026 at 9:29:03 PM

Yes, you may have to update your knowledge on the insane infrastructure boom going on in India right now.

by dyauspitr

7/6/2026 at 7:55:22 PM

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.

by alephnerd

7/6/2026 at 7:14:44 PM

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.

by alephnerd

7/6/2026 at 8:06:44 PM

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...

by cherryteastain

7/6/2026 at 8:10:08 PM

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.

by alephnerd

7/6/2026 at 8:19:37 PM

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.

by cherryteastain

7/6/2026 at 10:14:46 PM

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.

by alephnerd

7/6/2026 at 9:27:47 PM

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)

by betaby

7/6/2026 at 9:31:27 PM

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

by nradov

7/6/2026 at 9:33:49 PM

How is that even sustainable, like housing, education, electricity, running water, etc. how can they scale those with that fast growing population

by sajithdilshan

7/6/2026 at 10:04:02 PM

Typically, people produce about as much as they consume, so a growing population normally sustains itself.

by BurningFrog

7/6/2026 at 9:54:05 PM

Grow more crops, build more dams, etc?

Until they are out of room anyway, but they have a lot of unused desert right now.

by lazide

7/6/2026 at 8:56:57 PM

Egypt is trapped in mega projects death spiral

by gl-prod

7/6/2026 at 6:44:36 PM

This could completely terraform the weather for the entire region. Possibly even increasing the amount of rain in the middle east overall.

by hparadiz

7/6/2026 at 8:44:32 PM

Aren't they already on Terra, or did I miss something?

by HeyLaughingBoy

7/6/2026 at 5:17:42 PM

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...

by JumpCrisscross

7/6/2026 at 5:35:00 PM

I'd suspect it's a transcript of a video on his (excellent) YouTube[0], hence the repetition.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/@TheB1M

by kristjansson

7/6/2026 at 7:08:15 PM

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

by culi

7/6/2026 at 7:26:56 PM

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.

by legitster

7/6/2026 at 9:05:15 PM

> 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.

by JumpCrisscross

7/6/2026 at 8:59:29 PM

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...)

by ButlerianJihad