Throughout my government service in developing the Jordan
Rift Valley, international aid played a role in that effort (1973-1987). The
Jordan Valley Authority and its predecessor the Jordan Valley Commission were
the recipients of US Agency for International Development (USAID) lending programs.
Even when its presence shrank, after 1967, to one American and one Jordanian,
the agency applied the norms in its Handbook 11 in assessing each project it
was called on to finance.
اضافة اعلان
Topmost of its appraisal were the economic feasibility and
social returns, as well as the environmental impact assessment, which was added
later. Many capital projects were financed through grants between 1959 and 1967
and through soft loans thereafter. An important corollary of its involvement in
the Jordan Valley development was to encourage many other development agencies
to step in and participate in that government effort.
The program was very successful and worth the effort
invested in it. I was thoroughly involved in its planning and implementation
since 1973, but the driving forces were HRH Prince El Hassan Ben Talal and the
chairman of the Jordan Valley Authority at the time, Omar Abdallah Dokhgan, who
I succeeded in 1982.
More recently, I have heard statements by US officials,
including USAID personnel, expressing support for the National Water Carrier
even before the project was appraised for its economic and social feasibility
and environmental soundness. While I want to thank USAID for its historical
support of Jordan, I venture to question the wisdom of the early support for
the National Water Carrier expressed by US officials.
In October last year, they hurriedly expressed advocacy for
the Declaration of Intent of the UAE, Jordan and Israel, by which electrical
energy generated in Jordan would be traded for Mediterranean water desalinated
in Israel, provided, so goes the tripartite intent, the undertaking is
feasible, which provision makes sense and applies to any and all capital
investment projects.
My wonder is related to the deviation from the trend of assessing
the feasibility condition when talking about Jordan’s National Water Carrier,
whose name is copied from the major Israeli project conceived in 1952,
implemented in stages and completed by 1964 with covert US financial
assistance. The Israeli project pumped fresh Jordan River water from the
northwest part of Lake Tiberias to Naqab.
I wonder why the US support for our carrier was
enthusiastically expressed before studying its financial affordability, and
social and environmental adequacy. USAID readiness to help Jordan is not new,
and we owe them gratitude and thanks since the days of Point IV (the bill
passed by Congress in 1952).
I claim that the Jordan carrier will burden the consumers
and the Treasury, and that such burden could be avoided if the project is put
on hold until nuclear fusion energy is perfected and commercialized. That is
expected to take place by 2050 because the initial success of such generation
has been recently announced by a fusion research laboratory in the Bay Area in
California and by a similar laboratory in England. Before that happens, neither
the consumers in Jordan nor the Treasury can afford to pay the cost of water
desalinated on the Red Sea shore, whose brine could be dispensed with in an
environmentally friendly way, and pumped to the north of the country.
The cost of these projects is high; to it should be added
the cost of water distribution and of the unaccounted-for water. If the total
cost of water per capita is more than 2.5 percent of one’s share of national income,
a subsidy has to be afforded by the Treasury in order to pay the bill. Our
Treasury is already burdened with debt service and is in no shape to subsidize
consumer goods.
I have been advocating a better alternative: use the deep
sandstone aquifer underlying most of the territory of our country as the source
of water for the population.
I have assessed the adequacy of the alternative and it
competes very well with the proposed national carrier. The depth of that
aquifer is around one kilometer; its horizontal extent spans most of the
country. If only the horizontal extent of the Badia is considered, at 67,000
sq. km, the volume of the sandstone layer would be about 67,000 cubic km. The
voids in the sandstone vary between 15 percent and 37 percent of its volume. If
the average of this range is considered, or 25 percent, the volume of water
stored in the voids would be 17,000 cubic km, i.e., 17x1012 cubic meters.
As a lower middle income economy country, Jordan’s yearly
water needs for municipal, industrial and food production purposes is 17x102
cubic meters per capita. If a population of 10 million people would rely on
this aquifer, it would last them for 1,000 years. I am proposing to use it for
only 30 years, until the new energy gets on line.
The attractiveness of this alternative, other than the
volume of water, is that, in the areas where there is drilling data, the said
aquifer is artesian, with an average of 700 meters artesian head. If the
average drilling depth is one kilometer (as the data shows) the pumping head
would be only 300 meters, much less than the head of about 550 meters needed
for reverse osmosis desalination technology, not talking about the saving in
equipment and hardware.
USAID advanced us a loan in 1978 to explore groundwater in the
Jordan Rift Valley, which enabled us to quantify the renewable groundwater in
Wadi Araba. Under it we discovered the northwest aquifer in 1982, especially at
Wadi El Arab and Mukheiba. USAID could start to enable Jordan to assess the
deep sandstone by adding to the 33 or so wells already driven into it in just
the same way it assisted us in exploring the groundwater potential in the
Jordan Rift Valley.
It could further entrust a non-politically guided consultant
with comparing the cost of the alternative with the cost of the National Water
Carrier before encouraging Jordan’s involvement in the latter.
The writer was minister of water and irrigation (1997-1988),
president of the Jordan Valley Authority (1982-1987) and vice president of the
Jordan Valley Authority (1973-1982).
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