Egypt Is About to Flood the Sahara Desert [15:42]

00:00 An Insane Megaproject in the Sahara
01:36 The Toshka Project
03:18 Why Egypt Needs More Power
04:00 The Original "Sahara Sea" Vision
04:39 From Jules Verne to Real Engineers
06:00 Turning Geography Into Electricity
07:50 A Desert Below Sea Level
09:10 War, Mines, and a Forgotten Desert
10:00 The CIA's Cold War Interest
14:20 Nuclear Bombs as Construction Tools
16:10 Why the Project Failed
17:06 Modern Possibilities
21:50 Environmental Risks and Trade-Offs
22:20 Megaproject or Mirage?

YouTube transcript reformatted at textformatter.ai follows.

What could possible go wrong?

Well, there goes all the predicted sea Level rise caused by global warming!

Sounds like Salting da Erf.

Interestingly enough, the Looking 4 vid mentions another such depression, in Algeria, which per Waikikipedia (wikipedia, but that variation made me laugh) was once known as Lake Tritonis, which is mentioned by Herodotus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chott_Melrhir

Yup. Clear it right up. Particularly when it never happens. 😁

Transcript
What would you say if I told you Egypt wanted to build the world's largest artificial lake in the middle of the Sahara Desert? Many people throughout the last century have met the idea with skepticism. Most people have never been aware of the idea in the first place. But although it sounds like a fanciful idea, this bold project has in fact been quietly discussed in powerful circles for decades. And now there are multiple coalescing factors that have made interest in the project research. In a situation where energy needs are growing, creating a huge artificial lake in the desert could be one of the solutions to Egypt's development challenges.

This new artificial lake could not only provide a major source of energy through large-scale hydroelectricity, but it could also lead to the extraction of large quantities of lithium and the creation of a mining industry unprecedented in the country's history. In this episode of Looking for, we'll investigate the mind-blowing history and scintillating possibilities behind one of the grandest engineering projects ever proposed. A project so massive it would easily be seen from space.

From the construction of a 100 km canal using nuclear bombs to the CIA's interest in this mega project, I invite you to descend into the depths of the Qatara depression and discover the recent proposals to fill it with water from the Mediterranean Sea.

The country of Egypt has about 120 million people living within its roughly 1 million km borders. That's twice the size of France. However, less than 1% of the country is water, and almost all of its residents live within 20 km of the Nile River and its delta. The vast majority of the country, despite its world-famous landmarks and historic cities, is quiet, empty desert with very few people in it. To move forward, Egyptians have often attempted to overcome this geographical constraint. Modern mega projects such as the Toshka plan are a good example of this determination.
The Toshka Project
Launched in the late 1990s by Hosni Mubarak, it aimed to create a so-called new Nile Valley in southern Egypt by turning hundreds of thousands of acres of desert into irrigated new farmland. These lands were to be irrigated using a system of canals diverting water from Lake Nasser. The project had big visions, estimating the relocation of millions of Egyptians to the area. But the project never met its full potential due to economic reasons and governance issues. In 2014, only 10% of the announced area was actually cultivated.

Another project is the construction of the new administrative capital located 45 km east of Cairo. This project is ongoing and carries the promise of decongesting Cairo and relocating government institutions. If you'd like to learn more about this project, I've included the link to my video on the subject in the description.

But while such mega projects seek to address food and urban planning issues, the Qatara Depression Project aims at an entirely different aspect of Egyptian civilization: power.
Why Egypt Needs More Power
In 1970, Egypt completed the construction of the Aswan High Dam, a dam on the Nile which can generate 10 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity per year. But prior to this, the country had huge unsatisfied demand for power, water control, and new development land. It was in the midst of this unsatisfied demand that ideas first began swirling about building a lake in the desert. It wasn't a new idea at the time. Back in the 19th century, the French officer and geographer François Eli Rudair became enamored with the idea of creating what he called a Sahara Sea by flooding depressions in not only Egypt but Algeria and other parts of the Sahara desert.
The Original "Sahara Sea" Vision
In 1874, he planned to dig a canal from the Gulf of Gabès in Tunisia to Jot Aljarid in order to flood it with water from the Mediterranean Sea. At the same time, the French diplomat and entrepreneur Ferdinand de Lesseps, who had been a key figure in the construction of the Suez Canal, also became enamored with the idea, seeing in it the potential to become his second great triumph in the region. Rudair and de Lesseps spent nearly a decade in the late 1800s pursuing the project. But after a lack of political support and government funding, the project was abandoned.

Although the project never materialized, it did have a cultural impact, namely by inspiring the last novel ever written by Jules Verne titled Invasion of the Sea. A novel that imagines a fictional sequel to the French geographer's project, contrasting the Sahara life of the Tuaregs with the world of science and technology embodied by the engineer and his team.

The next person we know of to take a serious interest in the creation of a Sahara Sea was a German geographer named Albrecht Pank. Pank was particularly interested in a 20,000 km² section of the Sahara that sits as low as 133 m below sea level. In 1912, Pank drew up a plan to flood this area, which was named a few years later, the Qatara Depression. This one is located in the Libyan desert, the eastern desert in northwestern Egypt. In essence, Pank envisioned digging a system of canals which would carry water from the Mediterranean roughly 120 km downhill into the depression.

By this time, the world had already seen the construction of major projects like the Suez Canal, the Panama Canal, and the Simplon Tunnel. But even still, the scale of Pank's concept and the challenges of changing elevation and the harsh desert environment made it well beyond anything that had been done before. That being said, successfully flooding the area would create a massive teardrop-shaped lake with huge potential for hydroelectric power generation.

At nearly 20,000 km², the lake, if filled all the way, would become one of the largest in the world, comparable to Lake Ontario in Canada, one of the five Great Lakes of North America. To put this into perspective, Lake Ontario is nearly the size of the US state of New Jersey. From the downtown Toronto skyline, the lake is sometimes mistaken for the open ocean due to its expansive size. Even on a world map, the lake is easily visible: a huge blue aperture along the US-Canada border. This is how big and how significant a geographic transformation a lake in the Qatara depression would be.

Back in 1912, as Albrecht Pank was drawing up these early visions, the largest artificial lake ever made was only 425 km²: Gatun Lake in Panama, built during the construction of the famous canal. In the same year the Titanic sank, Pank was boldly dreaming of breaking the artificial lake record by almost 50 times. A degree of improvement that is almost never seen across any field. But frustratingly for Pank, dreaming was ultimately all he ever achieved, despite a hugely influential and long career as a geologist and geographer in other areas.

In Pank's defense, he was speculating about an area on the map that at the time very little was known about. It wasn't until 1927 that another geologist from England, John Ball, conducted a survey of the area and confirmed basic facts such as the depression's depth and surface area. Ball estimated the depth below sea level to be 134 m at its lowest point, just 1 m higher than the lowest point in Africa, the Afar depression in the east of the continent. Ball calculated the surface area of the Qatara depression to be about 18,000 km². Ball was also the first to formally study the hypothesis that the depression could be used to generate hydroelectric power.

In a 1933 article, Ball suggested that because of the depression's depth below sea level, water from the Mediterranean or possibly even the Nile River could be brought in and the drop from sea level to below could be utilized to create massive amounts of energy. Ball's calculations indicated somewhere between 125 and 200 megawatts. Impressive for the time, but way below modern estimates of the depression's potential. Ball also recognized a unique feature that's key to the feasibility of this audacious project, which is that the extreme heat of the desert would evaporate as much as several meters of water off the surface of the lake every year, allowing for continuous water flow year-round, essential for hydroelectric power generation.

But despite his fairly monumental discovery, Ball's work did not lead to any real action other than generating occasional discussion.
War, Mines, and a Forgotten Desert
A few years later, World War II began and the Qatara Depression Project was far from being a priority. During the Western Desert Campaign, which lasted from June 1940 to February 1943, the depression was mostly seen as an area to avoid mistakenly wandering down into. It marked the southern limit of the first and second battles of El Alamein, as it was impassable and impractical for tanks and most other military vehicles. In 2015, several million landmines were still buried there.

It was only after the end of the war and after Egypt's transformation from monarchy to republic in the early 1950s that serious interest in the engineering prospects of the Qatara depression resurfaced. And this time the interested party wasn't just some solitary geologist toiling in his study. It was the CIA.

And when you look at ideas this big—projects that entire civilizations dream about for generations—it really makes you wonder how human knowledge even gets built in the first place. [ad text redacted]

The year 1957 was the midpoint of Dwight D. Eisenhower's 8-year tenure as the president of the United States. It was also one of the most pivotal periods in Middle Eastern Cold War history. A year later, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser had declared martial law in the Suez Canal, which was owned by the British and French-controlled Suez Canal Company.

He did so in response to American refusal to fund the Aswan Dam over Egypt's growing ties to the Soviet Union, which sold its weapons via Czechoslovakia.

NASA was ultimately successful in nationalizing the Suez Canal, causing Britain and France to lose much of their influence in the region. The Suez Canal, as it came to be known, nearly triggered a US-Soviet confrontation, leading Eisenhower to give a landmark speech on January 5th, 1957.

In the speech, the president promised military intervention in any Middle Eastern country threatened by what he called international communism. Authorized such assistance and cooperation to include the employment of the armed forces of the United States to secure and protect the territorial integrity and political independence of such nations, requesting such aid against overt armed aggression from any nation controlled by international communism.

This later became known as the Eisenhower Doctrine. It was during this critical period that the Central Intelligence Agency began secretly developing various strategies for fostering international collaboration through Middle Eastern infrastructure projects.

A memo from the first civilian director of the CIA, Alan Dulles, which wasn't declassified until 2013, suggested, among other projects, building nuclear reactors on the Gaza Strip.

In the footsteps of previous geologists, the CIA also suggested flooding the Qatara Depression with seawater from the Mediterranean. The idea was that beyond the material benefits of changing the region's climate and providing work and settlement space for refugees, the project would also pull Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser toward the US and away from the Soviet Union.

Objectively speaking, it was a promising plan in terms of achieving the goals of the administration, but it would have been expensive and it was a gamble. We'll never know what Eisenhower actually said or thought about the proposal. All we know from declassified documents is that he ultimately rejected it. So, this colossal shadowy idea once again overpowered those fishing for it, returning to the hidden undercurrents from which it originated. It wasn't until the mid-1960s that the idea of filling the Qatara Depression resurfaced.

The next to try and wrangle it to the surface was Professor Friedrich Basler, who would ultimately spend more effort and contribute more to the modernization of the project than any other figure. Basler was a German hydraulic engineer who, beginning in 1964, became hugely drawn to the allure of the Qatara Depression project. He was eventually appointed by the German Federal Ministry of Economics to conduct a preliminary study of the project's feasibility.

Basler also became the leader of an international board of directors working on the project. Starting in 1975, Basler also began advising the Egyptian government on the project.

Basler was responsible for the first fully engineered concept of the Qatara Depression project. He dramatically increased the estimated power output from John B's earlier estimate of 200 megawatts to nearly 6,000 megawatts per year. At one point, he also proposed forging the canals for the reservoir by using nuclear explosions, calculating that he could create 213 boreholes, each with an explosive yield of roughly 1.5 megatons.

No, you're not dreaming. This proposal was very serious at the time. Why? Because the bombs would have cost much less than conventional construction techniques, which would not have made the Qatara project sufficiently profitable. The plan called for the forced evacuation of some 25,000 residents, which in the vast arid deserts of Egypt demonstrates the scale of impact Basler was envisioning. Even more ambitious, he proposed an alternative with an even longer canal to divert part of the waters of the Nile located 300 km further east.
Why the Project Failed
While in theory this could have worked, the reasons not to try it proved too numerous. Chief among those reasons was the political infeasibility, thanks to UN initiatives around nuclear weapon-free zones in the Middle East and the limited test ban treaty of 1963.

An even bigger reason not to try Basler's plan was the risk of nuclear fallout, which was already a major issue by that time in other places, for example, in the deserts of Nevada, where the US had conducted numerous tests.

Despite making huge leaps in terms of understanding logistics and proving the project was theoretically possible, the Qatara Depression Project was eventually relinquished yet again. Still too big and too daunting to be brought to life.
Modern Possibilities
And this is where the project remains to this day: an almost legendary entity swimming out in the deep sea just beyond our reach.

As I mentioned at the start of this video, there have recently been several converging developments that have renewed interest in the project. One is Egypt's rapidly increasing energy and sustainability needs. Water scarcity and geopolitical tensions with Ethiopia over the flow of the Nile have all made the Qatara Depression more interesting in recent years.

Egypt has been involved in an ongoing dispute with Ethiopia over Ethiopia's Grand Renaissance Dam, the largest dam in Africa, which sits on the Blue Nile and, according to Egyptian lawmaker Mustapha Bachri, is quote an existential threat to Egypt.

In addition to new worries, there are also new enticements. For example, the clean energy boom has sparked interest in both the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia to explore new opportunities for lithium mining via the use of salt pans. A potential secondary use of the lake in the Qatara Depression could be the resulting salt and evaporite basin, which could theoretically be used for such mining projects.

Technology has also improved since the days of Friedrich Basler and those prior. New remote sensing data and hydrological models allow better quantification of evaporation basin morphology and feasibility.

In 2023, Egypt announced it was partnering with Eg Consulting and Elite Capital and Co. Limited to conduct a new feasibility study of the Qatara project. No results have yet been publicized, but despite that, let's do our best to look at what a completed Qatara Depression project in the modern era might look like. Because let's face it, the scale is just too great to not think about. If completed, it would still be by far the largest artificial lake in world history. Even today, the largest artificial lake by surface area is Lake Volta in Ghana. Created in 1965 during the construction of the Akasamba Dam, it spans an area of 8,520 km². The dam made it possible to generate power, provide irrigation, and create a navigable route from Ghana's northern savannah to the coast. The lake occupies 3.6% of Ghana's area. And yet, it's still well under half the size of the Qatara Depression.

If built with pumped storage capability, the hydropower output might be as high as 4 to 6 gigawatts of continuous generation, making it one of Africa's largest non-fossil energy sources and a grid stabilizer for Egypt, Libya, and possibly the Eastern Mediterranean.

Egypt set a record in July 2025 for the highest daily electrical load in the country's recorded history at 39.5 GW. Meaning even at record levels of demand, the Qatara Depression could potentially power something like 15% of the entire country, millions of homes, and tens of millions of people.

And it's worth noting this July surge caused a huge strain on Egypt's current power grid, causing 12-hour outages in Giza, where the famous pyramids sit.

Qatara could also become one of the world's largest evaporite mining zones, exporting products such as industrial salt, potash, magnesium, bromine, and, as I said earlier, possibly a lot of lithium.

More recent proposals, for example, a detailed study published by Professor Magdi Ragheb of the University of Illinois in 2019, resemble earlier plans but add key new details. Ragheb's analysis suggests filling the depression in two distinct stages: a fill stage and then a continuous flow stage using not only canals but also tunnels and possibly an additional pipeline to convey water from the Mediterranean. Ragheb estimates as much as 1,213 km³ of water volume at full capacity with the lake surface maintained at around 60 m below sea level.

The extreme heat in Qatara offers the unique benefit of high evaporation for continuous filling of the basin, but it also makes large-scale population growth unlikely. That being said, the area might see new towns and mining communities, industrial zones pop up, and perhaps even tourist destinations along the lakefront.

All this is part of a major development project in the Qatara area, which stretches from south of Elamine to Solemn.
Environmental Risks and Trade-Offs
But creating a salt lake of this size would have repercussions for the entire surrounding region. Humidity would likely increase. Dust suppression and minor microclimate shifts might also occur. There's a significant risk to desert ecosystems that depend on existing oases, which would be contaminated by the salinity of the basin. What's more, the base of the depression is made up of porous rock, meaning that the infiltration of saline water into the water table would simply lead to large-scale contamination of this part of the Nubian aquifer. Making this groundwater extremely salty could also jeopardize Egypt's agricultural system.

On the other side of the scale, the lake would offer the huge benefit of gigawatt-scale clean power. The project would probably cost tens of billions of US dollars and take anywhere from one to two decades from start to finish. But the geopolitical impact for Egypt would be enormous.

The country would see a major boost in energy independence and gain a powerful new asset to its bargaining power in North Africa and the Arab world. The project would also create thousands of jobs and likely generate billions in revenue. In a country where one in three people experience life below the poverty line.

Like any record-breaking, earth-shifting mega project, the Qatara Depression Project would be difficult, expensive, time-consuming, and nothing short of transformational.

For more than a hundred years, there have been those who have said the project is impossible. And there have been those who have insisted it can be done. Only time can tell who in the end will be proven right.

While waiting for the answer, if you want to take another look at the mega projects underway in Egypt, which are just as ambitious, here's my video on the new Delta project, which aims to make the country self-sufficient in food. That's all for now. We'll see you next time on Looking Four.

Sounds like something Lex Luthor would do. They should name part of the new coastline “Otisburg”.

Sounds very environmental.

“turning hundreds of thousands of acres of desert
into irrigated new farmland”
-
Farmland irrigated with salt water?

Contamination of underlying freshwater aquifers.

“Farmland irrigated with salt water?”

riiiight ... and just because water flows down hill for 120 KM doesn’t mean it can be used for hydropower ... the drop has to be over a very short distance OR it has to be contained in a giant pipe over a longer distance, the pressure at the low end of the 120 KM end of pipe equal to the weight of the water over the entire drop, minus friction of course, which alone might make such using that long of a pipe unfeasible ... at any rate, check out the ocone flume [ https://www.google.com/search?q=ocone+flume ] in Tennessee: that structure used to fascinate me as a kid ... still does ...

How exactly will the energy be generated?

It will be as glamorous, beautiful, and smelly, as California’s Salton Sea.

"Ball also recognized a unique feature that's key to the feasibility of this audacious project, which is that the extreme heat of the desert would evaporate as much as several meters of water off the surface of the lake every year, allowing for continuous water flow year-round,"

Which is going to come back down as rain somewhere. Preferably somewhere it's needed.

Hydroelectric turbines.

Fascinating.

Why are you “catnip man’? Daisy would like to know. She’s eight years old, a very smart tri-colored Tabby.

“If built with pumped storage capability, the hydropower output might be as high as 4 to 6 gigawatts of continuous generation”

Uhhh?

You use pumps to pump water up a reservoir storage which you then use to make hydroelectric power?

Where would the pumps get their power from?

If it’s from solar, than why not use that to power homes and businesses?

OK I think I got it. The pumped reservoir is basically used as an energy storage (like a battery). So water is pumped during the day when the immense solar panels would be generating lots of excess energy, and then at night the hydro would be generating the electricity.

And they say the capacity would be about 6 gigawatts, which is roughly the equivalent of 6 nukes.

Might as well build the nukes, it would be a hell of a lot cheaper and mother-erf friendlier.

A freshwater lake would be interesting, but with a marine supply, the accumulation of salts and their infusion into groundwater give me the heebs.

Micro-nukes are a better answer.