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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 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.
"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).
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.
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
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...
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.
[1] https://hdr.undp.org/data-center/human-development-index#/in...
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.
EDIT: This [1] is better.
[1] https://meobserver.org/nutrition/2026/05/18/egypts-new-delta...
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/@TheB1M
As much as I criticize the channel, I admit I can't look away
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.