Would the Qattara Depression Project be feasible? And would the resulting sea make the surrounding land more arable, or would it be too salty.
>>16540926We already told you on /int/. No need to cope here.
>>16540931I wanted to ask science “experts” since I think megaprojects like this are super neat
Yes it would be very feasible. Electricity generation from the altitude difference and salt mining would be very profitable.>Surrounding land more arableUhm what? The goal of the project isn't to make anything arable, it's about hydropower generation? The hypersaline lake would be a dead zone.
if the only source of water was the sea, it would likely end up being hypersaline like the dead sea
>>16540933>The hypersaline lake would be a dead zoneSo what do you imagine Egypt would do with the lake once it was filled? And does this mean it would only be a short term benefit (in terms of a few decades) of massive hydroelectric power generation, as once the lake fills water from the Mediterranean will no longer flow into it?
You already got btfo on /int/ you dumb cunt, do you think people on /sci/ are going to tell you "yeah life is just like a videogame, it's that simple!"
>>16540936I think you don't understand what's going on here. The lake is never going to be filled because there is going to be a controlled equilibrium between the amount of water that is evaporating and the water that flows through the turbines to assure a continuous stream. Water is always going to flow into it.
>>16540941Nothing takes the salt out. It only increases with time.
>>16540939Nigger I asked a question
>>16540948Yes this is obvious. Your point is?
>>16540941So it will consistently be generating hydroelectric power and allowing for salt mining from the evaporated water?
>>16540955Yes. That's the whole point. I have never heard anyone talk about this project outside of the goal for hydroelectric power generation?
>>16540951My point is what the fuck is the point of Dead Sea 2 Electric Boogaloo except it costs a gazillion dollars to build and maintain?
>>16540957I just learned about the project and only read a few articles on it. One thing I read is the potential positive impacts the excess evaporation could have on rainfall, in the Sinai especially. Could there be any long term benefits from that or no?
>>16540950And multiple people answered it, and your dozen follow up questions as wellbut you kept ignoring them and sticking your head in the sand to try and defend this as a good idea
>>16540958Electricity obviously. Are you dumb? That's already stated in the post you are replying.
>>16540964Do you not understand that Egypt already has the Aswan dam and there’s a trillion cheaper ways to generate electricity there? Idk maybe a solar plant because it’s a desert?
>>16540964Sorry some German autist followed me from the thread I made about it on /int/
>>16540966>Already hasDude, are you fucking retarded? The Dam was finished in the 70s when Egypt had 35 million people. Now it has almost 120 million. Egypt is plagued by a constant energy crisis and frequent blackouts.>Solar panelsYeah definitely cheaper to import expensive foreign solar panels with your weak currency which you have zero know-how on instead of using your own engineers to realize a hydroelectric project which you already have experience on. lmao
>>16540973Yeah, definitely cheaper. Where are you getting concrete from, genius? It ain’t a sandcastle? And all those famous engineers? I’m sure Egypt has plenty and wouldn’t have to hire European or American ones at an exorbitant cost. And the whole project management isn’t going to cost a fortune by paying these people for years on end. It’s all just going to materlialize from thin air unlike all those existing technology that doesn’t require R&D. You sound like a teenager who’s never had a job.
>>16540976Wait you unironically believe that building solar farms doesn't require any building material or project management? Are they supposed to just appear in the dessert or something? Lmao. Kiddo, it seems to me that you are the one without a job experience here. Everything you have described applies to any other major energy project as well but doubly so because Egypt has at least rudimentary experience with several hydroelectric projects.And this is just the basic stuff I didn't even get really started on all the problems solar would come with, like energy storage, sensitivy, disposel or network stability, the required infrastructure, etc.
>>16540982Anon, we have this thing in the real world called research and development. R&D for short. When something completely novel gets proposed, people don’t just rush to build it because they aren’t angsty teenagers like you. There’s inevitably going to form dozens of commissions on this and that aspect of the project that’s never been realized before. And the whole thing would take literal years before it’d be given the green light to start construction.Or you could just, you know, skip all that and use existing technology that’s been tried and doesn’t have a thousand asterisks attached. Saves a ton of money, would recommend.
>>16541002>Anon, we have this thing in the real world called research and development. R&D for shortWho the fuck is 'we'? We isn't fucking Egypt. Egypt does absolutely zero solar R&D or has any production capacity or know-how nor the resources to fucking ship solar panels all the way to Egypt but Egypt has a lot of experience building, maintaining and expanding two of the biggest hydro Infrastructure projects on this planet, so yes this project would be more successful and cheaper that building fucking random solar farms in the dessert you dumb liberal.
>>16540933>it's about hydropower generation?Its about nothing. Its just a chance to do a thing that can be done and would cause a visible change in the world, immortality for the people in charge, etc. It has zero use
>>16540973Do you fucking cretin understand that that lake would just quickly turn into a mash of salt and no more hydropower would be generated? Hydropower needs decades of steady operation to breal even, you cant build a profutable hydro dam thats only going to last a few years.Nevermind all the nasty surprised you may get while drilling a tunnel, as the australians found out with their snowy project. Expenditures are now 5X the initial budget.You will pay for that by selling a couple years of electricity to broke-ass egyptians?
>>16540933The lake might be dead but the evaporate might fall down as rain and make the surrounding areas arable.
>>16540948Salt has commercial value. Also, with such large throughput you can start large scale extraction of other materials such as gypsum. Evaporate more of the rest and you can start extracting metals such as gold and uranium. You just need patient and smart people.
>>16540926>>16541182Not how it works. Countries around the Red Sea are still arid despite being located next to a huge body of water. Areas around the Horse latitudes are dominated by high pressure, which is just descending, moister less airAt best, there would be more thunderstorms every now and then, but it wouldn't be enough to make the land lush and green.
>>16540926Generally a good idea for a hydro power project. Salt or mineral extraction may also be something that would bring additional value if well managed. The evaporation would be a help to the regions moisture content but the effect would be marginal, limited by the throughput of the hydro power plants. The mere presence of water is obviously not enough to bring an area to life as observed by that region already being on the coast and being arid as well as several areas around the red sea for instance in Egypt again.As a project it would be easily within Egypts technical and financial capabilities to execute. >>16541125The evaporation from the lake can easily supply a hydro power plant with decent elevation. A large lake will evaporate from a large surface while the water is only coming in trough the hydro power plants.
>>16541594>The evaporation from the lake can easily supply a hydro power plant with decent elevation.The qattara depresion is a 19 square kilometers.Coomonly seawater evaporates at a rate of 3 cm a dayThat amounts to a water flow of 6.5 meters per secondNever mind that when if that lake was full, it would have zero height difference with the ocean and there would be zero pressureAt the botton it has a depth of 134 metersIf you were to break the laws of physics and have that lake full of water to get full evaporation but also empty to get maximum pressure difference with the ocean, you'd get a gran total of..134 x 6500 x 9.8=8 megawattsA single large wind turbine will produce 12 megawatts.
>>16541917>The qattara depresion is a 19 square kilometers.Doubt.
>>16541917Now, if you were to fill the qattara depression to half depth, to get some pressure, you'd lose some surface area. Assuming is shaped like a wedge you have half the surface at half depth, so that gives you a grand total of 2 megawattsIn the US a megawatt-hour sells for around 100 dollarsSo you could sell that power and get 1.7 million dollars selling electricity to EgyptIf you could build such a project for 17 million dollars you'd get 10% return which is around the limit at which any industrial project will get funding.Spoiler: just building a service road from the ocean to the depression, to the machinery and workers in place will cost you at least 100 million dollars.
>>16541932oh my bad, missed 3 zeroesSo multiply everythibg by 1000. Now the numbers look much betterrather than 2 megawatts, you get 2 gigawattsRevenue of 1.7 billion dollarsThe project is feasible at a budget of 17 billion dollars or less. Ideally less, because at 17 billion you get pretty much zero profit.
>>16541948Now, as regarding the evaporationIf the lake is filled half way, which is required to get any pressure at all, it has a depth of 67 metersCommon seawater evaporation is 1 meter at year, or around 3 cm a day. The whole lake would evaporate after 67 years but it gets replenished, so the salinity would grow from 3% to 6% after 67 years of operation. Basically a footnote. After 700 years of operation you'd reach total salt saturation and then solid salt would start to form at the bottom of the lake but at that point you have already recovered all expenses 10 times over
>>16541941>Now, if you were to fill the qattara depression to half depth, to get some pressure, you'd lose some surface area.One solution is to split into multiple levels so you can work the entire area at different depths, pic. related.
>>16541917>A single large wind turbine will produce 12 megawatts.It might in fact be beneficial to fill the area with wind turbines too, since horizontal axis turbines cause turbulence and vertical mixing of the air, thus enhancing the evaporation.
>>16541988>one solution to generating 8 MW is to split it into even more expensive stages 1 MW eachgenius plan
>>16542021Its GW not MW
>>16541184>You just need patient and smart people.if there were lots of those in Egypt, their population wouldn't have doubled in 50 years
>>16542095*quadrupled, fuck
>>16542034who the fuck cares? Could be Planck energies per Planck time for all I care. That’s not the point.
>>16542114>who the fuck cares?It matters because theres a specific threshold at which a project becomes financially feasible, 2 megawatts are not enough to build a hydropower station, but 2 gigawatts are
>>16542221I'd like to add that this qattara project would become megaprofitable if its coupled with solar and wind power. The idea is you use the lake as a massive energy storage and you use the solar and wind power to pump put water into the ocean. Its large enough to store multiple years of energy, it could store enough to run Europe through a whole winter
>>16541917>the ol retardo with several orders of magnitude error bars making confident statements
>>16542221You are genuinely retarded. You cannot just magically make more energy from hydro by splitting a tall hydro plant into smaller ones. That’s not how conservation of energy works. That’s what I was alluding to with plants 1 MW each. Seems like it flew over your head because you have zero knowledge of basic physics.
>>16541125>Hydropower needs decades of steady operation to breal even,"Erm... I get that people need electricity to continue living a modern lifestyle, but have you considered that producing electricity costs money? We could rake in a much bigger profit if we... y'know, didn't build electrical infrastructure!"
>>16542021You really didn't think this through, did you.>>16541958As salinity increases you can use the osmoric effect if the less salt water out of the turbines and lift these with osmosis and gain more energy. This is trivial in theory but hard in practice. Still, if you can gain another GW power it might be worth it.
>>16542594You really don’t know what conservation of energy means, do you?
>>16542395You can in this case because it increases the evaporating surface without decreasing the depth of the water drop. It's probably not worth it unless the geography favors it but conceptually it could be done.
There are a lot of genuine retards in this thread, that's how you know the middle easterners are here and it's not just outsiders speculating. lol
>>16542697Of course I know what that is; you are out on the wrong tangent.
>>16542395>You cannot just magically make more energy from hydro by splitting a tall hydro plant into smaller onesThat was a different poster, I dont endorse that dumb idea.>>16542594>As salinity increases you can uNah the solution is just to use solar and wind power to pump water from the lake into the ocean, if you just use it as a temporary energy reservoir it could pump out a terawatt of power rather than just 2 GW. Evaporation will then become irrelevant in the context of how much water is being pumped into the ocean>>16542745>There are a lot of genuine retards in this thread,I thought the qattara depression was stupid until i realized the volume of the reservoir. Its huge. Like geologically speaking, and it could provide energy to all of Europe.
>>16542934>and it could provide energy to all of EuropeYou could cover the Sahara with solar panels for daytime base power and use the Depression for balancing power, and get more power than Europe coulld use.Yet nobody would trust any such installation in north Africa.>>16542114You seem hysterical. Have you considerd leaving this place forever?
>>16542934>Nah the solution is just to use solar and wind power to pump water from the lake into the ocean, if you just use it as a temporary energy reservoir>I thought the qattara depression was stupid until i realized the volume of the reservoirThis person right here is an actual retard lol.
>>16543000>You could cover the Sahara with solar panels for daytime base power and use the Depression for balancing power, and get more power than Europe coulld use.Thats the idea. The lake can store enough hydropower for multiple years.>>16543005>This person right here is an actual retard lol.why
>>16541016>Who the fuck is 'we'?We are in people of the world.>We isn't fucking Egypt.Let's be generous and include them too.>Egypt does absolutely zero solar R&DNot important, you can hire in such capacity from other countries. >or has any production capacity or know-how nor the resources to fucking ship solar panels all the way to EgyptHow hard is it to ship solar panels? In any case, China has now a major surplus solar panel production capacity and the situartion is so desperate that they sell panels so cheaply that people use these as fences in Europe. Offer to buy a huge load and the Chinese companies will be falling over themselves to ship it all the way to the site.>but Egypt has a lot of experience building, maintaining and expanding two of the biggest hydro Infrastructure projects on this planet, so yes this project would be more successful and cheaper that building fucking random solar farms in the dessertWhy not both? And you forgot wind power, where the downturn in Europe has made the Chinese wind power companies very eager to open new markets.>you dumb liberal.Like the rest, this too was wrong.
>>16543743This idiot unironically believes that the US will allow the US-aligned Egyptian government to conclude a major infrastructure deal with China in a highly stratetic sector with the volume of tens of billions of dollars. Look at him and laugh.
>>16542745The Middle Easterners are your masters
>>16543748Did the US somehow deny Europe Chinese solar panels? I just cannot remember that part but I can remember the glut we had.
>>16541249If not natural rainfall, the new humidity could be precipitated artificially using the cold water pipes with cold Mediterranean water. With a lot of cheap water, you could grow a lot of crops. The Nile delta is surprisingly full of agriculture.
