Ethiopia is continuing on with its Koysha hydropower project in the southwest region of the country, with official reports placing it at 70 percent.
The project involves the construction of a 170-meter-high, 1,000-meter-long composite concrete gravity dam with a nine billion cubic meter reservoir within the dam’s body, reaching a height of 128 meters.
It is the second largest hydropower facility in Ethiopia after the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), according to the Construction Review website (Africa Publishing Group Ltd).
Its construction cost is estimated at approximately $2.7 billion, and is designed to generate between 1,800 and 2,160 megawatts of electricity.
Former Egyptian Minister of Irrigation Mohamed Nasr Allam explained that the Koysha dam is located on the Omo River, which originates in Ethiopia and flows into Kenya, and is not a tributary of the Nile.
“As we know, Ethiopia doesn’t leave any neighboring country untouched by problems and conflicts, even Kenya, whose president (the only Nile Basin country) attended the inauguration of the GERD Dam,” Allam explained in a post on his Facebook page.
A professor of water resources at Cairo University, Nader Nour-Eddin, also commented on the Koysha Dam, and explained that, “Ethiopia has nine river basins, each with numerous tributaries and smaller rivers.”
“Only three of these rivers belong to the Nile River Basin. They are the Blue Nile, with a flow of 49 billion cubic meters per year, on which GERD was built with a storage capacity of 74.5 billion cubic meters; the Atbara River, with a flow of 12 billion cubic meters per year – on one of its tributaries, the Takize Dam was built with a storage capacity of nine billion cubic meters. And in the south, the Sobat River, with a flow of 11 billion cubic meters per year; two dams are planned for two of its tributaries in the future.”
He continued, “The remaining river basins do not belong to the Nile River Basin and do not impact us. Some of them are between Ethiopia and Kenya, such as the Omo River, which is the target of the new dam; two rivers with Somalia; a river that flows into a lake basin on the border with Djibouti; and the rest are internal rivers. Egypt is awake and closely monitoring.”
Edited translation from Al-Masry Al-Youm
