Water Security in Libya

Chairman of General Desalination Company (GDCOL) Abdulmonem Ali Elhassadi explains the issue of water security in Libya.

Libya is one of the poorest countries in water resources. Thus according to Elhassadi, “GDCOL Libya is trying to invest in this sector, we have the money and so we are now trying to prepare our human resources and technologies to provide drinking water. In the future we also want to provide water for agriculture and industry. As you know Libya has a green coast almost 20km west from the sea; if we don’t protect and preserve this area, it shall be taken over by the dessert. We need water to preserve this greenery. Firstly, we need to provide water for drinking purposes to tackle the water shortage problem, and then we can look to providing water for agriculture and industry.”

“Desalinated water is the only renewable resource in the country. We have the Great Man-Made River but the ground water it provides is not renewable. As time goes by we are looking towards desalination as the main solution to our water shortage problem,” explains Elhassadi.

As for the demand for water, Elhassadi belives that the demand is not being met. “Currently the capacity that I mentioned provides almost 400,000m3 per day but the demand is not being met. If you use the world standard of 300 litres per day per person, we have a population of 7 million so you can easily calculate the demand. Some regions that I mentioned in the east for example are looking for any water source, even brakish or sea water to solve their demands for washing etc. The demand increases as population increases. Now we are satisfying this demand by utilising the GMMR and the affinities that belong to our Ministry; our desalination company and the water company that provides ground water from each location, while the GMMR brings water from the southern regions. We are almost on the cusp of providing the drinking capacity for the population of Libya, but we are falling behind day by day and if you think of the agriculture and industry sector, then of course we have to increase our supply for these.”

At the moment less than 20% comes from desalination as the main resource in the country is the GMMR. The reason for this is that in the past we used to only concentrate on the Man-Made River.

Regarding the investment roadmap Elhassadi says: “This is easily calculated, if we say that 1m3 of water will cost US $ 1,000, you multiply this by the capacity and the expansion we need, and you can see that the result is a huge number. To give you an example, the plant in the village close to Tobruk with 40,000m3 capacity using RO technology will cost more than US $100 million. We are going to spend a great amount of money in this sector. We hope that it will be for the benefit of the people, to provide good drinking water and to preserve our green areas.”