Grand Inga Dam Gaining Traction

This will be the world’s largest dam if it is ever built. The locale and political issues makes it seem doubtful, but the Three Gorges Dam also got built over problems just as daunting.

That design is well along suggests that it may well get build. That the energy will initially flow to rich markets is inevitable, but diversion later is also inevitable as new African markets open up.

Major development is brewing up around the Congo Basin and now includes a huge six billion barrel oil reserve on Lake Albert.

The one can encourage the other and the area is so huge that it can contain wars, political upheaval and an ongoing insurgency besides.

Grand Inga Dam to light up Africa
14 May 2009
Khanyi Magubane

The final stages of planning are underway for the construction of the Grand Inga Dam hydroelectric project.

According to project leaders, the massive undertaking will be able to supply power to the entire African continent, with enough left over to sell to Europe.

When the Grand Inga Dam is completed, it is expected to have an output of about 39 000 MW, making it one of the biggest hydroelectric projects in the world.

The first phase of the scheme will be the construction of the Inga Three hydroelectric plant, expected to generate about 5 000MW of electricity, which, according to research, will provide electricity to five countries by 2015.

Inga Three will draw water from the existing Inga One and Inga Two.

Its design consists of eight parallel tunnels of 6 770m in length and 13.3m in diameter. Each tunnel will support two turbines, of 270MW each

Inga One was built in 1972 and Inga Two in 1982, and currently supply electricity to mines in the Katanga region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

Due to poor maintenance, both Inga One and Two are currently undergoing rehabilitation to increase their efficiency in supplying electricity to the DRC and other neighbouring countries.

A feasibility study ahead of the construction of Inga Three will be completed within 18 months.

The Western Power Corridor (Westcor), the driving company behind the project, is owned by the electricity utilities of South Africa, Namibia, the DRC, Angola and Botswana. Each member country owns 20% of Westcor.

Each of the five countries involved has a mandate to manage the infrastructure aspect of the Grand Inga dam project in each country, which is expected to cost around US$8.5-billion (R71.7-billion). More accurate figures will be available once the feasibility study has been completed.

In addition to Inga Three, Westcor intends on developing hydro power plants with an output capacity of 6 700MW on the Kwanza River in Angola.

Speaking to Business Report, Westcor chief executive Pat Naidoo said the project is close to implementation. “We have been finalising contracts, sorting out finance, talking to all the governments, and the engineering work in the background has been done.”

According to the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (Nepad), Westcor will receive support from a number of financial institutions.

These include the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the Southern African Power Pool, regional economic communities, development agencies such as the Development Bank of Southern Africa and the African Development Bank.

Funding from international banking institutions such as the World Bank, the African Development Bank and the International Monetary Fund had initially been part of the plan, but Westcor has since opted to fund the project independently,

“We concluded that their processes and proposals did not adequately prepare the project for construction. Studies were more of an academic nature and of no commercial value to the project, and were much more costly and expensive,” said Naidoo.

According to Naidoo, once Inga Three is completed, South African electricity utility Eskom will be drawing power from it. This will allow Eskom to shut down a number of older coal-powered stations, which are more expensive to maintain.

Money saved from the coal power station closures will then be used to finance the cost of rerouting the electricity from the DRC.

It is expected that the cost of electricity will be lowered significantly with Westcor setting a fixed price of US 5 cents (about 42 South African cents) per kilowatt hour, making it the world’s cheapest supplier of electricity.

Ambitious plan comes together

According to Engineering News, some $563-billion (R4.7-trillion) is needed to successfully supply power to the entire African continent.

Research by international market research company Frost and Sullivan indicates that for Africa to avoid a looming electricity crisis, the continent has to meet the current average growth of 4.4% per annum.
To date, the Grand Inga Dam project is the most ambitious plan by African countries to solve the challenge of electricity shortages on the continent.

During one of the many brainstorming sessions involving the five African countries, World Energy Council secretary general Gerald Doucet noted that the project has a high level of success. “Grand Inga is the greatest sustainable development project, offering Africa a unique chance for interdependence and prosperity. It's much more feasible now than ever.”

Despite Doucet’s optimism, there has been some Western scepticism about Africa’s ability to complete the project successfully.

The World Rainforest Movement has cast doubt on the Grand Inga’s claim to light up the entire continent.

The organisation says Africa’s rural communities living outside electricity grid areas would not benefit from the scheme, as installing power grids are expensive and the project would mainly be restricted to the urban areas.

“The mega-project will provide industrial economic growth for foreign businesses seeking cheap electricity and financial opportunities for Africa’s elite business and government leaders,” it says on its website.

The environmental group International Rivers is mainly concerned about the massive impact, it believes, the project will have on climate change.

“Development of Inga will also significantly increase Africa’s vulnerability to climate change and political instability. Climate change will bring risks to hydro–dependent economies through increases in the severity and frequency of both droughts and floods. Climate change will add to existing environmental stresses on river ecosystems and watersheds” said International Rivers’s Terri Hathaway.

Dawn Age Reptilian Presence

I have written several posts on the more impressive eyewitness reports describing large aquatic reptiles. Most of these were gathered in the early twentieth century and war and other upheavals ended public curiosity by the forties. Little has been seen since and few are matching the apparent quality of these earlier articles. It is very much as if these eyewitnesses felt a driving need to describe events as carefully and as personally as possible for the benefit of posterity.

I got my education regarding such reports reading old mining reports, and then a very few reports on the Sasquatch. What came through were attempts by skilled practical men who knew their environment to properly describe the local context. They usually got it more or less right when we dealt with mining reports. The several historic published reports of the Sasquatch have since been repeatedly confirmed by thousands of separate independent reports. That tells me that they were getting it right also.

With our reports on dawn age reptiles, the story is no different except for the sparse recent observations as yet. This is a direct result of decolonization in the later half of the twentieth century where a large body of foreign observers largely left the scene and it became difficult to report events at all.

Today the pendulum has swung back and the Internet is helping locals become observers. What is still missing is good journalism and sites like BFRO set up to collect specific eyewitness reports. Google BFRO for an example of how it should be done.

I have already explained why these reptiles can be still extant. They are aquatic and rely on water immersion to control body temperature. That means that they stick to swamps and related rivers. The sea going version may also be around but obviously having no pressing need to spend time on the surface at all.

Their present populations are likely at low ebb, but that merely reflects the present paucity of swamps. We are missing most of the Saharan swamps and those of the Outback. Both these would have compared to the Congo. We are also missing the coastal swamps caused by the Northern Ice age that circled the continents.

Another characteristic of these animals is their nocturnal nature. It we want to see them, it has to be at night through the predawn when they are most active. After that these animals den up to avoid the discomfort of overheating caused by activity in the daytime. That may mean sunning themselves where they cannot be disturbed. However lack of any but rare observation mitigates against that.

My key point here is that the phenomena is global and the critter assemblage is dawn age aquatic reptile believed to be extinct except for the crocodile since the emergence of dinosaurs able to leave their swamps. The evidence is sufficient to suggests that they are not extinct.

The Return of the Dinosaur Age

If you have been following my posts on the apparent reports on the existence of dawn age reptiles scattered around the globe, you know that my principle conjecture is that all such critters are members of the specific ecological niche formed by swamplands. The moment that your thinking goes there, all the limited data and the actual nature of the animals falls cleanly into place. They all are aquatic in nature yet retain the ability to travel extensively on land. They are also likely most active at night in order to avoid been overheated.

The vegetarians can spend their days browsing underwater and maintaining an ambient unchanging temperature, only rarely emerging to get at choice food. The carnivores simply fetch up against a group of drowsing crocodiles in the dark and seize a likely meal before dragging it underwater to a lair.

I now have a number of compelling eyewitness reports for both the Amazon and the Congo in particular and other similar locales to both support the core conjecture but also to support the conjecture that a wide range of such critters are extant today.

The probability associated with the existence of a whole family of dawn age reptiles is no longer zero, and I can assure you, I never thought that I would write such words. In fact the niche is globally pervasive and the ecology so inimical to human penetration that it is avoided by even primitive hunter gatherers. We always had easier game out on the open plains and in the ocean shallows.

That now brings up another issue. A previous post on the Antarctic ice core, established that every 100,000 years or so we swing by Sirius and get bathed in ultraviolet radiation for a thousand years or so. The effect of this is to essentially melt out a large part of the ice caps and add perhaps another couple of hundred feet of sea level. The temperature will rise several degrees on average and that surplus must migrate north.

Far more importantly huge amounts of water will find its way into the atmosphere introducing enough rain to establish tropical conditions almost to the poles themselves. It also means a massive expansion of Amazon tropical rainforest like conditions far to the north. The Mississippi valley, the Sahara, the Outback, the Middle East will all become saturated swamplands fully able to support their own populations of crocodiles.

Mankind will simply migrate up into the hills to avoid the worst while managing tropical agriculture.

The point that this addresses is that this cycle has been in place for millions of years and nicely explains the world wide extent of these critters, while we live in a world in which their particular niche while not small is also limited to tropics and coastal swamps. It is in fact at its lowest ebb for the moment.

It is noteworthy, that before the Pleistocene nonconformity mankind was principally operating on coastal lowlands and in constant confrontation with crocodiles at the least and a whole range of rather large carnivores. The moment you left those lowlands, it in fact got much worse. The size alone made it no contest to confront a saber tooth, a mega lion, or a cave bear. Entering swamps holding hungry theropods and crocodiles was a non starter. I am certain mankind was able to wring out refugia for their safety but the confrontation would never have let up. Once the crustal shift occurred, those populations were shattered and in extremis everywhere opening up the uplands to human occupation.

Thus the Pleistocene Nonconformity allowed mankind to swap out of coastal lowlands that were assuredly malarial crocodile infested swamps of restricted areal extent for continents of climatically stable uplands. A rather good deal you know?

Since I have made the conjecture that this was all put in place by humanity in the first place, it is an obvious extrapolation that they went the extra mile and hunted out the top predators for us.

If you are reading some of this stuff for the first time, I suggest searching the blog for earlier posts on these topics. We have progressed a long way here and are long past initial skepticism which is a bit unfair to a new reader.

Also, we are piecing together an alternate human history that is vastly more compelling than any present explanations that is drawn from the evidence at hand and telling us where to go look for additional evidence. More critically, it is telling us to look.

After all, just how many explorers have penetrated deep swamps in order to run down large critters? The number is in fact shockingly small. It will be difficult today and was almost impossible in the recent past

Cryptozoological Thoughts

If you have read my posts on the Burrunjor in Australia and the apparent Apatosaurus in the Congo you will understand that I am sympathetic to the probability of these animals been real.

I got there from been essentially dismissive of these observations to having a deep appreciation for all data however acquired. What led me there was my study of the Sasquatch phenomena. What convinced me was the presence of approximately an unbelievable ten thousand good eye witness reports. By the way, UFO sightings head over 100,000, although they are mostly lights in the sky.

The Sasquatch led me to reformulate my thinking in terms of dealing with eyewitness information and it is covered in the first two chapters of my manuscript ‘Paradigms Shift’. The process also informed my approach regarding all such reports.

First, the reports invariably describe a finite set of observed characteristics that are generally repeated. This largely describes the nature of the likely animal. A Sasquatch, for instance, and it is presently our best observed and reported such animal, is clearly a clever primate at least fifty percent more massive than humanity on average and who is also a nocturnal omnivore. That is a pretty powerful statement.

What I learned then is that it is absolutely necessary to also characterize the environmental niche occupied. The moment that you do that it becomes very clear why we have trouble getting samples or seeing the animal in more congenial surroundings.

In the case of the Sasquatch, it is clear that this primate is specifically adapted to living in woodlands and operating nocturnally when taking down game. This is similar to the niche of the cougar and both animals operate solitary and with similar ranges. In fact if it were not for the fact that our dogs are able to tree cougars, the cougar would be just as mysterious today. In fact the Sasquatch will turn out to be more successful because they do not hunt humans unlike the cougar.

Therefore, it is necessary to isolate the ecological niche. When we did that for our Australian theropod, it became clear that this predator was a swamp dweller that had evolved to hunt crocodiles and was very similar in expected life cycle. That led me directly to a major swamp in Arnhem Land in Australia. And it all fit together.

Then of course, I was drawn back to reports out of the Congo that I saw decades ago and did not take too seriously. I have now dug through some additional reposts from the Congo and I am seeing further reports again suggesting a range of Dawn Age reptiles that we actually recognize. If they are extant at all, the Congo is where they must reside.

What I have learned to appreciate though is that the locales are huge in their own right and are unpopulated by man for some incredibly good reasons. Like, how do you keep hungry crocodiles away? What is also not understood is that the areal extent compares to France and has maintained a Dawn Age swamp rich ecology since then. Add in the simple fact that these water loving reptiles are active hunters at night to avoid overheating in the sun and we have a challenging hunt on our hands.

So, even though it seems hard to believe, it is clearly possible for the chief predators of the crocodiles and their associated kin to be still extant in this particular region. I hope that I have opened a few minds to this phenomenon.

The Eyeball Assumption

One aspect of the hunt for rare and elusive animals needs to be discussed. We have a finite number of trained observers for niches that demand thousands. For that reason alone it will take decades to sort out the many dozens of known witness reports and it will always be easier to simply bad mouth the witness.

Let me share a tale. I grew up on farm land in Midwest Ontario. This land included many open fields as well as a modest river valley cleared but not cultivated, a strip of varying woodland from which all remaining mature trees had been harvested over the past century and an evergreen tree farm. This was a pretty friendly environment for small game at least. At the time, deer had been hunted out.

During the times in which the land was not bound with snow, I was able to spend a couple of hours almost every day not a school day wandering the woods and hedgerows. In the process I identified many birds and every weed native to Ontario listed in the government manual. Over the years I saw plenty of rabbits and groundhogs as might be expected.

When it came to everything else, it was a very different story. Over a decade I saw a fox several times, a deer once, a flock of grouse once when my dog startled them, a possible bob cat once, a swamp hawk once. So in exchange for a couple of thousands of hours of effort and observation, my reward was pretty paltry. I am hardly an unskilled observer either.

Obviously, a walk in the woods does not cut it at all. Additionally we now know that all animals avoid contact. A web cam placed on a game trail pick up a virtual traffic jam once the humans have left.

Our natural assumption that enough folks have seen the ground and would have seen the animals is wrong as hell.

There are dozens of obscure observations of creditable strange animals, including some very famous ones, which need to be meticulously thought out as to habitat and likely behavior. These need then to be set up for camera traps. That is how we will eventually prove up the Sasquatch. Only a remote camera will catch anything with its guard down.

We are now entering a new era in which the web cam will actually sort all this out finally.

After the Bronze Age

The one major climate anomaly that needs explanation is the Bronze Age warm period and its aftermath which we are living in today. During the Bronze Age, the climate appeared to be, at least on the basis of the science to date, a couple of degrees warmer than the present temperature regime. It ended with a bang as Hekla blew up, but why was recovery never full? We have had near attempts to restore that climatic regime, such as the medieval warm period, but all have ended badly. We are now clearly living through another such warm spell.

The chart shows a two thousand year warm spell that was untouchable. I have to accept that the data proxies are also fairly consistent for that era. The question remains, what mechanism lowered the global heat content?

For that we have the stripping of the Sahara by misplaced human agricultural practice. Today, solar energy is not absorbed or stored there at all. It is mostly reflected back into space. If that energy were been collected by vegetation, it would represent a huge addition to the earth’s heat content. The loss of that heat surely was responsible for post Bronze Age coolness.

We now have increasing evidence that the surplus CO2 in the atmosphere has now encouraged an increase in plant life throughout the globe. This should increase direct solar energy absorption and has likely contributed to the slightly warmer global conditions. Note the attached report.

With this excess of CO2 in the atmosphere, there is ample reason to restore the Sahara as growing environment. We have already addressed some of the needed methodology. I am not sure that I have added more since my earliest postings.

The first question is what really can be done using native dry land vegetation and is there any obvious engineering solutions. Solar driven atmospheric water extraction is a long way from been actually a feasible option although clunky demos have been built.

Before we start, it must be understood that reforesting the Sahara will lead to a far warmer Northern Hemisphere and that this is actually a good thing, It is also reasonable to anticipate the regreening of the entire Middle East. This will generate a warmer but moderated northern Hemisphere. This is one of the greatest single Terraforming tasks left to us to accomplish.

As I have posted earlier, the first step is the building of fenced range lands along the edge of the true desert. That controls the cropping behavior and allows a resurgence of vegetation promoting the retention of moisture. This perimeter culture will migrate backward into the more arable lands and also enhance their productivity. This should tend to encourage an increase in available moisture into the nearby desert lands.

Most critically, it has been shown that the establishment of acacia trees provides shade and a reduction in general temperature increasing the probability of night showers. It has also been shown that such an environment is conducive to the raising of indigenous cattle that are able to graze the developing grasses and possible under story. One would expect that the best strategy would also include other native ruminants that browse more difficult fodder. No goats should be permitted as they will attack and destroy the whole plant.

The idea is to advance this culture into the desert one fence row at a time as the following advance of available moisture accommodates. Without use of artificial means this does promise to take many years. Yet it will still be hugely advanced. The necessary population exists along the entirety of the southern edge of the Sahara with the necessary skills. In most cases it will be a problem of establishing title and supplying barb wire. It will be a lot like the spread of farming on the Great Plains.

We actually know that this was all likely viable grazing land in the beginning that was destroyed over a thousand years. Restoring it this way would likely take another thousand years.

To speed the process up, it should be possible to first design some large water diversion schemes that transfer water into suitable desert regions. It will never be enough but is will expand the watered regions and increase the atmospheric moisture content in those regions, once again allowing a gradual dry land expansion.

The principal prospect for this is the diversion of most of the water in the Upper Congo Basin over to the Chad Basin, perhaps not creating a lake so much as a fully watered basin with a sustainable lake that hopefully is large enough to drain. The possibility would also exist for additional diversion into the north. Work done seventy years ago suggested that this might be feasible.

It is also possible to create a biannual diversion of the Nile west of its current route but this may be of doubtful value until we are in the very late stages.

That then opens the remaining question of whether there is any method to divert some water north from the Niger Valley. At first blush, this appears very unlikely except the rainy season produces a huge amount of water that naturally is lost to the sea. It may be possible to divert sections of that river system to the north into valleys running into the Sahara. There should still be ample water for down river applications.

The truth is that that these engineering options help, but actually for a small fraction of the Sahara. The place is several millions of square miles and it would be a miracle to provide direct irrigation for even a quarter million square miles.

Therefore without actual atmospheric moisture recovery, we are looking at relying on natural recovery aided at least by our direct land management efforts. This might be at the rate of a mile per year, so that you are always followed closely by emergent tree cover. It will require two thousand years at this rate to do the Sahara, and assuming a simultaneous effort in the Middle East, much the same time.

The process may go faster if appropriate grasses can be used.