China-Mekong

Message from discussion SCMP: China to dam world's highest river Apr 24 2010, 5:26 am Kevin Yuk-shing Li

China to dam world's highest river S.N.M. Abdi in Calcutta and Stephen Chen and Kristine Kwok in Beijing Source: South China Morning Post (Hong Kong). Apr 24, 2010.

Beijing has admitted to New Delhi that the mainland is building a dam on the Yarlung Zangbo River near its disputed border with India.

The river originates in Tibet and flows into India as the Brahmaputra - a major waterway on which millions of people depend. Chinese officials told visiting Indian External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna in a closed-door meeting this month a hydropower project was being built at Zangmu in the Tibet Autonomous Region's Shannan prefecture, the Times of India reported.

Mainland experts involved in the project confirmed the hydropower plan for the river yesterday and said four other, similar dams would be built in a deep valley between Sangri and Jiacha counties. The total power capacity of the dams, once completed, would be "several times" bigger than the massive Three Gorges Dam.

Electricity generated from the hydropower plant at Zangmu will be sold to South and Southeast Asian countries such as Myanmar, Thailand, Bangladesh, Laos and Cambodia. The money raised will then be used to fund the other dams, according to a preliminary report by mainland experts.

Eventually, the dams will generate power to meet the fast growing demand in Guangdong and Hong Kong. Guangdong, the country's primary manufacturing base, now relies heavily on Yunnan and Guangxi for power. But the two western provinces are undergoing rapid industrialisation, increasing their own use of electricity, and the country needs to look further west to build more generating capacity.

"The ultimate goal for the Yarlung Zangbo project is to supply electricity to Guangdong and Hong Kong. The peak season for electricity usage in these regions falls exactly on the flooding season for the Yarlung Zangbo. It will be an ideal match," the report says. While reports of Beijing's plan to dam the Yarlung Zangbo have been circulating for years, this month's meeting was the first time the country had admitted the plan to India.

New Delhi is worried that the Chinese dams will affect India's water supply and destroy the ecological balance in the Himalayan region. Northeastern Indian states, whose agriculture and industry rely heavily on the Brahmaputra, are particularly alarmed.

The damming of the Yarlung Zangbo, the highest major river in the world, will also give Beijing direct control of the water supply to more than 90,000 square kilometres of land over which China claims sovereignty but which is under the control of India.

Chinese officials told India that Beijing had no obligation to reveal its plan to New Delhi but did so to build trust and ease tensions. Beijing said the hydropower plants would not affect water flows into India.

The Zangmu plant has a designed capacity of 500 megawatts, according to a paper published in the academic journal Sichuan Water Power in February by Yuan Guodong , an engineer from the 11th platoon of the hydropower construction regiment under the People's Armed Police Force. On the mainland, the duties of the armed police include dam- building and mining, particularly when these take place in strategically sensitive areas.

The dam lies southeast of Lhasa at an altitude of 3,260 metres, in an area subject to frequent extreme weather, the paper said. Ordinary construction materials could not ensure the dam's stability, and special technology developed by China's space industry programme was being utilised. The cement, for instance, was developed by laboratories at the Xichang satellite launch centre, it said. The experience gained building it would make building even bigger dams at high altitude easier.

The damming of the Yarlung Zangbo was first suggested in the 1960s, but the idea was never looked into seriously until more recently because of the almost insurmountable engineering challenges such an undertaking must confront.

The absence of proper roads and sufficient oxygen, labour, equipment and technology has severely limited the construction of hydropower stations in Tibet, even as the mainland has gone on a dam-building frenzy in the past decade, putting up hydropower stations in nearly every possible location in nearby Sichuan and Yunnan. More than 99 per cent of Tibet's hydropower potential of 1,764 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity a year remains untapped.

Yan Zhiyong , the general manager of China Hydropower Engineering Consulting Group, told China Energy News that nearly all the major obstacles to damming the Yarlung Zangbo had been overcome. He said China was under huge pressure to switch to a low-carbon-emission economy, giving the project a sense of urgency.

"Tibet has the largest stock of hydropower among all provinces," Yan said. "Exporting Tibetan electricity to eastern provinces will significantly ease China's energy shortage problem."

Yan said major challenges would come from the region's fragile ecology and the native Tibetan population.

Zhang Guihong , who studies Sino-Indian relations at Fudan University in Shanghai, warned that the project could become a new flashpoint between China and India. He said China had the right to build dams on its territory, "but if the project is going to affect other countries along the lower reaches of the river, China has to notify relevant governments as early as possible, so that they can be better prepared".

Anant Krishnan, a foreign affairs expert in India, said international law allowed China to build hydro-power stations as long as the projects did not divert or substantially alter the course of rivers.

But he said China's aggressive damming of rivers in its territory would affect its ties with countries on their lower reaches.

"India is just as alarmed about dams on the Yarlung Zangbo as Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia are about China's dams on the Mekong River in Yunnan," he said.

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