China’s Tibet dam project has worried its neighbors

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Side by side, three gorge dam. China’s latest massive infrastructure project, once completed, will be the world’s largest hydroelectric dam high on the Tibetan Plateau bordering India.

China says the Mutuo power station it is building in Tibet is key to its efforts to meet clean energy targets. Beijing sees infrastructure projects as a way to stimulate China’s sluggish economy and create jobs.

But this project has raised concerns among environmentalists and China’s neighbors – in part because Beijing is very little about it.

The area where the dam will be built is prone to earthquakes. A Tibetan river that is being restricted, the Yarung Changpo, flows into neighboring India as the Brahmaputra and into Bangladesh as the Jamuna, posing water security concerns in those countries.

China announced in late December that the government had approved the Motuo project on the lower reaches of the Yangtze River, but released few details about it. This includes the cost of the project, where the money will come from, which companies will be involved and how many people may be displaced.

The known dam is in Medog County, Tibet, where the river is in a steep gorge known as the Great Bend of the Horseshoe, and falls 6,500 feet in about 30 miles.

Using the kinetic energy of that drop, the power plant could generate 300 billion kilowatts of power a year by 2020, according to the China State-owned Power Construction Corporation, or Power China. The Gorges Dam, currently the world’s largest, cost China $34 billion to build.

China has not yet announced which company will build the dam, but some analysts say Power China, the country’s largest hydropower infrastructure developer, is involved. The company did not respond to a request for comment.

Construction of the roadless 500-meter-deep Great Bend is likely to take a decade due to technical challenges, experts say.

Even the basic design of the dam is unknown.

Fan Xiao, a senior engineer at the Sichuan Geological Bureau who spoke to The New York Times, said one idea he saw as an alternative would involve building a dam near the tip of the Great Bend and diverting the water significantly. Tunnels are dug into the canyon.

China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, has pledged to replace coal with renewable energy sources by 2030 to reduce carbon emissions. The ruling Communist Party, which uses massive public works projects to demonstrate its engineering prowess, has studied for years how to harness Yarung Changpo’s power.

The forces that created the Great Bend pose a threat to the China Dam. The Tibetan Plateau was formed by a collision between the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates millions of years ago. To this day, the Indian plate is slowly moving towards Eurasia, which is why the Himalayas are regularly hit by earthquakes.

Such seismic events threaten the safety of dams. Chinese officials said this month’s 7.1-magnitude earthquake near the town of Shigatse in Tibet caused cracks in five hydropower dams; More than 120 people lost their lives.

Although the Motuo Dam is built to withstand earthquakes, it is difficult to control the landslides and mudslides caused by the earthquake, which can kill people living nearby. Experts say that large-scale drilling in the construction of the dam will increase the risk of such accidents.

It is difficult to know how the project will be received by Tibetans and members of other small ethnic groups living in the area. Tibet is tightly controlled by the Communist Party, which encourages the Han Chinese to move to the plateau and strictly controls the practice of Tibetan Buddhism. Tibet is open to foreigners only with a permit, and is usually off limits to foreign journalists.

In the past, Tibetans have held protests against hydroelectric dam projects, including evictions. last year According to a news report in Sichuan province.

The Motuo Dam project is expected to bring further changes to Medog, once China’s most remote province. According to Matthew Akester, a researcher of Tibet in India, the government has built highways into the region in recent years to attract tourists and adventurers.

Now people will be relocated to make way for the dam, which may require submerging farmlands and towns. It is not clear how many people may be affected. Medog It has a population of 15,000.

Vast but sparsely populated Tibet does not need much power, and the dam’s capacity is expected to exceed what neighboring states need, Mr Fan said. They have many hydropower plants near Sichuan and Yunnan, producing more power than the region needs. And it would be expensive to send the power over long distances to other parts of China.

The dam could affect people living downstream in the Indian states of Arunachal Pradesh and Assam, as well as in Bangladesh. If the dam traps silt, that will make the soil downstream less fertile and erode river banks and beaches in India, he said. Dr. Kalyan Rudra, Professor of River Science and Chairman, West Bengal Pollution Control Board, Govt.

Scientists in India and Bangladesh have asked China to share its plans to better assess the project’s risks. Indian diplomats have urged Beijing to ensure that the project does not harm downstream countries. China says it has taken steps to prevent negative consequences for its neighbors.

China’s secrecy is fueling mistrust, said Genevieve Donnellon-May, a water policy and environmental conflict researcher at the Oxford Global Society in the UK. If Beijing does not release hydrological data and detailed plans for the dam, India and Bangladesh will be left in the dark, so it will be difficult to prepare for possible impacts, he said.

China and India have accused each other of trying to control water resources in what some experts and officials call “hydro-hegemony.” The dam could be seen as a way to project Chinese power near the disputed border with India, including Arunachal Pradesh, which China claims as its territory.

Because it’s upstream, “China can make decisions that directly affect the flow of water, which creates concerns in India,” Ms Donnellon-May said.

Some officials in India have proposed building a large dam in a tributary of the Brahmaputra to store water and reduce the potential flow of a Tibetan dam. But Dr. Rudra of the West Bengal Pollution Control Board said such a dam would cause similar problems to soil fertility and soil erosion.

Saif Hasnat Contribution reporting. Lee you Research contributed.