Suez Canal Improvements

The New Suez Canal  is a waterway project in Egypt, expanding the existing Suez Canal between the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea. It was launched simultaneously with plans to build six new tunnels under the canal and to transform a 76,000 km² (29,000 sq mi) area on both banks of the canal into an international logistics, commercial and industrial hub that Egyptian authorities projected would create one million jobs.

Overview

The project comprises a new 35-kilometre-long (22 mi) section parallel to the existing 164-kilometre-long (102 mi) canal, and the deepening and expansion of a 37-kilometre-long (23 mi) section of the existing canal.

The enlarged canal allows ships to sail in both directions at the same time over much of the canal's length. This is expected to decrease waiting time from 11 to 3 hours for most ships, and to increase the capacity of the Suez Canal from 49 to 97 ships a day. The construction of the new canal was initially scheduled to take five years. It was then first reduced to three years, and finally ordered by President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to be completed in one year only.

Technical difficulties initially arose, such as the flooding of the new canal through seepage from the existing canal. Nevertheless, work on the New Suez Canal was completed in July 2015. The channel was officially inaugurated with a ceremony attended by foreign leaders and featuring military flyovers on 6 August 2015, in accordance with the budgets laid out for the project.

Six new tunnels for cars and trains are also planned to end the isolation of the Sinai peninsula, connecting it better to the Egyptian heartland. As of 2015, there was only a single tunnel under the canal, the Ahmed Hamdi Tunnel which connects Suez with the Sinai.

Benefits and Risks

The chairman of the Suez Canal Authority, Vice-Admiral Mohab Mamish, announced that the revenues from the Suez Canal would jump from 5 billion dollars to 12.5 billion dollars annually. However, according to the Egyptian trade expert Dr. Omar el-Shenety, the official estimate of traffic doubling in the first year of the canal's operation is somewhat exaggerated. Higher traffic projections could be affected by a slump in global trade or by increased fees.

Eighteen scientists writing in the academic journal Biological Invasions in 2014 expressed concern about the project impacting the biodiversity and the ecosystem services of the Mediterranean Sea. They called on Egypt to assess the environmental effects that the canal expansion could cause, a request echoed by the executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity. Over 1,000 invasive species have entered the Mediterranean Sea through the Suez Canal since its original construction in the mid-19th century, with human activities becoming a leading cause of the decline of the sea's biodiversity, according to the European Commission's Joint Research Centre.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Suez_Canal