BEIJING • China is planning a mega dam in Tibet that is able to produce triple the electricity generated by the Three Gorges - the world's largest power station - stoking fears among environmentalists and in neighbouring India.
The dam will span the Brahmaputra River before the waterway leaves the Himalayas and flows into India, straddling the world's longest and deepest canyon at an altitude of more than 1,500m.
The project in Tibet's Medog County is expected to dwarf the record-breaking Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River in central China, and is billed as being able to produce 300 billion kilowatts of electricity each year.
It is mentioned in China's strategic 14th Five-Year Plan, unveiled last month at an annual congress of the country's top lawmakers. But the plan was short on details, a timeframe or budget.
The river, known as the Yarlung Tsangpo in Tibetan, is also home to two other projects far upstream, while six others are in the pipeline or under construction.
The "super dam", however, is in a league of its own.
Last October, the Tibet local government signed a strategic cooperation agreement with PowerChina, a public construction firm specialising in hydroelectric projects.
Beijing may justify the massive project as an environmentally friendly alternative to fossil fuels, but it risks provoking strong opposition from environmentalists in the same way that the Three Gorges Dam, built between 1994 and 2012, did. That project created a reservoir and displaced 1.4 million inhabitants upstream.
"Building a dam the size of the super dam is likely a really bad idea for many reasons," said Mr Brian Eyler, energy, water and sustainability programme director at the Stimson Centre, a US think-tank.
Besides being known for seismic activity, the area also contains unique biodiversity. The dam would block the migration of fish as well as sediment flow that enriches the soil during seasonal floods downstream, said Mr Eyler.
There are both ecological and political risks, noted Mr Tempa Gyaltsen Zamlha, an environmental policy specialist at the Tibet Policy Institute, a think-tank linked to the Tibetan government in exile based in Dharamshala, India.
"We have a very rich Tibetan cultural heritage in those areas, and any dam construction would cause ecological destruction, submergence of parts of that region," he said. "Many local residents would be forced to leave their ancestral homes."
He added that the project will encourage migration of Han Chinese workers that "gradually becomes a permanent settlement".
New Delhi is also worried by the project. China is effectively in a position to control the origins of much of South Asia's water supply, analysts say.
"Water wars are a key component of such warfare as they allow China to leverage its upstream Tibet-centred power over the most essential natural resource," wrote political scientist Brahma Chellaney in the Times of India.
In reaction to the dam project, the Indian government has floated the prospect of building another dam on the Brahmaputra to shore up its own water reserves.
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
