Turkmen “Golden Lake” Put on Hold

An ambitious reservoir project in Turkmenistan was suspended last month for lack of funding and a shortage of water.

“Everything has been halted for about a month,” said a local source in early December. “The [construction] companies involved in the project are worried. They’ve brought in the equipment, but it is still unclear when the construction work is going to resume”.

The reservoir, dubbed the “Golden Lake”, is a massive civil engineering challenge, as it is being created out of nothing in the sands of the Karakum desert.

The idea was conceived by the late president Saparmurat Niazov in the mid-1990s, and the first section of the reservoir was formally opened by his successor Gurbanguly Berdymuhammedov last July.

The thinking behind the reservoir is based on Turkmenistan’s need to conserve water given its arid desert climate. The “lake” is intended to serve as a collection point for drainage water from surrounding regions, so that it can be purified and recycled for irrigation.

However, the idea that a massive man-made reservoir is the solution has been criticised by environmentalists, who say it will be unworkable and ultimately futile. They fear the end result will be a swamp, not a lake.

Simply maintaining the reservoir will cost the government dear, as the canals that feed it will have to be cleared constantly to stop drifting desert sand blocking them up.

A combination of factors appears to have halted the project for the moment.

One local observer cited natural seasonal fluctuations in the availability of water, quoting water ministry officials as saying that “groundwater levels sink to a minimum in autumn and winter, making it impossible to fill the canals with the required amount of water”.

A scientist at Turkmenistan’s Academy of Sciences said the designers appeared to have ignored seasonal factors.

“The amount of water changes every year. It seems the experts working on this project forgot about this, and now the project has been suspended,” he said, adding that the authorities “should have rejected this project early on”.

An analyst in Dashoguz, the province where the reservoir is located, said the government was running short of funding for the six billion US dollar project.

From May last year, Russia’s Gazprom company cut the amount of gas it bought from Turkmenistan so as to realign itself with lower global demand for the fuel. The firm takes most of Turkmenistan’s natural gas exports. The reduction in revenue had left the treasury strapped for cash, he said.

A senior construction official with the Golden Lake project dismissed such concerns, saying the closure was temporary and work would resume by the end of winter.

He said the delay happened after deadlines were brought forward.

“The commissioning deadlines were changed. Everything was supposed to take place much later, but we wanted to do everything sooner and we timed it to coincide with the president’s visit in the summer,” he said.

NBCentralAsia is an IWPR-funded project to create a multilingual news analysis and comment service for Central Asia, drawing on the expertise of a broad range of political observers across the region. The project ran from August 2006 to September 2007, covering all five regional states. With new funding, the service has resumed, covering Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.