Bahr El-Baqar: a record capacity, and the salt it cannot remove

The Bahr El-Baqar drain has for decades been among the most polluted drainage systems in Egypt.¹ It carries agricultural runoff, industrial effluent and municipal sewage north-east across the delta and empties into Lake Manzala. About 40 per cent of its flow is domestic and commercial wastewater.⁶ Sampling at the outlet in 2018 and 2019, by a team including the National Water Research Center’s environmental quality laboratory, found dissolved oxygen at 0.24 mg per litre and total coliforms of 43 x 10⁵ per 100 ml.⁶

Egypt wanted that water. The Sinai reclamation programme needed irrigation and the Nile allocation is fixed at 55.5 billion cubic metres a year.⁷ Treating a drain adds supply without taking Nile water from somebody else, so the drain became a resource and the plant became a flagship.⁸

The Engineering Authority of the Armed Forces commissioned it.⁹ A fifty-fifty joint venture of the Arab Contractors and Orascom Construction built it under a US$739 million engineering contract signed in May 2019, with Acciona as process partner and Khatib and Alami leading design.⁵⁴³¹ The Arab Fund approved a loan in May 2018 at 2.5 per cent, with six years of grace and thirty to maturity.¹⁰

The train is physico-chemical: rapid and slow mixing for coagulation and flocculation, settling, disc filtration, then ozone and chlorine.² There is no biological stage and no membrane in the published process descriptions.³² Four treatment lines of 1.25 million cubic metres a day give the 5.0 million figure that Acciona and the lender both use.³¹⁰ Four intake buildings rated at 1.4 million give the 5.6 million the state and Guinness use.¹¹² No source consulted reconciles the two. The site covers 155 feddans on the east bank of the Suez Canal.⁵¹

The delivery. Construction ran from September 2019 to May 2021, under two years and through the pandemic.¹ ENR named it Global Project of the Year for 2021, and MEED lists it among past winners of its regional Project of the Year award.¹¹² Orascom reports more than 22 million hours worked without a lost-time injury, which is the contractor’s own figure.⁵

Two design decisions deserve credit. The team moved the plant from the west bank to the east because the western site could have been farmed, and paid for 6,500 piles to stabilise the sandy soil there.¹ And 16,000 square metres of solar sludge drying, the first in Egypt, dry the cake by a further half using sunlight rather than fuel.¹

It also built a capability. The same two contractors, joined by Hassan Allam and Metito, went on to build the larger New Delta plant at Dabaa.¹³ Egypt can now deliver water infrastructure at this scale largely with Egyptian contractors.

The salt. A 2026 study in Scientific Reports, written by Benha University with the Nile Research Institute and the Drainage Research Institute of Egypt’s National Water Research Centre, identifies the feeder supplying the plant as a compliance hot-spot. Baseline salinity there runs about 2,200 ppm against a regulatory reuse limit of 2,000.⁷ The authors are blunt about the arithmetic. Restoring compliance by dilution would need a 15.8 per cent increase in Eastern Delta freshwater, which is unattainable under a fixed Nile allocation. Even relaxing the standard to 2,500 ppm does not fix it.⁷ Their conclusion is that no realistic adjustment to mixing ratios or standards can restore compliance, and that pretreatment is required regardless of freshwater availability.⁷

The plant as built removes no salt. Its published process stages address turbidity, organics and pathogens, and none is designed to remove dissolved salts.³² A plant sized for the wrong constraint is still a large and competent plant, but it is not a solution to the constraint that governs reuse.

Nor is it treating most of the problem. Lake Manzala still takes over 95 per cent of its inflow, about 7,500 million cubic metres a year, from six mostly untreated drains, Bahr El-Baqar among them.¹⁴ A peer-reviewed assessment of the lake in 2026 credits the plant and the dredging with improved circulation, and still finds Manzala hypereutrophic with a heavy metal pollution index above 180.¹⁴

The water also has to arrive. The plant was finished in May 2021.¹ The two conveyance routes taking its output into the Sinai reclamation areas were about 89 per cent complete in August 2026, five years after the ribbon was cut.¹⁵ Two of its three Guinness records, for the largest water treatment plant and the largest sludge treatment plant, passed to the New Delta plant at Dabaa in 2023.⁵¹³¹⁶

What is missing from the record matters as much. No published measurement of the plant’s actual effluent was found. Egyptian standards prohibit treated wastewater on raw vegetable crops, and nothing establishes what is grown with this water or on how many feddans.¹⁷ Orascom reports an operation and maintenance contract running from December 2021, but its terms, operating costs and energy use are not public.¹⁸ An evaluation in Frontiers in Water put the surrounding problem plainly: public critical assessments of Egypt’s water megaprojects were not detectable.¹⁹

Design for the constraint that governs reuse, not the one that is easiest to engineer. A physico-chemical train sized for turbidity and pathogens is the right answer to a different question. Where the limiting factor is salinity, the treatment choice is settled before the tender, and the Egyptian institutes say so in terms: pretreatment is required regardless.⁷

Treat salinity at the sub-basin rather than the outfall. The same paper points to upstream source control, citing work in which treatment at sub-basin outlets combined with lined channels achieved a 75.67 per cent reduction in dissolved solids.⁷ A network of smaller interceptors also avoids concentrating a whole basin’s salt load at one point.

Specify the target as a share of basin load, not as plant size. A plant on one drain, while the lake still takes most of its inflow untreated, helps explain why a record capacity did not produce a restored water body.¹⁴ Build the conveyance before the opening, and publish the effluent data. Without it, a plant of this scale is judged on a certificate rather than on what comes out of the pipe.