Water transfer schemes
Schemes that move water between catchments and across borders.
A 25 km storage and transfer tunnel beneath the Thames built to intercept combined sewer overflow discharges that Bazalgette’s Victorian system can no longer contain.
The largest water transfer scheme ever built, moving water from the Yangtze basin to the water-scarce North China Plain along routes over a thousand kilometres long.
- Design transfer
- on the order of 40 billion m³/yr at full development
- Routes
- Eastern, Central and a planned Western route
- Central route length
- approximately 1,270 km
- People resettled
- Hundreds of thousands
Transfers water from the Lesotho highlands into South Africa’s Vaal system, supplying Gauteng — the country’s economic centre — while generating hydropower revenue for Lesotho.
- Transfer capacity
- on the order of 780 million m³/yr at full development
- Countries
- Lesotho and South Africa
- Principal dams
- Katse and Mohale
- Beneficiary
- Gauteng province, including Johannesburg and Pretoria
Libya’s network of large-diameter pipelines conveying fossil groundwater from the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer beneath the Sahara to the coastal cities.
- Pipeline length
- approximately 2,800 km
- Source
- Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System — fossil water
- Design delivery
- on the order of 6.5 million m³/day
- Sustainability
- Finite: the aquifer receives effectively no modern recharge
A gravity aqueduct completed in 1904 carrying water from reservoirs in mid-Wales to Birmingham, still supplying a large share of the city’s water more than a century later.
- Operator
- Severn Trent Water
- Length
- approximately 117 km
- Completed
- 1904
- Operation
- Entirely by gravity — no pumping
- Fall
- roughly 52 m over the full length