Countries of the World/COUNTRYS.BIN/dp/0342/03425.txt

Text File | 1991-06-25 | 33KB | 511 lines

$Unique_ID{COW03425}
$Pretitle{227}
$Title{Sudan
Chapter 3C.   Energy Sources and Supply}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Donald P. Whitaker}
$Affiliation{HQ, Department of the Army}
$Subject{sudan
khartoum
nile
early
road
transport
port
river
roads
al}
$Date{1982}
$Log{Figure. 16*0342502.scf
The Nile*0342503.scf
}
Country:     Sudan
Book:        Sudan, A Country Study
Author:      Donald P. Whitaker
Affiliation: HQ, Department of the Army
Date:        1982

Chapter 3C.   Energy Sources and Supply

     In 1982 the chief sources of energy were wood and charcoal, hydroelectric
power, and imported oil. Wood and charcoal were the principal energy sources
for households for heating and cooking. Substantial quantities of wood fuels,
amounting to roughly one-fifth of the country's annual consumption, were also
used by commercial operations-chiefly baking and brickmaking and to a lesser
extent tobacco curing and the like. Some use was also made of other vegetable
matter including sugarcane bagasse, which met a significant part of the
energy needs of the sugar mills, and cotton stalks used locally by households.
Consumption of wood and charcoal has continued to increase as the population
has grown, and some concern has been voiced at the gradual depletion of forest
and woodland resources serving the large towns. Overuse of the sparser
vegetation in the semidesert grazing areas reportedly was resulting in some
fuel deficiencies in those regions, as well as desertification.

     The country's hydroelectric potential has been only partially exploited.
Major undeveloped hydropower sources exist at the several cataracts on the
main Nile downstream from Khartoum. Natural gas was discovered in the early
1960s along the Red Sea coast in a fruitless search for petroleum. In the
mid-1970s further quantities were found during additional oil explorations,
but they were not considered at the time to be commercially feasible from a
cost standpoint. No production of natural gas had occurred as of early 1982.
The 1979 and later petroleum discoveries in southern and southwestern Sudan
added a new domestic energy source (still of unknown size in 1982). Sudan had
no known deposits of coal or lignite as of early 1982.

Electric Power

     The only sizable area of the country having electric power available to
the public was the central region along the Blue Nile from Khartoum south to
Ad Damazin. Of the approximately 165,000 Sudanese power customers, some 75
percent were in this area, which was served by the country's only major
interconnected generating and distributing system, the Blue Nile Grid. This
system provided power to both the towns and irrigation projects in the area,
including the Jazirah Scheme. Another small local interconnected system
furnished power in the eastern part of the country that included Al Qadarif,
Kassala, and Halfa al Jadidah. The remaining customers were in fewer than
twenty widely scattered towns having local diesel generating facilities: the
towns of Shandi, Atbarah, and Dunqulah in the north; Malakal, Juba, and Waw in
the south; the provincial capitals of Al Fashir and Nyala in Northern and
Southern Darfur; Al Ubayyid and Umm Ruwabah in Northern Kordofan; a few towns
along the White Nile south of Khartoum; and Port Sudan. Some fifty other urban
centers in outlying regions, each having populations of over 5,000, still did
not have a public electricity supply in 1982. Rural electrification was found
only in some of the villages associated with the main irrigation projects.

     Nearly 90 percent of the country's total electric power was produced by
the Public Electricity and Water Corporation (PEWC), a state enterprise. The
remaining some 10 percent was generated for self-use by various industries
including food processing and sugar factories, textile mills, the Port Sudan
refinery, and others. PEWC also handled all regular electricity distribution
to the public. In the late 1970s PEWC power stations had a total of 234
megawatts of installed generating capacity divided relatively equally between
hydroelectric and thermal, gas turbine, and diesel units. (By the end of 1981
additional installations under way were to have increased the total to
approximately 280 megawatts, of which about 148 megawatts would be
hydroelectric.)

     The largest hydroelectric plant was at the Roseires Dam on the Blue Nile;
it had three thirty-megawatt generators in operation, and a fourth was under
installation in 1981. Sannar Dam further downstream had fifteen megawatts of
installed capacity. A third hydroelectric installation of 12.6 megawatts was
located at Khashm al Qirbah Dam on the Atbarah River; this was part of the
small power grid (which also included some diesel units) in the Al
Qadarif-Kassala area. The Sannar and Roseires dams were constructed originally
to provide irrigation, Sannar in 1925 and Roseires in 1966. Electric-power
generating facilities were added only when increasing consumer demands had
made them potentially viable (Sannar in 1962 and Roseires in 1971).

     The Blue Nile Grid, in addition to its Roseires and Sannar hydroelectric
plants, had thermal and diesel plants at Burri (where additional diesel units
were installed in 1980 and 1981) in the eastern section of Khartoum, a gas
turbine unit at Kilo X, south of the city, and diesel units at Wad Madani and
Ad Damazin. Electric power had been generated in the Khartoum area by a
private company as early as 1908, but the present-day system began in 1925
with the establishment of the Sudan Light and Power Company, a
British-financed and -managed but government-owned enterprise. This company,
acquired in full by the colonial government in 1952, was the
precursor-through several name changes and reorganizations-of the present-day
PEWC.

     The demand for electricity on the Blue Nile system increased greatly in
the late 1970s, and power shortages were reported to have been acute from 1978
through 1981 when output by the hydropower units dropped during the dry season
(March to May) drawdown of water for the irrigation systems. However shortages
had also occurred at other times and have been blamed in some part on
management inefficiency and lack of coordination between the PEWC and
irrigation authorities and other government agencies. Demand was expected to
continue growing strongly in the early and mid-1980s as development projects
were completed and became operational. The provision of new generating
facilities had been programmed and was in process in early 1982 under what was
called the Power III Project. This included installation of two additional
generators (each of forty-megawatt capacity) at the Roseires Dam, further
diesel units totaling about forty megawatts at the Burri power plant, and a
sixty-megawatt oil-fired steam turbine at a new thermal plant at Khartoum
North. In view of delays in earlier projects, completion dates could not be
projected accurately. Work on the Roseires units was being assisted by funds
from IDA and on the Burri and Khartoum North installations by the British
Overseas Development Administration (ODA).

Petroleum Use and Domestic Resources

     In 1982 roughly four-fifths of the nation's commercial energy
requirement-for industry, modern agriculture, transportation, government
services, and households (in addition to wood fuel, charcoal, and the
like)-was provided by imported petroleum and petroleum products. Approximately
10 percent of these imports were used to generate electricity. Foreign
exchange costs for oil imports rose dramatically from 1973 and by 1980
amounted to over 60 percent of earnings from merchandise exports. The
discovery of domestic petroleum deposits at the end of the 1970s and during
the early 1980s has given promise of eventual lessening of dependence on
external sources.

     The search for oil began in 1959 in the Red Sea littoral and continued
intermittently into the 1970s. In 1982 several oil companies were prospecting
large concessions offshore and on land from the Tawkar area near the E