A 8000 KILOMETRE SERIES

After completing his PhD, Tennyson joined the academic staff at UTIAS, where he and a small group of colleagues performed critical calculations – without the aid of computers – that helped NASA bring the Apollo 13 astronauts back safely to Earth after their spacecraft was crippled by an oxygen tank explosion. “The U of T Engineering program gives you a tremendous breadth of knowledge and skills.” From left to right: Phil Sullivan, Rod Tennyson, Irving Glass, Barry French, and Ben Etkin. “I found no difficulty going from designing rockets and aircraft to designing new materials for spacecraft to designing fibre optic sensors for bridges and now water pipelines,” he says. Tennyson attributes his broad range of interests and skills to his engineering education at U of T, where he received his BASc, MASc and PhD degrees. Tennyson also argues that the construction and operational costs of the project would be offset by sale of the salt that would be a byproduct of the desalination plants. Two-thirds of arable land is expected to be lost in Africa by the year 2025 because of land degradation.”

“And Africa is losing 20,000 hectares of land to desertification annually. “Diseases from dirty water kill more people every year than all forms of violence, including war,” Tennyson says. The cost of not building the pipeline, he contends – in human suffering, environmental degradation and lost potential – is much higher. Tennyson concedes that the projected cost of $14.7 billion is considerable. “It’s a simple pipeline, combined with desalination plants and solar energy.” “This is not rocket science, as an aerospace engineer I should know,” he adds with a smile. Tennyson says the project is technically, economically and politically feasible. His non-profit organization dedicated to the Trans-Africa Pipeline has partnered with the Pan-African Great Green Wall Agency, an 11-nation consortium that plans to plant trees across the Sahel to halt the continued desertification of that region. He has received support from the leaders of Mauritania on the Atlantic coast and Sudan on the east. Since he had the initial idea, Tennyson has travelled extensively, consulting with academics, politicians, bureaucrats, fundraisers and other engineers in his efforts to bring the Trans-Africa Pipeline (TAP) to reality. It would provide 800,000 cubic meters of water each day to the tens of millions of inhabitants of the region.

A 8000 KILOMETRE SERIES

The pipeline would feature desalination plants on each coast and a series of solar-powered pumping stations along the way. Why not think big?’ Daphne replied that if we can build oil pipelines that are thousands of kilometres long, why can’t we build a water pipeline?”Īnd so was born the Trans-Africa Pipeline project, a $14.7-billion proposal to build an 8,000-kilometre water pipeline across the Sahel region of Africa from the Atlantic on the west to the Red Sea on the east. “I said to Daphne, ‘These guys are talking about Band-Aid solutions. I know a fair amount about pipelines, even though I’m mostly interested in rockets and aircraft. “I’m sitting there watching (Bob) Geldof and the others on Live8,” says the former director of the University of Toronto’s Institute for Aerospace Studies. U of T Engineering professor emeritus Rod Tennyson (UTIAS) and his wife Daphne Lavers were among the millions who watched the concerts and wondered what they, as individuals, could do. And a stellar cast of musicians was performing in a series of globally televised concerts called Live8 to bring attention to poverty – in particular poverty in Africa.

The leaders of the G8 countries were about to gather in Scotland to discuss the state of the world economy. This story originally appeared on U of T News for World Water Day, March 22, 2016.

A 8000 kilometre