Power Stations to Make Lancang-Mekong River More Navigable

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Sunday, February 03, 2002

Power Stations to Make Lancang-Mekong River More Navigable

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Hydro-electric power stations built on the Lancang River in southwest China's Yunnan Province are expected to regulate the flow of water in the lower reaches especially during the dry and flood seasons, experts say.

By regulating the flow of water, power stations are expected tomake the river more navigable, said Dr. He Daming with the Asia International River Center of Yunnan University.

Based on research of the hydrologic data between 1953 and 1993,He and his assistant Feng Yan concluded that the runoff from the river, known as Mekong in the lower reaches in other southeast Asian countries, during the dry season is 689 cubic meters per second on average.

Upon the completion of the Xiaowan and Nuozhadu power stations on the Lancang River, the runoff of the Mekong will reach 1,869 cubic meters per second in the driest season, 1,180 cubic meters more than the average water flow in normal years.

The Xiaowan power station, being built on the Lancang, will eventually form a reservoir with a storage capacity of 14.94 billion cubic meters, they say.

Navigation on the Mekong can be dated back to 1954 when Vietnam,Laos and Cambodia signed a treaty on managing navigation in the river.

China started to dredge the watercourse of the Lancang in the 1960s, and now a 293-kilometer section of the river inside China is open to ships of 100 to 300 deadweight tons. In June last year,an 886-km section of the Lancang-Mekong watercourse, from Simao Port in Yunnan Province to Louang Prabang Port in Laos opened to commercial navigation.

The Lancang River starts in the Tanggula Mountain on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau and runs more than 4,800 kilometers, cuttingthrough China, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam before emptying into the South China Sea.

He has calculated that the development of navigation on the Lancang-Mekong River is cost-efficient and will greatly shorten the transport distance, time and costs from southwest China to Europe, Africa and southeast Asia.

Sources with the Yunnan Provincial Communications Bureau said that currently, China, Laos, Myanmar and Thailand have more than 110 ships sailing on the Lancang-Mekong River course, transporting150,000 to 200,000 tons of cargo annually.

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