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The Belarusian Natural Resources and Environmental Protection Ministry and the Housing and Utilities Ministry intend to implement a water supply engineering project in Egypt. Speaking about the project, the official noted that preparations are already underway. “Money needs to be found for the sake of implementing the project. Apart from that, the project will require good equipment and machines. The geology R&D center will buy them. The project will involve a lot of work but we will do our best to start implementing the project as early as 2017,” said the Belarusian Natural Resources and Environmental Protection Minister.

Andrei Kovkhuto said that the cost of the project is estimated at dozens of millions of U.S. dollars. “I cannot say the exact sum for now since only preparations are now in progress, in particular, equipment acquisition. Besides, we need our own representative office in Egypt and arrangements with banks,” he stated. The official said that using the representative offices that some Belarusian companies had already established in Egypt is being considered.

The Natural Resources and Environmental Protection Minister reminded that he met with Egyptian Water Resources and Irrigation Minister Mohammed Abdel Atty in mid-December. During the meeting the sides discussed prospects of advancing bilateral cooperation in the protection and rational use of water resources. The development of an interagency memorandum of understanding and cooperation was discussed. The document is supposed to be signed in 2017. The Egyptian side expressed interest in cooperation in a number of areas, including control over the pollution of water resources, technologies for purifying and recycling water, drainage systems, new and promising water extraction technologies, including water production from alternative sources. The Egyptian side also expressed interest in water demineralization, ways to increase production and reduce losses in the course of using water resources, purification of artesian water from iron and magnesium.

According to Sergei Mamchik, Head of the Geology Office of the Belarusian Natural Resources and Environmental Protection Ministry, there are hopes for increasing the export of geological services in 2017 by drilling and testing deep water extraction wells in Egypt. In September AMSC Company and the geology R&D center signed an agreement on cooperation in the course of drilling and testing deep water extraction wells. The customers for the projects are the Egyptian Oil Ministry (in Western Minya, $16 million) and the Egyptian Defense Ministry (Sinai Peninsula, $41 million).

Sergei Mamchik also said that active work is in progress to step up geological surveying cooperation with Pakistan, Angola, Sudan, and Laos. In particular, the possibility of setting up a Belarusian-Laotian lab to study the quality of mineral resources of Laos is under consideration.