Changes in Water Resources Systems: Methodologies to Maintain Water Security and Ensure Integrated Management (Proceedings of Symposium HS3006 at IUGG2007, Perugia, July 2007).  IAHS Publ. 315, 2007, 92-99.

 

Impacts of the southeastern Anatolia Project in Turkey on the performance of the Tabqa dam and hydropower plant in Syria

 

Quentin GOOR1, Ali ALIA2, Pieter VAN DER ZAAG3 & Amaury TILMANT2

 

1 Dept of Environmental Sciences and Land Use Planning, Université Catholique de Louvain, Croix du Sud 2 box 2, B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium 

goor@geru.ucl.ac.be

2 Dept of Management and Institutions, UNESCO-IHE, Westvest 7 PO Box 3015, 2601 Delft, The Netherlands

3 Water Resources Section, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands

 

Abstract Water resources systems development in the upper parts of a river basin can have major impacts on downstream users. This paper analyses the impacts of development of the southeastern Anatolia Project (Turkey), com­monly called GAP, on the Euphrates downstream riparian countries, Syria and Iraq, and especially on the performance of the Tabqa dam in Syria. A two-stage modelling approach has been adopted. First, the operating rules of the largest GAP reservoirs are optimized and then simulated using a stochastic dual dynamic programming (SDDP) model to get, among other results, time series of simulated discharges at the borders with Syria and Iraq. This process is repeated for three development scenarios of the GAP. In the second stage, the reservoir operating policies of the Tabqa hydropower plant in Syria are derived from a stochastic dynamic programming (SDP) model and then simulated over a planning period of 50 years using the time series of inflows produced by SDDP for each development scenario. The analysis of results reveals, amongst other things, that if GAP is completed as planned, the risk of not meeting the annual Syrian energy target increases substantially (up to 60%).

 

Key words  Euphrates; large scale optimization; reservoir operation; Stochastic Dual Dynamic Programming (SDDP); Stochastic Dynamic Programming (SDP); upstream/downstream trade-off