Construction of highways across the desert is one of China’s engineering feats.
The Tarim Desert Expressway – which traverses the Taklimakan Desert in Xinjiang Autonomous Region , China – is not only the largest highway ever built in the desert, but a real achievement in engineering. China.
The 522km route passes through one of the most inhospitable regions on the planet, covering an area of 270,000km². The name of this desert, in the Uighur language, means “can only go in but cannot go out”. For the Chinese, this place is also known as the “Sea of Death”.
Since it was built in 1995, a problem that has always haunted the builders of this road is: how to keep the dunes from burying the highway? For the first ten years, the road was constantly affected by sand, terrain and the environment “stopped” dozens of truckloads of oil from the Tarim basin southward.
The Tarim Desert Highway passes through the Taklimakan Desert.
To find a solution, technicians built a giant green belt on either side of the highway, supported by drip irrigation pipes for vegetation to grow. In this way, the belt of bushes and small trees will prevent sand from passing and keep the highway clear.
To maintain this massive infrastructure and to maintain a smooth road for oil transportation, the Chinese government has hired a large contingent of workers to work at the foot of the highway. Every 4km there is a small blue house issued to two Chinese people, specializing in monitoring and repairing the irrigation system on their stretch of highway. Each couple stays here for a maximum of two years and usually doesn’t contact anyone else during this time, including their neighbours.
Since 2003, China has planted about 2 million trees a year in this desert.
Since 2003, China has planted about 2 million trees a year, built dozens of water wells and increased the size of the sand-proof belt to about 70 meters in width and 400 kilometers in length. Tree planting on the Tarim Highway is being studied by international scholars as a good example of how to develop irrigation systems in arid regions.
In January 2022, PetroChina’s Tarim oilfield branch launched a conversion project to convert all diesel generators into photovoltaic machines.
The solar generators are also equipped with energy storage devices, which ensure stable power supply and power supply to maintenance workers.
An aerial view shows a new highway passing through the Taklimakan desert in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, northwest China, June 23, 2022. (Photo: Xinhua News Agency).
An aerial view shows a new highway passing through the Taklimakan desert in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, northwest China, June 25, 2022. (Photo: Xinhua News Agency)
An aerial view shows a new highway passing through the Taklimakan desert in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, northwest China, June 26, 2022. Photo: Xinhua News Agency
Workers spread grass nets along a new highway passing through the Taklimakan desert in Xinjiang Autonomous Region, northwest China, July 13, 2018. (Photo: Xinhua News Agency).
In addition to the main route of more than 500km through the desert, China also built other highways across the desert to serve people’s lives. Last year, a highway linking Yuli County and Qiemo County – located in the south of Xinjiang’s Bayingolin Mongolia Autonomous County, also a third road across the Taklimakan Desert – was put into operation.
With a design speed of 60 or 80 km/h for different sections, the highway has a total length of 334 km, with 307 km going through the desert. To date, China has more than 1,200 kilometers of highway through the Taklimakan desert , the world’s second largest shifting sand desert.
This expressway has been built with an estimated total investment of 1.75 billion yuan (about 261.5 million US dollars) and construction started in October 2017.
The highway shortens the journey between Qiemo District and the provincial capital Korla by about 350 kilometers. It is expected that the road will effectively improve the situation that people have to travel long distances, the cost of living is high, and agricultural products are difficult to consume.
Tursunjan Darman, 51, a local resident of Qiemo district, said that over the past few decades, the travel time from Korla to Qiemo has been shortened from three days to more than ten hours, and now only six hours. clock.
Mr. Wang Yunfei – project manager of China Communications Construction Company, which is in charge of the project – said extreme weather conditions such as frequent sandstorms and difficult access to water, electricity and signals Communication and supplies of daily necessities made the construction of a highway across the desert a challenging task.
According to Mr. Wang, construction crews leveled 32 high dunes and filled 28 low-lying areas between the dunes. To prevent the highway from being buried by sand, contractors have installed 58 million square meters of grass nets and more than 900 km of barriers along the road.
The opening of the expressway has boosted the confidence of businesses to invest in areas along the route. A livestock company in Qiemo County raises more than 6,000 cattle. “The road has saved nearly 1,000 yuan per cow in transportation and breeding costs, and we plan to invest another 500 million yuan to expand the scale of livestock production,” said Guo Chengli, deputy head of the project. said the company director.