Economic Use
Tankers and passenger and freight boats navigate the river between April and October, when it does not freeze over. Omsk, home to the headquarters of the state-owned Irtysh River Shipping Company, functions as the largest river-port in Western Siberia. Major hydroelectric plants at Ust-Kamenogorsk and Bakhtarminsk use the Irtysh near the Kazakhstan-Chinese border. The world's deepest lock, with a drop of 42 metres, allows river traffic to by-pass the dam at Ust-Kemenogorsk.
Some of the Northern river reversal proposals, widely discussed in the 1960s and 1970s, would have seen the direction of flow of the Irtysh reversed so as to supply water to central Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. While these gigantic water management schemes were not implemented, a smaller Irtysh-Karaganda irrigation canal (Russian: Канал Иртыш — Караганда) was built between 1962 and 1974 to supply water to the dry Kazakh steppes and to one of the country's main industrial centers, Karaganda. In 2002, pipelines were constructed to supply water from the canal to the Ishim River and Kazakhstan's capital, Astana.
In the 2000s, projects for diverting a significant amounts of Irtysh water within China, such as the proposed Black Irtysh - Karamai Canal, have been decried by Kazakh and Russian environmentalists.
Read more about this topic: Irtysh River
Famous quotes containing the word economic:
“The reality is that zero defects in products plus zero pollution plus zero risk on the job is equivalent to maximum growth of government plus zero economic growth plus runaway inflation.”
—Dixie Lee Ray (b. 1924)
“A society which is clamoring for choice, which is filled with many articulate groups, each urging its own brand of salvation, its own variety of economic philosophy, will give each new generation no peace until all have chosen or gone under, unable to bear the conditions of choice. The stress is in our civilization.”
—Margaret Mead (1901–1978)