While no plan has yet been drawn up, Zhang Boting, the deputy general secretary of the China Society for Hydropower Engineering, said research has been conducted on the project. But the Web site of a government agency suggests that a 38-gigawatt hydropower plant is under consideration.

Such a dam, on the great bend of the Brahmaputra River - or the Yarlung Tsangpo, as it is also known in Tibet -- would save 200 million tons of carbon each year and would benefit the world, Zhang told The Guardian, a British newspaper.

He admitted, however, that downstream nations India and Bangladesh would be concerned as they also rely on the river for water and power.

Based on extensive study of state grid maps, Tashi Tsering, a Tibetan scholar of environmental policy at the University of British Columbia, says the proposed massive plant, likely to be located at Metog, would be the biggest on the 1,800-mile-long Yarlung Tsangpo.

To date, Tsering says, 10 dams are completed, three are under construction, seven are under active consideration and eight more are proposed.

"Certainly there is no domestic demand for so much energy, except to power government's extensive plans to develop the (Tibetan) region and to extract gold, copper and other minerals," he said on his Web site, which includes maps and documents to support the claims of his research.

Tsering says the building of dams and power transmission lines on the Tibetan Plateau follows a pattern: smaller and mid-sized dams are built first, providing a basis for construction of larger ones to follow.

"The current push to provide Tibetans with electrical power seems primarily motivated by the need for larger hydropower projects to power resource extraction, infrastructure development, and ultimately for supply to coastal Chinese cities where demands are the highest," he said.

China -- which already leads the world in hydropower capacity -- is expected to nearly double its capacity to 300,000 megawatts by 2020, the country's water resources minister announced last September.

Environmentalists have warned against the construction of large projects in the seismically active and ecologically fragile Metog area, likely the site for the massive dam.

"A large dam on the Tibetan plateau would amount to a major, irreversible experiment with geo-engineering," said Peter Bosshard of environmental group International Rivers. "Blocking the Yarlung Tsangpo could devastate the fragile ecosystem of the Tibetan plateau and would withhold the river's sediments from the fertile floodplains of Assam in northeast India and Bangladesh."

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