Alaska To Export Billions of Gallons of Water 290
theodp writes "Newsweek reports on a company called True Alaska Bottling that has purchased the rights to transfer 3 billion gallons of water a year from Sitka, Alaska's bountiful reserves. If all goes according to plan, 80 million gallons of Blue Lake water will soon be siphoned into the kind of tankers normally reserved for oil and shipped to a bulk bottling facility near Mumbai. From there it will be dispersed among several drought-plagued cities throughout the Middle East. Think of it as a proof of concept for turning life's most essential molecule into a global commodity." I'm sure the residents of Saratoga Springs and Perrier (not to mention the island nation of Fiji) can think of some prior art.
or desalinate? (Score:2, Interesting)
How can it possibly be cheaper to drive water from Alaska to Bombay, than it would be to fund and build a desalinization plant?
Huh, wut? WTF it's raining anyway.... (Score:5, Interesting)
The big problem that TAB (and everybody else in this business has) is how to ship potable water in bulk. They've talked about converting either a tanker or a general merchant ship to take on the water but haven't been able to find the money. I've heard of standard modal containers outfitted with plastic insets - sounds reasonable as the infrastructure to move them is well developed - but I've yet to see one. It's too warm to freeze the water into an ice cube so that one's out. Ten billion 1 liter plastic bottles would be a bitch to recycle.
So I don't see this one working out at all. But we've got lots of water. 100+ inches per year falling into steep rugged terrain that just says 'dam me!'.
Re:News For Nerds (Score:4, Interesting)
The world is going to be in a world of hurt because clean water is essential to society and civilization and clean, fresh water is unequally distributed around the planet. The human race is literally mining it's water - pulling it out faster than the system can replace it (think aquifers, not rivers).
But as I pointed out in my other post, it's hard to move potable water. In fact, it might be easier to run a desalinization plant. To ship in bulk you need either an ice berg (which has been proposed) or a purpose built tanker. So far, at least, the economics of water just haven't risen to the point where putting a whole bunch of money in for a tanker makes sense. Maybe later, but not as of 10/10/10.
Re:selling is better then buying crap from china! (Score:3, Interesting)
They could just filter their own water, but... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:We've got water problems in the lower 48 (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm a little surprised that there isn't more of a protest from Alaskans over this... though I suppose they're used to "mining" and shipping their natural resources elsewhere. Here in Michigan, which sits in the middle of one of the world's great fresh water reservoirs, the export of water is hotly debated, and regulated under the Great Lakes Compact. In part that's because fresh water (in the form of sailable lakes, fishable rivers, swimmable beaches, etc) is a major part of our tourism economy and what's left of our shipping/industrial economy. In part it's because we know that there are parts of the country (and the world) that are getting thirstier, and we don't want to give up what we have here without a fight. (Though there's a certain segment of the population who'd settle for a profit.) This is just an early skirmish in the Water Wars of the 21st century.
Re:News For Nerds (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Prior art? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:News For Nerds (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't even see any tech angle here.
80 million gallons of Blue Lake water will soon be siphoned into the kind of tankers normally reserved for oil
As far as I know a VLCC has never been repurposed for anything, except maybe as an artificial coral reef. So I guess its a first, at this large scale. An interesting engineering / naval architecture angle, which I guess counts as tech, barely.
Great, more landfill (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:News For Nerds (Score:5, Interesting)
Wouldn't they just line the oil tanker's hold with a rubber bladder (liner)? That's what they do with consumer sailboats at least. Big, square metal box, rubber bladder inside of that.
Re:or desalinate? (Score:5, Interesting)
The Emma Maersk can haul [wikipedia.org] 11,000 14-ton containers, or 154,000 metric tons, or 154,000,000 KG of water, which is the same as liters.
It consumes 1,660 gallons [ckthisout.com] of fuel oil per hour.
Of course, the Emma Maersk doesn't sail Alaska to Saudi Arabia, but we can extrapolate from another long-distance trip.
The sailing distance [portworld.com] from Alaska to the middle east is 10,428 nautical miles.
When the Emma Maersk sails [maerskline.com] from Yantian to Suez, that's 6,370 miles and it takes 353 hours. So it might be around ((10428/6370) x 353) = 575 hours sailing time, x 1,660 gallons of fuel per hour = 954,500 gallons of fuel. Divided by 154 million liters of water is
Desalination plants consume about 5 watt hours of electricity per liter [hurkle.com]. But note that for the Emma Maersk, I used the energy of fuel consumed, not power output of the diesel engine, which only runs at 50% efficiency. So the proper comparison here would also take into account the loss at the power plant. The 2,000 MegaWatt power plant that runs the Jebel Ali desalination plant in Dubai is a gas turbine plant. [zawya.com] Modern gas turbine generators can run at about 60% efficiency [wikipedia.org], so that 5 watt hours of electric energy took about 8.3 watt hours of fuel energy to produce. 8.3 watt hours is about 30,000 joules.
So unless I've got a big mistake in my napkin math, desalination is actually about 10x more energy efficient that shipping water from Alaska to the Middle East.
Re:News For Nerds (Score:4, Interesting)
If you're creating an infrastructure to distribute water being shipped into a port, the cost to desalinate it there isn't going to depend on that infrastructure, as you need it for both.
As a comparison, this would be about $1/6 barrels of oil. I don't know what shipping costs of oil are, but I'm willing to bet it's the same ballpark. (I could only quickly find one number, which was around $1 per barrel of oil. If that's the case, and shipping water is the same cost, it's cheaper to desalinate it.)
End of this ramble is that it's probably cheaper to desalinate, but it requires less investment up front to import.
Re:or desalinate? (Score:3, Interesting)
As other posters have pointed out, water is in the range of $1.00-$0.50 US per cubic meter if you desalinate it. 3 billion gallons is only 11 million cubic meters. That's $6-$11 million dollars to desalinate, and probably a bit more than that to transport. Say $20-$50 million to transport, to be very generous. A desalination plant will cost you in the realm of a billion dollars. What possible reason would they want to spend a billion dollars, along with the yearly costs of labor, energy, upkeep, permits, etc? If they were doing 5-10x this much importing, it might start to make sense.
Were you planning to give them your spare desalination plant?
Def of Economics (Score:2, Interesting)
The critical issue is that while there are alternative energy sources, there is no substitute for drinking water.
Re:Prior art? (Score:3, Interesting)
The funny thing is, it's not even about the scarcity of water. It's basically a marketing gimmick [truealaskanwater.com].
If they just wanted water, it would be cheaper to desalinate and purify ocean water. But purified ocean water wouldn't be fresh from an Alaskan glacier, in eco-friendly bottles, constantly kept below 42 degrees.
Re:or desalinate? (Score:3, Interesting)
Not only that but desalination plants can be built in concert with electricity generation plants like nuclear, gaining efficiency by pre-heating the water. A lot of developing countries need more power in addition to more water.
Re:Huh, wut? WTF it's raining anyway.... (Score:3, Interesting)
There's prior art for that, too: Google "dehydrated water". There are a scary number of hits.
Re:or desalinate? (Score:1, Interesting)
I am not sure that the middle east has that much usable energy available. Seriously. Iran imports gasoline because it doesn't have the necessary refining capacity. Tankers from the Middle East might be carrying crude oil, which might not be great for powering a desalinization plant, I don't know. Alaska might have enough diesel fuel. So if the Middle East doesn't have the readily available energy to power desalinization plants, it might actually be impossible for them to desalinate enough to satisfy their needs, but possible, if expensive, for Alaska to supply enough freshwater. Not sure, just saying, cost is a concern that arises after physical possibility. Sure, they could build more refineries, but that probably takes more time and planning than the alternative.
Re:Prior art? (Score:3, Interesting)
reverse global climate change (Score:5, Interesting)
If we take energy out of the global climate system using more sail boats, we would still have the global warming, but we might end up with fewer severe storms.
Just a thought.
Re:We've got water problems in the lower 48 (Score:3, Interesting)
If I had points to give you'd get an informative mod for that. The average annual rainfall in Sitka is 86.1 inches. That amounts to around 2,350,000 gallons per acre. They probably won't be taking out enough water to even be noticeable to the locals.
Indeed (Score:3, Interesting)