Water rescue: Innovation, a fight for survival

Monday, June 08, 2009 | Posted by: Brian Maguire
Categories: Environment, Technology | Tags: innovation, technology, energy, india, innovators, science, economist

Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, Chairman of food giant Nestlé, told the Economist’s ‘The World in 2009’: “under present conditions… we will run out of water long before we run out of fuel”.

James Bond’s most recent desertic adventures led Daniel Craig to uncover a dastardly water market conspiracy. The plot, in twelve words, is: you can keep your oil; I want the water, all the water. All very glamorous, but the United Nations reports over 70 per cent of the Earth’s surface to be covered by water,  and most of it is unusable for human consumption.

Often described as “the oil of the twenty-first century”, a scarce commodity that will be a source of conflict between peoples and nations; the UN also estimates that 1.2bn in a world of just over 6bn people do not have access to safe drinking water and 2.4bn lack proper sanitation facilities. Now, that’s worth waking M,  Moneypenny, don’t you think?

According to Canada’s Environment Department, freshwater lakes, rivers and underground aquifers represent only 2.5 per cent of the world’s total water supply. The UN has compared water consumption with its availability and has predicted that by the middle of this century between 2 billion and 7 billion people will be faced with water scarcity.

As aquifers deplete, Beijing is sinking into the ground at the rate of 4 inches per year. Some districts in Mexico City sink as much as a foot a year; China has approximately 21 per cent of the global population, but access to only 7 per cent of the planet’s freshwater.

It takes 300 litres of water to produce 1 kilogram of paper, and 215,000 litres to produce 1 metric ton of steel; 15,000 tons of water to produce a ton of beef, and 1,000 tons of water for a ton of grain. As nations like China, India and Mexico continue their rapid industrialization and catch up with the developed world, this consumption will only increase. To some degree, water used in production can be reclaimed; but the extent to which this occurs depends not just on the availability of technology to reclaim the water, but on the perceived need and cost of doing so.

The CERES group, whose members control an estimated $7tn in assets, according to the Guardian newspaper, reported in February that the industries most at risk include high-tech companies using large quantities of water to manufacture silicon chips; electricity suppliers who use vast amounts of water for cooling; and agriculture, which uses 70% of global freshwater.

By 2050, reports Monsanto, the agricultural company, UN experts say our planet must double food production to feed an anticipated population of 9.3bn people - that figure is 40 percent higher than today’s 6.6bn. In seven of the last eight years, the world has consumed more grain than it produced. Our planet may now need to double agricultural output by 2050 to feed a growing population. By some estimates, that means producing more food in the next 50 years than has been grown in the last 10,000 years - agriculture uses two-thirds of the world’s freshwater withdrawals.

The innovation challenge is a war to be fought on several fronts. Technology companies,  management authorities and service suppliers must innovate to engineer solutions consuming less water in agriculture, and reclaiming more water from waste products, including sewage. ‘Water rescue’ technologies such as membrane bio-reactors (MBR) are widely used to clean sewage in Australia and increasingly used in the United Kingdom.

Alternatives, such as desalination, an expensive but effective process, are used increasingly in the Arabian Gulf, Libya and the United States. Desalination is effective, but limited by the huge energy consumption needed in the process, and the expense of transporting water, either by tanker or overland pipelines. Most suited to coastal regions, desalination is uneconomic in the interior of large states. In part, the solution is new national water grids, dams and irrigations zones – a colossal undertaking for the next decades. Meeting national and global water needs will be a monumental test of innovation.

Rising to the challenge are new clusters of innovators, led by CEOs such as Rich Meeusen of Badger Meter, a driving force behind Milwaukee’s efforts to become a global hub of water technology businesses, and part of a team proposing a lakefront site for UW-Milwaukee’s School of Freshwater Sciences.

So, next time you add a smidgeon of H20 to a nip of whiskey, remember, the 10 year-old Quantum of Solace has 007 sweating for Queen and country, and he doesn’t have a drop to spare.

 

Water and Agriculture:

Monsanto Non-irrigated Agriculture
  http://producemoreconservemore.com

Pacific Institute
  http://www.pacinst.org/

CRES – Advancing Sustainable Prosperity
  http://www.ceres.org

Milwaukee School of Freshwater Sciences
  UW-Milwaukee’s School of Freshwater Sciences