Mass Water Shipment Planned From Alaska to India
July 13th, 2010 by 
A Texas company has announced that it is moving forward with a plan to ship 2.9 billion to 9 billion gallons of water a year from the small Alaskan town of Sitka to the west coast of India. If the company, S2C Global Systems, succeeds in carrying out the shipments, the deal would represent the world’s first regular, bulk exports of water via tanker. The city of Sitka, a water-rich community of 8,600 people located on Baranof Island off Alaska’s southeast coast, is supporting the plan to export the water for a penny a gallon from its Blue Lake reservoir.
S2C Global Systems, which is partnering with an Alaska company called Alaska Resource Management, announced in a press release that it has located a port south of Mumbai capable of offloading the water and shipping it to cities in India, as well as to countries in the Middle East and Asia. Depending on how much water it ships to India, the city of Sitka could earn $26 million to $90 million annually from the controversial deal, according to the Web site Circle of Blue, which first reported prospective shipment. Such bulk exports of water have been proposed before in Canada and elsewhere, but have never come to fruition because of logistics and concerns about natural resource sovereignty.
Article appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360.
photo: Aksveer.
|
|
Tags:  Alaska bulk export India Mumbai water water shipment | [ Permalink ] |
I am quite familiar with ocean freight rates and costs and find it hard to believe that shipping 9,000,000,000 gallons (34,065,000 tonnes) per year for a total revenue of only $US 90,000,000.
This is only $US 2.64 per tonne! The cost of fuel for the ship to carry it that distance is more than that!!
Some time ago I did a study based on using a relatively small but efficient tug boat to tow a very long, streamlined, 1,000,000 cubic metre (264,200,792 gal) bladder of very pure water from the west coast of Canada to the Santa Monica beach at Los Angeles. That kind of operation is the most energy efficient type of transport reasonably possible but the cost was more than a penny a gallon just for the fuel!
Did you slip a digit in your calculations??
Regards
Paul V. Preminger
Ooops, I misread the article! The one penny a gallon is for Sitka, Alaska!
However, the people in India will have to pay a lot more than $US 2.64 per cubic metre for the water if the business is to be profitable.
It would be cheaper for them to construct and operate a desalination plant or, much cheaper still, a solar distillation plant!
Paul V. Preminger
[...] Alaska planifica envío de agua hacia la India [ENG] blog.cleantechies.com/2010/07/13/mass-water-shipment-planned… por Phony_Pope hace 2 segundos [...]