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Engineering Firm Plans To Tow Icebergs From Antarctica To Parched Dubai (stuff.co.nz)
A Dubai-based engineering firm is planning to tow an iceberg from Antarctica to help provide fresh drinking water to the desert city's rapidly-growing population. Stuff.co.nz reports: The National Advisor Bureau (NABL), a private engineering firm, wants to schlep a glacial iceberg from Antarctica -- weighing approximately 100 million tons -- to Dubai, via an intermediate stop in either Perth, Australia, or Cape Town, South Africa. If the iceberg doesn't melt along the way, the firm will sell the water to Dubai's government. Dubai, which is the most populous city in the United Arab Emirates, is growing so rapidly that a solution to the city's looming water crisis must be found, according to the city's largest English-language newspaper, The Khaleej Times.
The company is beginning a pilot study in November to examine the feasibility of the iceberg-towing project. According to Alshehi, the firm will use satellite imagery to look for a suitable iceberg -- which he says should be between 2000 feet (609 meters) and 7000 feet (2.1 kilometers) long -- and then try and tow it to either Australia or South Africa. Once the iceberg gets to its first stop, it will be towed the rest of the way. Because icebergs are so heavy, the company will need multiple ships to assist with towing, and it will use the ocean's prevailing currents to their advantage. Alshehi told NBC that even if 30 percent of the iceberg melts on the journey, it will still be able to provide between 100 million and 200 million cubic meters of fresh water -- enough for 1 million people to stay hydrated for five years. Last month, Alshehi told NBC: "If we succeed with this project, it could solve one of the world's biggest problems. So if we show this is viable, it could ultimately help not only the UAE, but all humanity."
The company is beginning a pilot study in November to examine the feasibility of the iceberg-towing project. According to Alshehi, the firm will use satellite imagery to look for a suitable iceberg -- which he says should be between 2000 feet (609 meters) and 7000 feet (2.1 kilometers) long -- and then try and tow it to either Australia or South Africa. Once the iceberg gets to its first stop, it will be towed the rest of the way. Because icebergs are so heavy, the company will need multiple ships to assist with towing, and it will use the ocean's prevailing currents to their advantage. Alshehi told NBC that even if 30 percent of the iceberg melts on the journey, it will still be able to provide between 100 million and 200 million cubic meters of fresh water -- enough for 1 million people to stay hydrated for five years. Last month, Alshehi told NBC: "If we succeed with this project, it could solve one of the world's biggest problems. So if we show this is viable, it could ultimately help not only the UAE, but all humanity."
I'm skeptical that this will go anywhere near as well as planned. I suppose if it doesn't work out, they can always park what they do manage to haul all the way there off of the world islands.
a cool project :-)
https://www.igsoc.org/annals/1... has several interesting papers related to this subject.
The short summary is that we really don't have a good feel for the feasibility of this, so it seems like an experiment worth trying.
Brewster's Millions was a comedy - NOT a business think tank.
would be not only more cost effective but less risky of an investment
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You're off by an order of magnitude. The earliest documented proposal is from 1825.
Apparently, iceberg towing away from things (oil rigs, mostly) is pretty routine, and mature technology. Towing them to somewhere is a difference in scale only.
But history suggests this is mostly just another way of extracting money from gullible investors.
The Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty prohibits the exploitation of Antarctica's resources based on environmental concerns.
Now it does say -mineral- resources and I don't think ice counts as a mineral, but still, I'd imagine the environmental impact isn't negligible. Specially if done in large scale.
Have gnu, will travel.
I would love to see the energy estimate for the fuel required to tow this, compared to desalination of the same volume of seawater, for example. A giant 30 story iceberg isn't exactly streamlined.
I saw that documentary Already. I seem to remember they spent 30 million to make 300 million but it wasn't easy.
I mean .... is it ?
No. It is an idiotic idea. Most of the water in UAE is used for subsidized agriculture. Wheat (the local staple) does not naturally grow in deserts, so it needs lots and lots of expensive water.
Instead of importing millions of tons of water, they should be importing thousands of tons of wheat from countries with rain.
Seriously, I would love to see us move something that large. It would enable a number of other actions. I will say, that it would be best to have a small 1-10MW nuclear reactor to power several electric motors to drive this forward.
Regardless, desalination is probably the better way. The reason is that multiple sites can be set up along the seas and have multiple continual sources of water vs. batching it.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Well, that rain thing was this year extremely uneven distributed over the ares of the planet where you could grow wheat or rice ....
Wheat prices are a little above historic norms but not by much.
Buying wheat would be way cheaper than shipping ice 10,000 miles through equatorial seas. For every tonne of wheat, they need 4000 tonnes of fresh water. This is far above the world's average because of low humidity, high temperatures, and sandy soil. Nearly all of that needs to be supplied by irrigation.
IF they're growing grain with it, that is.
Water use in UAE
From the citation: Irrigated agriculture is the primary water consumer, with an average of around 60% of total water use
Also from the citation: Irrigation water is generally used in a wasteful manner, mainly through traditional flooding and furrow irrigation techniques and for cultivating low-value, high-water-consumption crops.
WTF are we talking about "greening the desert"? I mean, it's the desert - it wasn't a lush rainforest before the industrial revolution/age of the automobile, so why are we trying to make it something it never was? It's a stupid idea, it was always a stupid idea, and nothing Al Gore has ever has or will put on a powerpoint slide is going to change that.
Is desalination really so hard?
Can't Dubai figure out a way to, you know, conserve water?
Ken
Unfortunately, it's done virtually everywhere.
Although California's almonds get a lot of the bad press, depleting the desert aquifers to grow hay and corn to feed slaughter cattle is similarly wasteful.
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Thanks for being at least one person who is not just opining in complete ignorance like all of other 126 posts here (at this moment).
This is subject (towing icebergs for water) has been studied to death, anyone can Google dozens of studies done over the last few decades. There is nothing novel about the idea at all. This is the second such scheme posted on /. this year!
Slashdot should stop posting stories about "plans" to do this, and just post a story about someone who is at least about to actually do it! But then there would be no story to run.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
True.
The worst travesty by far are the alfalfa growers in California, that only exist because of water rights written into law 140 years ago. The crop is worth less than the cost of delivering the water used to grow it, it consumes 22% of all of California's water (as much as all the cities in California combined) and 2/3 of the alfalfa is simply exported to Asia. Yes the California tax payer is paying to have 14% of the state's water exported to Asia at a financial loss so that a small number of industrial farm operators can pocket some money.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
No, but much of pre-industrial Arabia and North Africa was grassland. What is now the Sahara Desert was once the breadbasket of the Roman Empire.
No it wasn't. The Roman breadbasket was the Mediterranean Maghreb which is about as fertile now as it was then. In 2003 Tunisia alone produced 2.3 million tonnes of grain.The total amount of grain needed to feed the million people of Rome was 300,000 tonnes.
The expansion of the Sahara is almost entirely to the west and south, not the north where the Maghreb its.
Starships were meant to fly, Hands up and touch the sky - Nicky Minaj
When you want to keep something frozen you want it bigger not smaller. The amount of heat needed to melt something is proportional to its volume but the amount that can actually be added is proportional to the surface area. As things get bigger volume increase much faster than surface area so larger the block of ice more chance it has of reaching Dubai without melting.
Interestingly this is also why Europeans who evolved for cold climates are larger in size . Heat loss is proportional to Surface area while core heat is proportional to volume so bigger bodies can survive better in cold climates. Of course in hot climates its more efficient to be thin and short.
**Life is too short to be serious**
Desertification in north Africa is not caused by human civilization. It caused human civilisation. the drying of central north Africa is what drove hominids into the Nile valley.
But history suggests this is mostly just another way of extracting money from gullible investors.
This. Towing icebergs around the globe is an old snake oil idea that someone dusts off every couple decades to try to sucker some "investors" out of some cash. It's an idiotic idea if you give it any real thought and have even a passing familiarity with physics and economics. It's like flying cars. It sounds like a cool idea and seems plausible enough at first to credulous people but the reality is that it isn't practical or economic and there are better solutions already available to us.
I am quite confident there are no actual plans to do this. It's just an old scam that I've seen several times already in my life and I'll probably see again a few more before I die.
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