Firm Seeks ‘Blue Gold’ in Alaska
By JOHN COLLINS RUDOLF
Green: Business

Quote:Freshwater supplies are strained in countries all over the world. But in a few places like Alaska, Greenland and Canada, there’s more than enough to go around. So why not ship water from where it’s plentiful to where it’s scarce?
A woman heading to fetch water on the dry bed of a river in Palghat, India, in a past drought. Associated Press Heading across a dry riverbed in Palghat, India, in a past drought.

Most people would call this a fool’s errand: water is heavy and transporting it thousands of miles is tremendously expensive and energy-intensive. But not S2C Global Systems, a small Texas company now in the developmental stage that hopes to ship billions of gallons of freshwater by tanker to India and the Middle East from Alaska.

The water will come from Sitka, a small town on an island in southeast Alaska that holds the rights to 6.2 billion gallons a year from a large reservoir nearby. The town recently signed a contract with S2C to export nearly half of that allocation at a price of a penny a gallon. The company’s first “water hub” is under development at a port south of Mumbai, an S2C executive told Circle of Blue, a global water issues research and advocacy group that has been following the deal.

That would mean a round trip for tankers of at least 14,000 miles.

Financial statements from the company paint a sketchy future for the venture, however. The company has identified Saudi Arabia, Iraq, India and Cyprus as markets for its water, but has yet to sign formal pricing or distribution agreements in any of those countries. The company’s share price is currently about 2 cents.

The export of high-quality bottled water has long been big business, but bulk water sales have yet to catch on – no doubt because the cost of producing local supplies even with pricy desalination plants remains cheaper than shipping water across vast distances by sea.

But as water supplies grow scarcer – a likely outcome for many regions if global warming scenarios prevail – the margins for bulk water exports may well improve. If they do, you can expect to see many more entrepreneurs try to strike “blue gold.”

http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/1...messcience

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