Sunday, June 26, 2005
Australian water security
These days, the concern of many an Aussie conversation is water, or lack thereof.
The Sydney equivalent of a conversation filler like "Beautiful day, isn't it?" seems to have become "Oh good, it's raining today. Hope we're getting some in the catchment area."
Maybe the inversion is a southern hemisphere thing. Like water travelling down the the drain in the opposite direction, if you will.
With Australian dams draining faster than Bob Hawke can drain a glass of cold beer, it's refreshing to read some fresh ideas on the subject, like those offered by (UNSW Dean of Science) Mike Archer after a trip to arid Israel, including inter alia:
.
... We live in the flattest, driest vegetated continent. ... a mere 15 per cent can be considered reliably well watered.
To complicate matters, we have the world's least typical rivers. Many never reach the sea but flow, often only now and then, towards the inland. They may end in billabongs, sink into the ground or evaporate in the hot sun.
... Australia simply can't afford to wallow in doom and gloom.
What ... options are there? ... using medusa bags to bring freshwater from where it is abundant to where it is needed. These huge nylon sacks are the size a supertanker and, because freshwater floats on salt water, they can be towed across the ocean by tugs.
... Obviously, there would be an energy cost in harvesting and distributing water in this way but it could provide a reliable source of water to any city or town along the coast.
Where would we store surpluses produced in this way? ... safely underground in suitable aquifers where it can't evaporate?
Think of the vast amounts of rainwater that Sydney's roofs and roadways send into our stormwater system: even if we all had rainwater tanks, we'd never be able to collect more than a small fraction of the massive volume of water that torrents down when the coastal rains arrive.
Perhaps all that water could be collected and stored underground, filtered by billions of tonnes of sandstone, rather than shunted out to sea? We'll soon see: Sydney businessman Gary Johnston has very generously put his money where his vision is on this issue and donated $1 million to the University of NSW to establish a professorship to research how to move and store water in underground aquifers. We're searching for the right candidate now. This should add another element of resilience to the blueprint for Sydney: more reliable water in this, the most unreliable of lands.
Underground aquifers!
Tanker-sized "medusa" bags of fresh water floating on the ocean!
Great stuff. More tantalising, for mine, than the (now standard) bleating on the left for self-sustainability with respect to energy, though the achievement of such, as per the sustainable house highlighted in this link is admirable:
Each year Sydney's Sustainable House...
- Saves 102,000 litres of water which is left in the Shoalhaven river and Warragamba Dam
- Keeps >60,000 litres of sewage out of the Pacific Ocean
- Saves 4.3 tonnes of coal from burning
- Cuts Council's waste by several tonnes. The waste stsyem recycles newspaper, kitchen scraps, compost
- Produces $1119.30 of clean energy a year, or $3.06 a day
- Keeps >80,000 litres of stormwater out of Sydney Harbour
"Looking back on what we did and our experience living here in the first 12 months, it seems to us that perhaps the key tool for anyone wishing to live sustainably is already held by each of us: to use it we need only say to ourselves, "I can do this"."
For more information contact Michael Mobbs
ph +61 2 9310 2930
fax +61 2 9310 1893
I wonder what costs and maintenance are involved re that house and it's impressive facets.
