Fresh water is becoming increasingly scarce in many countries, but not in Greenland. Its ice sheet contains around 6.5 percent of the world’s fresh water, and over 350 trillion liters are estimated to run into the ocean annually. And with climate change accelerating Arctic melting, more and more of Greenland’s water is set to flow off the island every year.
In some places facing water shortages, those very same water molecules are potentially being taken from the sea and turned back into fresh water using desalination, at large electrical and financial cost. This has inspired a startup to pursue an unusual and ambitious business venture that has been partially approved by the Greenland government—harvesting glacier meltwater and shipping it abroad.
“We have one of the world’s finest resources in this area and plenty of it, and we want to push that message out to investors and potential markets,” says Naaja H. Nathanielsen, Greenland’s minister for business and trade.
The startup behind the idea, Arctic Water Bank, plans to build a dam in South Greenland, capture meltwater, and then transport it around the world by boat in bulk water carriers. If all goes according to plan, the company says the project will be completely carbon-neutral and inflict minimal damage to the local environment.
“This is some of the cleanest water in the world. Anyone who has tried Greenlandic water knows that it’s pure, white gold,” says Samir Ben Tabib, cofounder and head of international relations at the startup.
Arctic Water Bank is first and foremost, Ben Tabib stresses, a business, but he believes it could also provide a service to Greenlanders and the wider world. He argues that his company will help the people of Greenland by leveraging the country’s natural resources and paying taxes on income generated from them, and it’s an ambition the government shares. “The goal is twofold,” says Nathanielsen. “It is about new sources of income for the national treasury, and local business development and the associated creation of jobs.”
In the long run, Ben Tabib says, Arctic Water Bank might even help mitigate the impending global water crisis. “It’s probably not something our little business can solve alone, but in Greenland, fresh water is a resource that is just washing into the sea.”
Right now, the startup has the initial permissions it needs. In documents seen by WIRED, the government grants the company sole rights for the next 20 years to use all water and ice from a river near the town of Narsaq. On average, this river produces 21.3 billion liters of water each year, almost entirely meltwater from the Greenland ice sheet. But before any water can be shipped, a dam must be built, and Arctic Water Bank will need an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) to be completed to get started on construction.
This isn’t as great a hurdle as it might seem. Greenland may be one of the most untouched environments in the world—roughly the size of Western Europe and home to fewer than 60,000 people—but the construction of dams is not unheard of, says Karl Zinglersen, head of the Department of Environment and Minerals at the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources. In the early 1990s, the first hydroelectric dam was built to serve the capital of Nuuk, and since then, a handful of smaller hydroelectric dams have been built around the country. The EIA process is very thorough, says Zingerlsen, but in his experience it rarely if ever stops a project.
Arctic Water Bank estimates the total cost of the site—dam and shipping facilities—will be $100 million. Ben Tabib says he and his three cofounders are considering several investors, some Greenlandic, some foreign, including some American private equity firms. Ben Tabib would not say who specifically the startup is in talks with.
This isn’t the cofounders’ first foray into exploiting Greenland’s water. A separate startup they founded, Arctic Ice, ships glacier ice fished from the sea to cocktail bars in far-flung locations, including in the UAE. Nor are they the first to dream up an elaborate scheme to transport fresh water out of the Arctic. It’s more than 200 years since the notion of towing icebergs to more southerly regions was first suggested, an idea that never proved workable. In the late 1990s, the Netherlands planned to import water from the fjords of Norway, but that, too, proved unviable.
David Zetland, an assistant professor at the University of Leiden who researches the political economy of water, recounts the story of an American entrepreneur who planned to fill a giant plastic bag with glacier water and use a tugboat to pull it from Alaska to California. The entrepreneur ended up losing a lot of money. “Because of monopolies, in the water industry bad ideas can persist much longer than you would expect,” Zetland says.
Examples like this make Zetland skeptical that the Arctic Water Bank project will ever be able to compete with market prices for tap water. Should it succeed, he believes, it will be for the same reason as Fiji Water: good marketing. But unlike that company, Arctic Water Bank is planning to sell its water wholesale to distributors, not direct-to-consumer in a bottle.
Zetland points out that countries with a coastline will always have the option of removing the salt from seawater—a solution that water-scarce countries like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Oman already rely on for most of their drinking water, and one that Australia turns to in times of drought. The price for desalination, roughly $1 per 1,000 liters, is impossible for imported water to compete with, he believes.
When faced with this criticism, Ben Tabib says that his company’s water is not, in its initial phase, aimed at the developing world, and that according to the startup’s calculations, the exported water will be able to compete with desalinated water on price—though they don’t have an estimated per-liter cost to share. As yet the startup has not finalized agreements with distributors, but many have been interested, Ben Tabib says, and he is confident some agreements will be in place before the dam is ready, though he would not share whom the company has been in talks with.
Guy Alaerts, a veteran of the water industry, is not as quick as Zetland to write off water imports as a solution for the future. “Desalination is very expensive in terms of energy, so if energy is expensive, then maybe it could become competitive to import water instead.” A professor at the IHE Delft Institute for Water Education in the Netherlands, Alaerts worked for more than 20 years at the World Bank as a sector leader on water supply and climate adaptation. He knows firsthand the kinds of water-scarcity problems the world is facing.
He points to two ongoing agendas: the long-running one of securing reliable and secure drinking water for lower-income populations—favelas in Brazil and slums in Asia, for instance—and a newer one that is concerned with securing water resources in the face of climate change and a growing global population. “Everybody thinks that the world is a wet place with a couple of deserts, but by 2050 it will be different. The world will essentially be a dry place with only some locations and countries having a lot of water.” In this future, a “menu” of creative solutions is needed, and importing water might be one of them, he says.
There are issues, though: You need advanced infrastructure to capture the water on-site, and shipped water can only arrive in places that have ports fitted with special equipment to pump it out. Then it must be stored and fed into the existing supply hygienically.
“I would say that as a general solution to the global shortage of drinking water, it’s not going to work, but as a kind of emergency or supplementary provision of water resources, it may work in some places,” Alaerts says.
Aside from its economic feasibility, there’s also the issue of shipping emissions. Ben Tabib promises that the project will be carbon-neutral on-site, as the dam will also double up as a hydropower station, and that as well as powering the facilities on land, some of this energy will be used to produce green hydrogen. If technology allows once the dam is live—and Ben Tabib acknowledges, it doesn’t currently—this fuel will be used to power the ships transporting Arctic Water Bank’s product, making the whole operation carbon-neutral.
“They’re looking at transocean shipping, and that boat doesn’t exist,” says Tom Baxter, who has 40 years’ experience working in the oil and gas industry. There are smaller hydrogen-powered vessels out there, but nothing running on the fuel operating at this scale. Such a boat would also need certification once created. And alongside the infrastructure to get water on board, the Greenland site would need a facility that can store the hydrogen and get it on the ship. Creating such a facility would take five years “at a stretch,” Baxter says.
But Robert Steinberger-Wilckens, a professor in fuel cells and hydrogen research at the University of Birmingham, is more optimistic. Getting a hydrogen production and storage facility online in four years is possible, he says. “But you’d be hard-pressed to find a ship that runs on hydrogen by that time.” Ben Tabib says the company is considering both building its own ships and converting existing ones.
An additional problem is the hydrogen itself. “Even if you liquify it, it would need seven times more space than diesel,” says Steinberger-Wilckens. Using a derivative fuel—perhaps methanol or ammonia created from the hydrogen—could cut that space requirement down, but even then a ship would still need a fuel tank two to three times the size of a similar diesel-powered vessel. Space that would otherwise be carrying water.
Both Baxter and Steinberger-Wilckens believe that creating a hydrogen-fueled transocean ship is theoretically doable—but neither could see how Arctic Water Bank’s plan could make economic sense. “The last thing you should ask an engineer is ‘Can you do this?’” says Baxter. “You should be asking: ‘Should you do that?’”
But even if zero-emissions transport isn’t possible right away, Alaerts points out that if conventional water carriers are able to ship water more cleanly than, say, Saudi Arabia is able to desalinate its water, it might still end up being good for the climate, hydrogen or no hydrogen. “I don’t think anyone has assessed the water and energy footprint of the two options: shipping the water or desalinating the water,” Alaerts says.
“Shipping water from Greenland to the east coast of the US, for instance, is not a very long distance, but if you have to bring it to California, which is a drier area, then you have to go all the way around the continent, and that might be too expensive. I think the mathematics will have to be done case by case,” he says.
If the emissions and economic sums can be squared, there’s still one final issue: the optics of it all. Shipping fresh water from rapidly receding glaciers to developed nations, potentially helping them mitigate water shortages exacerbated by climate change, when these countries are disproportionately driving climate change with their emissions? It’s an uncomfortable feedback loop.
But such environmental questions are not the primary concern of Ben Tabib and his cofounders. Instead, they point to all the good they want to do for Greenland, and the great water their customers would get to enjoy.
“I understand why some might think the project is bad for the environment, but it is only because they don’t know better. Would the climate improve if we didn’t take this water? No it wouldn’t,” Ben Tabib says. “But with the project, we make sure that some people will get to drink some really good water.”