3 August 2023
Water, water everywhere
By Paul Branch
In the news again for various reasons is water. Life’s great supporter along with oxygen. Nature’s gift to lush British gardens. A treat for foreigners visiting our damp shores as they try to escape the worst excesses of global warming. We are truly blessed to have such quantities of liquid manna raining down on us from heaven while the rest of the world sizzles and fries. So to those bemoaning the non-arrival of summer: be careful what you wish for.
It had been assumed that our dear old planet would have enough water for us all forever and a day. Even with a rapidly rising global population, we’d never run out of fresh, potable drinking water thanks to the constant, beautifully choreographed recycling process between our oceans, lakes and rivers, the atmosphere, and the huge quantities of water stored in rocks beneath the Earth’s surface. Natural evaporation plus vapour released by volcanoes hits the cold upper reaches of the atmosphere where it forms solid crystals, and these trickle back to Earth as rain or snow, so none of the precious liquid is lost. But with the scorching acceleration of global warming, water levels in our lakes are diminishing at an alarming rate as droughts become regular, exacerbated by the increasing loss of water due to overconsumption and absorption by humans, in our bodies and in our modern infrastructures and industries. Furthermore the water stored beneath the Earth’s surface is proving to be impenetrable and inaccessible, trapped beyond our reach. One scenario now suggests that by the end of the century there won’t be enough fresh water to go around. Add to this the spectre of rising sea levels laying waste to swathes of our land masses, as glaciers melt and sea water expands with rising temperatures …. surely the case for doing something about global warming can’t get any more real or urgent.
If that wasn’t enough to worry about, clean freshwater isn’t distributed evenly across the world, with half of it concentrated in only six countries. Brazil alone accounts for 12%, much of it coming from the Amazon. Russia’s Lake Baikal is the largest and deepest freshwater lake in the world, contributing 20% of the global total. The USA with its Great Lakes is right up there, as are Canada and China, and little Nepal. However, over a billion people have to get by without enough safe, clean water to drink. For all Brazil’s seemingly infinite water wealth, São Paulo still experiences annual droughts and acute water shortages albeit in the more derived parts of the capital.
Cape Town offers another example of man’s inequality to man. With the city coming close to running out of water, it was found that the wealthiest inhabitants used 50 times more than the poorest, and that less than 15% of the population used over 50% of the water. Swimming pools were a principal cause of the problem. Other major cities around the world are facing similar challenges, with a tipping point projected to occur by 2030. Southern and western states of the USA are in the danger zone, with California possibly top of the list of those in need of emergency action. Here in the UK we’re not totally impervious to the dangers of water shortages, in the Midlands, London, and across the southwest and southeast regions. Northwards the situation doesn’t get too bad until 2040, so maybe the levelling-up process needs to be inverted at some stage to get the water flowing down South.
Better conservation of water is one part of the solution to an emerging natural crisis. Investment in new technology is another, especially desalination of seawater. We humans are not built to absorb the dissolved salts in saline water – as lamented by Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner: “Water, water every where / Nor any drop to drink”. But seawater and brackish groundwater can be converted into palatable freshwater by two processes: distillation, which involves boiling the water, removing the salt and collecting the vapour; and reverse osmosis, forcing seawater through micro filters to remove the salt. Both methods are becoming widespread in the USA and the Middle East. Both are also very expensive, in terms of large-scale production investment and ongoing energy costs. Salinity levels in our oceans are also on the rise, which would further increase processing costs unless renewable energy is used to drive desalination plants. The richest countries will no doubt need to stump up to pay for efficient desalination development for the benefit of us all …. so no problem there then.
Back in the UK we have one desalination plant, built in 2010 by Thames Water at Beckton, east London at a cost of £250 million, with a 15 km pipeline to the Woodford reservoir carrying 150 million litres of freshwater per day. The plant uses the reverse osmosis method of producing fresh water from brackish river water, runs on biodiesel fuels produced from recycled fat and oil from London restaurants and households, and has been out of action for a while due to a lack of chemicals. Clearly its presence is a start to addressing the impending water shortage issue, as we can’t rely on hosepipe bans forever. But equally obviously it needs a few more across the country to make sure we can carry on watering, bathing and drinking.
Water companies have been on the receiving end of much bad press resulting from too many leakages and not enough investment in infrastructure to cope with increasing rainfall and increased demand. Pumping raw sewage into rivers is not winning them any friends, nor do their track records make a good enough case in retrospect for the privatisation of the country’s water supply dating back to the Thatcher era. Supporters of selling off our natural liquid assets claim that the state of our water supply today is much improved compared to the 1980s; opponents of privatisation would argue that such improvements are no guarantee that the water companies will be able to cope with future demands, and that relinquishing control of our most essential asset, to shareholders whose main concern is achieving returns on investments, is no way to run a critical industry.
Both sides in the debate seem to have a point. Re-nationalisation would return the burden of investment to tax payers as well as imposing a further crushing level of debt on the national account. And what we don’t need is a hands-off approach to management of the industry as in days of yore, where there was no commercial incentive to strive for greater efficiency or pursue investments in modern technological improvements. Carrying on with the current privatised strategy would seem to deny the urgency of the need to do something, anything to avert future water calamities. And in Wales they may well have the solution – Welsh Water has no shareholders and is run solely for the benefit of its customers, on commercial lines with professional managers held to account by a board of independent trustees. To date its performance has been superior to other privatised companies, as has the level of its debt burden. The model is not a new one, having been used in the evolution from the old Railtrack to the present Network Rail, subsuming the debt which was then underwritten by the government and reducing its servicing cost. If the water industry were to be transformed in this way, maybe we could help save the planet and alter Coleridge’s rime: “Water, water every where / And still enough to drink”.
tile photo:frame harirak on Unsplash
