An engineering firm wants to tow icebergs from Antarctica for water

Next
stop: Dubai.
AP/Brennan
Linsley

• A Dubai-based engineering firm wants to tow icebergs
  from Antarctica
  to Dubai in
  order to provide the city with a reserve of fresh drinking water.
• The firm will use satellite imagery to select candidate
  icebergs. It’s eyeing icebergs that are between 2,000 and 7,000
  feet long, and weigh around 100 million tons. 
• But the plan is short on details: the firm doesn’t know
  exactly how it will get the icebergs to Dubai, or how the
  icebergs will be stored.

What do you do if you’re a fast-growing city in the desert with
lots of thirsty people and little freshwater reserves? Park an
iceberg off the coast.

That’s one Dubai-based engineering firm’s plan to provide fresh
drinking water to the city’s rapidly-expanding population.

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.

“If we succeed with this project, it could solve one of the
world’s biggest problems,” Abdulla Alshehi, NABL’s founder
told
NBC News. “So if we can show this is viable, it could
ultimately help not only the UAE, but all humanity.”

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.

To put Dubai’s population growth in
perspective, the desert-bound city is
set to house over 3.4 million people within by 2030, up from
just over 2.5 million in 2016. That’s a lot of thirst to
quench in a city that’s built in one of the driest regions in the
world.

The problem is greater than just Dubai. According to the
World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report, an estimated 4
billion people around the world face difficulty accessing safe
drinking water. 

Other methods, like processing Dubai’s
salty groundwater into freshwater, or deploying
water harvesters — which produce freshwater from atmospheric
moisture — are still too costly and inefficient to produce enough
water for the city. 

A tabular iceberg floats
near the coast of West Antarctica, as seen from a window of a
NASA Operation IceBridge airplane on October 27,
2016.

Mario Tama/Getty
Images

How to get a 100 million ton iceberg to Dubai without melting is
a monumental challenge

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 2,000 and 7,000 feet
long — and then try and tow it to either Australia or South
Africa.

Once the iceberg gets to its first stop, it’ll 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% of the iceberg melts on the
journey, it’ll 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.

Private investors have bankrolled the project to the tune
of $60 million, according to NBC. 

But there are still some unanswered questions, like how the
firm plans to store the iceberg, and how it will sell the fresh
water to the government.

That isn’t stopping Alshehi from trying. If he’s successful, he
hopes to bring icebergs to freshwater-starved regions throughout
the world.

“The entire world is in need of water, but initially we
would be looking at countries such as India, South Africa and
Saudi Arabia,” he told NBC.