Ready-to-drink melted glacier water that’s nearly 1 million years old? Thanks to new research and persistent interest, multiple projects are currently looking to tow icebergs from Antarctica as a pressure release valve for increasingly arid regions.
It’s an idea that has seen as much enthusiasm as false starts. However, the allure of transporting ice from the frozen southern continent has consistently piqued the interest of researchers and high-level officials in many countries, including the United States.
One United Nations analysis estimates that 700 million people worldwide will be displaced by a lack of fresh water by 2030.
Harvesting icebergs from the earth’s polar regions has been viewed, often skeptically, as a wild card method for securing fresh water. Yet many small operations have been collecting icebergs from the Arctic between Greenland and Canada’s Newfoundland Province for years. The area is colorfully referred to as “Iceberg Alley.”
The ice collected has been used to make an array of products, including vodka and artisanal bottled water. It’s part of what has fueled the idea to drag bigger icebergs from farther destinations, such as Antarctica.
In the past decade, science and the maritime industry have caught up with the dream of harvesting Antarctica’s ice. Last year, the idea took another step forward with a feasibility study showing how towing ice from the Southern Ocean could be possible.
Cold Equation
“Expanding agriculture, rising global population, and shifts in climate are placing increasing demands on existing water resources, especially in regions currently experiencing extreme drought. Finding new and reliable water sources is an urgent challenge,” Alan Condron at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution observed in his 2023 study.Mr. Condron also outlined one of the biggest hurdles the operation would face: reducing ice loss as the bergs are towed into warmer climes.
He concluded that if, for example, an iceberg was to supply Cape Town, South Africa, with enough drinking water for a year—up to 4 million gallons—the iceberg would need to be 2,300 feet long and 820 feet thick at the start of its journey to account for ice melt en route. While that sounds Herculean, Mr. Condron believes three large tugboats could do the job.
Additional research supports Mr. Condron’s assessment that ice loss in transport is a major problem. This is why icebergs of such enormous size would need to be towed. However, there’s another way to harvest polar ice that’s more than just a theory. It has been done many times.
Jamal Qureshi is the former owner of Svalbardi, a company that collected freshwater icebergs in the Arctic Circle near the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard for use in premium bottled water. The Norwegian American said he fell in love with the Arctic’s beauty and quickly recognized the unparalleled purity and taste of iceberg water back in 2013, so he decided to share it with the world.
“It’s a super light taste. This is basically the taste of 4,000-year-old snow,” he told The Epoch Times.
Melted iceberg water was a luxury item when Mr. Qureshi started his company.
“It was a small family business trying to compete in a global food and beverage market,” he said. “The costs were so high, it’s really a marketing game.”
Regardless, Svalbardi’s water found a niche market in the international community. However, Mr. Qureshi’s team didn’t tow icebergs. They plucked them straight out of the ocean.
“We went to places where a lot of calving [ice breakage] was happening, so we had a lot of options and different pieces,” he said.
Mr. Qureshi said a persistent problem for companies that tow icebergs in the Arctic is the knee-jerk reaction from climate activists.
“We were not up there hacking away at a glacier—that would be utterly irresponsible,” he said. “It’s an iceberg now, and it’s about to melt.”
Ironically, many climate-change advocates claim that melting freshwater runoff from glaciers is contributing to rising sea levels and redirecting ocean currents.
Mr. Qureshi said the icebergs harvested near Greenland are huge compared to what his company collected to make Svalbardi’s water. A 2-ton crane fixed to a 40-meter (131-foot) boat collects ice close to where the glaciers are calving or shedding ice directly into the sea.
The crane could handle collecting icebergs of about 35 cubic feet. He said there are millions of cubic feet of freshwater ice just sloughing off glaciers into the sea near Svalbard every year.
Others have also recognized this method of ice harvesting—cranes pulling smaller icebergs onto large boats—as a potential opportunity to capture the ultimate prize in Antarctica.
One project proposed using this method to create a fleet of 40 to 50 specialized vessels to transport 10 to 16 blocks of ice per ship from the Antarctic to Saudi Arabia. But a 2021 study noted that this highlights another major roadblock to accessing Antarctica’s fresh water: The cost is astronomical.
The analysis observed that while Saudi Arabia could potentially generate $5 billion in revenue from such a venture, the costs are estimated to reach $4 billion just to build the fleet. That’s not including the price tag for any port or other land-based infrastructure.
Tip of the Iceberg
“The majority of the world’s fresh water is in Antarctica. As they [icebergs] melt, they waste billions of gallons of fresh water that humanity needs,” Abdulla Alshehi, managing director for UAE-based National Advisor Bureau Ltd, told The Epoch Times.He is the mastermind behind the UAE-Iceberg Project, which has navigated many obstacles since its inception in 2016. Like neighboring Saudi Arabia, the UAE is suffering from significant water stress.
Mr. Alshehi believes that the diminishing availability of fresh water worldwide is of “strategic importance” to all nations.
“It is a concern for all human beings because water is life,” he said.
Mr. Alshehi also said the UAE-Iceberg Project has worked out many technical kinks, including ice loss from prolonged exposure to warm waters. Beyond his own country, other destinations the project is looking at towing icebergs to include Western Australia and Cape Town.
Earlier this month, reports emerged stating that Mexico City could face a “day zero” water scenario by the end of June. This comes after increasingly strict government water restrictions on usage began in October 2023.
Mr. Alshehi is planning for the future. He says his project aims to tow free-floating icebergs that naturally break away from glaciers near Heard Island. The island falls under Australia’s territory in the Antarctic. From there, the boats will bring the ice to the port of Fujairah, UAE, which is surrounded by deep water. This will help avoid accidentally running the frozen behemoths aground.
In total, the journey from Antarctica to the UAE will take about nine months.
“During these nine months, it’s expected that 30 percent of the iceberg mass will melt during the transit period. However, we have an invention that was granted in 2020, where the iceberg is contained on a floating tanker. Melting ice isn’t a concern for us anymore,” Mr. Alshehi said.
He didn’t share further details on the offshore containment unit or his current investors but assured that the project is still very much “in progress.” The original launch date for the UAE-Iceberg Project was in 2020, but the COVID-19 pandemic created setbacks.
At the moment, the price of oil is the “biggest factor” in terms of cost, but Mr. Alsheshi maintains that towing icebergs is still more cost-effective and environmentally friendly than ocean desalinators. This is how the UAE currently gets most of its fresh water.
Desalination opens a whole different can of worms in terms of pollution. One U.N. Environment Programme analysis states that for every liter of potable water produced using desalination, roughly 1.5 liters of polluted brine are created. Even worse, it usually gets pumped back into the ocean, and it’s not just salt being put back. Copper and chlorine are also in the mix.
Historical Precedent
The ambition of harvesting ice from Antarctica has its roots in Chile. In 1956, Santiago-based university professor Carlos Hoerning brought the idea into the mainstream after sharing how, in the 1890s, his countrymen successfully towed icebergs from the remote San Rafael glacier in southern Patagonia to the arid cities of Valparaíso, Chile, and Callao, Peru.And in that moment, the dream of capturing Antarctica’s ice was born.
In the 1970s, NASA led a study to determine whether Antarctic icebergs could be harvested for their fresh water, and they weren’t alone. The RAND Corporation submitted a 71-page report to the National Science Foundation outlining the potential for harvesting Antarctica’s ice for water usage.
The same report estimated that the savings of using Antarctic icebergs for fresh water as opposed to ocean desalination or long-distance interbasin transfers could be up to $70 billion per year. The RAND Corporation also outlined the possibility of using nuclear-powered vessels to tow the icebergs.
Fast-forward a few decades, and the theory has inched its way closer to the proving ground and with more incentive than ever. Because free-floating icebergs aren’t protected under the Antarctica Treaty, the door is open to aspiring ice harvesters who want to take a shot at the untapped wealth of fresh water floating in the Southern Ocean.
Distributor challenges and the compounding effects of the COVID-19 pandemic led Mr. Qureshi to quit the ice harvesting game and close Svalbardi’s doors. When asked if he thought towing icebergs from Antarctica would ever be economically viable, he was skeptical.
“People keep talking about it, but there’s enough friction in the water, the melting ... it’s expensive,” he said, noting that the alternatives would likely always be more attractive to investors.
Yet he acknowledged the value and the unfortunate irony of such a critical resource being trapped just out of reach.
“I don’t know that it'll ever be viable, but in a very big picture, macro sense, the world has a big problem in that most of its water is in the very far north or south,” Mr. Qureshi said. “But most of the people live closer to the middle.”
