Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for June 19, 2007

The Cost of Supplying Melbourne With Irrigation Water: A Note from Rojo

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Hi Jennifer,

I’ve just read an article in The Australian regarding a possible sweetner for the Bracks government, namely consideration of a $1.5 billion pipeline to supply Melbourne with water from the Murray river system.

I haven’t found what the other options — desalination, reuse of stormwater and a scheme to use waste water to replace water used by power generators in the Latrobe Valley — were going to cost the Victorian goverment but I’m blown away with spending $1.5 billion for 150 gigalitres per year. And the water will have to be sourced from consumptive users and almost certainly not from environmental flows.

Maybe the $1.5 billion price tag includes the cost of purchasing this water, if not it will add another $ 2-300 million.

To my way of thinking that leaves the capital cost in the region of $10-12 million per gigalitre, or $10-12,000 per megalitre. The opportunity cost of that money will hover close to $1,000 per megalitre let alone any pumping, cleaning, maintenance and payback for the $1.5 billion outlay. And if we account for the lost agricultural production(say $250 per megalitre) due to the loss of the water, then cost per megalitre approaches $2,000.

And to top it all off we’re not harnessing any new water for that outlay.

I can’t begin to guess what it would cost to harvest storm water, which is wasted at a cost to the environment, or getting waste water to power generation sites, at least doing either ‘create’ new water. Water that can be used without infringing on anyone. I’ll assume this is an expensive option.

I do note the Victorian government hasn’t mentioned recycling.

What I do have, is some understanding of desalination. One of the more recent installations is in Ashkelon, Israel. This plant has a capital cost of about $300million( US$250m) to produce 110 gigalitres per year at a cost of $700 per megalitre (52 cents US/m3)

Desalination of seawater takes 3-4kw of electricity to produce a m3 (1,000 litres).

This desalination plant has it’s own gas fired 80MW power station. I would guess such power consumption will have some people jumping up and down, but to put 80 MW into perspective it is less than 1% of Victoria’s generating capacity of 9,000 MW and is close to 10% of Victoria’s current (no pun intended) renewable electricity output of 767 MW of which 580 MW are hydro generated.

All we need to do is expand renewables by 10% to keep blood pressures in check.

A Texas site on desalination supports the Israel experience. Though slightly more expensive – those Israeli’s know how to drive a bargain.

Regards,
Rojo

Japan Really a Winner from Recent IWC Meeting: A Note from Ann Novek

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Greenpeace and most anti whaling organisations proclaimed victory for the whales after the annual International Whaling Commission (IWC) meeting in Anchorage and a deafening defeat for the pro-whaling nations.

This is hardly the truth.

Most IWC delegates agree that the current IWC is dysfunctional and the positions are deadlocked. The moderate minded delegates still believe that the IWC is the best body to solve and manage whaling issues.

Japan threatens as usual to leave the IWC , but Norway has stated it has no intention to leave the IWC and the IWC is the best body to take care of its interests.

So who are the winners and losers in this high political game?

In a recent comment here at the blog, Sidney Holt, one of the persons behind the design of the whaling moratorium, stated:

“Yesterday the on-line paper American Prospect (www.prospect.org) published my evaluation of the present whaling crisis that some of the participants in this debate here might care to look at. I have concluded that the authorities and commercial interests in Japan do not wish the moratorium on commercial whaling to be lifted, because conducting commercial whaling under Special permits for ostensibly scientific purposes is more convenient. The overwhelming evidence now is that Japan intends to indefinitely expand its unregulated whaling, as the major whale populations recover. The argument that whales are eating “our” fish, and that some of them are now competing with the others and hampering thier recovery are purely devices to justify future unsustainable whaling, which is the only kind that can be profitable. The argument about meat stockpiles is interesting because it is really not about selling the current catches but rather preparing the consumer base for the planned increases in production in the coming decade.. Look at it that way and then consider the discussion now going on in the technical press in Japan regarding the projected design of a new and bigger factory ship, and increasing the numbers of catcher boats in order to fully use the factories processing capacity.”

Another scientist, Atsushi Ishii, from Tohoku University in Sendai , Japan, shared a similar view. He believes the current status quo suits the Japan’s Fisheries Agency:

“Japan is happy to continue scientific whaling; but they say scientific whaling is needed because they want to overturn the moratorium, so they need the moratorium to continue scientific whaling,” he says.”

And what did the antis say?

In the BBC article, Dr Epstein from the University of Sydney said:

“There’s that relationship between NGOs and governments that is quite functional from both of their perspectives,” observes Dr Epstein.

“Governments look quite green because they’re listening to NGOs; NGOs get listened to in an international system of states where there isn’t much room normally for them. So there isn’t much incentive to listen to anything else.”

In this thesis, the NGOs dictate what governments need to say to look green, the governments say it, and NGOs duly say nice things about them. Reporters lap it all up, even help foment it, because they know what story their readers are expecting; it is all utterly predictable, and nobody has an incentive to step out of line.

Everyone’s a winner; except, of course, the whales.

Ann Novek
Sweden

PS The Norwegian media even pointed out that Norway was praised at the IWC meeting for its thorough report on how long it takes to kill a whale!

Save the Planet, Throw C02 Into Outer Space?

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“Six scientists from some of the leading scientific institutions in the United States have issued what amounts to an unambiguous warning to the world: civilisation itself is threatened by global warming.

They also implicitly criticise the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for underestimating the scale of sea-level rises this century as a result of melting glaciers and polar ice sheets.

Instead of sea levels rising by about 40 centimetres, as the IPCC predicts in one of its computer forecasts, the true rise might be as great as several metres by 2100. That is why, they say, planet Earth today is in “imminent peril”…

Read the complete article entitled ‘The Earth Today Stands in Imminent Peril’ by Steve Connor: http://environment.independent.co.uk/climate_change/article2675747.ece

The piece finishes with comment that “a feasible strategy for planetary rescue almost surely requires a means of extracting [greenhouse gases] from the air.”

“Alfred Wong of the University of California, Los Angeles, at last week’s meeting of the American Geophysical Union, in Acapulco, … reckons the problem is not so much that CO2 is being thrown away, but that it is not being thrown far enough. According to his calculations, a little helping hand would turn the Earth’s magnetic field into a conveyor belt that would vent the gas into outer space, whence it would never return…

Read the compete article from The Economist entitled ‘Stairway to Heaven’ here: http://www.economist.com/research/articlesbysubject/displaystory.cfm?subjectid=348924&story_id=9253976