Computer Models Show that Towing an Iceberg to a Drought Area Could Actually Work

Some one must have dropped a decimal point somewhere. 30 metric tons = 30,000 liters of water or about 6250 gallons of water. I don't care how you split that up it isn't going to supply 500,000 people for an hour never mind a year. Supply that many people with 10 gallons a day would require about 2 billion gallons a year by my quick calculation. Roughly a 9 million ton berg.

Yes, that remark about a 30-ton ice berg supplying drinking water to half a million people for a year simply can't be right. But I'm not sure where agesilaus is coming up with a requirement of 10 gallons a day for drinking water. I think a general agreement is that people require 2 to 3 liters of water a day (for drinking). So, assuming the lower figure, 500,000 people would require 1,000,000 liters of water for a single day, or 365,000,000 liters for a year. That is, a 365,000-ton ice berg would be required to supply drinking water (only) to half a million people for a year. A 30-ton ice berg would supply only about 40 people enough drinking water for a year---maybe only the 40 people who might be willing to invest in this unlikely scheme.

An aircraft carrier weighs about 100,000 tons. I know a half dozen tugboats can tow one into the harbor; I've seen it done. I believe that oil tankers are quite a bit larger. I do not know if they can tow an iceberg that is three times that large on the open ocean, but I think that's the scale they meant.

Read the linked article. It says 30 million ton iceberg.

Or you can use the same $10M to build a desalinization plant in the same spot where you would park the iceberg and supply all those people with fresh water for the rest of their lives.

technically feasible maybe but still seems as kooky today as it as it was 40 years ago. whatever you do to insulate a 500,000 ton irregularly shaped iceberg will surely be destroyed in passage. lots of waste and garbage. to capture water from icebergs perhaps better to tow many smaller icebergs to a tidal "landing pad" somewhere closer to where they naturally occur. winch the icebergs up out of the water on a massive cement pad and let the summer air melt them. water could be collected, made potable and pumped into a decommissioned supertanker for delivery anywhere. better to spend you money on system to deliver a steady/reliable supply of fresh water than one very expensive one-off project to make the old guy happy.

Glad to know there are still people who read critically and reality-check claims they read in print.

I still get politically-motivated ridiculous emails (and also read things in online comments) that are obviously wrong "by inspection."

If you look at the source link, the larger iceberg has to be 30 MILLION tons to provide fresh water for half a million people for a year, not 30 tons.

1 ton of water is 240 gallons
30,000,000 tons of ice would be 7,200,000,000 gallons of water
7,200,000,000/500,000 = 14,400 gallons per person per year
14,400/365 = 39.5 gallons of water per person per day.

Seems a little high unless you're counting crop irrigation and water for livestock as well.

I see everyone is having fun with iceberg and all that water, but exactly how would it be pulled to said location and then pulled out of the sea and then contain all that water for human consumption. I mean, yes we can travel to the sun and get a scoop of energy to last us forever, but then the reality sets in exactly how do we do it, hmm.

@SEE-SCI
I was thinking something about the same. With as long as we have been shipping oil I have to believe there are some moderately sized tankers that could be cleaned up, possibly coated on the inside to help prevent contaimination. And either get loaded up from a barge/platform type ice harvesting station or just load up at a developed countries port. As much water as we waste on a daily basis I would think a city could skip watering it lawn for a day or 2 and fill up a tanker. I would think that would be cheaper than $10 million (at the city fill up, not the custom ice harvesting rig(s)), but as over priced as everything else is these days there's no telling.

I see potential for ecological disaster.
a 30 million ton ice cube is going to likely cause pressure zones as it moves, condensation, possibly transport foreign bacteria from the poles to the desert.
Often it is not just can we mechanically do it. We need someone to look at the big picture. How much will the water temperatures drop? Will it kill fish? Will it cause a low pressure zone? Will the condensation dry out the air? Will sitting in a bay kill the fish in that bay off or drive them away?
"Water shortage solved, food shortage created!"
I know some of these concerns are localized, and may not have a huge impact, but we should at least verify it.

Side note:
500,000 Americans pay approximately 50 Million for water for a year. (Assuming 30 water bill and about 4 people per house). Note this figure is not based on any real research, just an very rough estimate.

Building a plant is the most reasonable idea presented in the comments as far as I am concerned. Unfortunately you are looking at around 50 cents per cubic meter after the plant is built, and the plants cost millions. So 10 Million to distill salt water is not enough. (Ice Burg is more economical at this point in time).
This information is based on Wikipedia and google research in a couple of minutes, so not great, but indicates suggest vastly more cost (150 Million to build the plant). Then again someone doing the research in more depth could give a lot better numbers.

@BubbaGump

I've been thinking about the same thing for a while. After all, since like 95% of the iceberg is underwater, we cannot just dig it and bring it on ground...or can we?

Actually, it's how I think it'll be done. You bring the iceberg close to the shore (probably near an harbor), build a bridge or something then dig the ice above water and bring it to the ground. As you remove ice, the submerged part will gradually come above water.

Still, digging out 30 million ton will be hell of a task.

@BubbaGump
We don't need to go to the sun, it spits out billions of tons of particles. We just need to figure out how to capture that energy for use :D...

I wonder if the 60% accounts for harvesting. Perhaps a dry dock or similar setup to get it out of the water, or even harvest it quickly, and transporting the portions to a container. Computer models are great, until they fail to account for some specific detail.

Why movie the ice berg at all. If you just have one really large bag around the ice berg, you can capture the fresh water as it melts and pump into a cleanly lined barge. Then of course you can transport much easier the fresh water.

That's essentially what I'm thinking. Just wrap the iceberg in a bag and dont' worry how much it melts. when it gets to shore, connect a pipe to the bag and pump it dry.

There is no shortage of fresh water that is easily captured. Just park a tanker with the ability to collect water at the mouth of any large river pouring into the ocean. Fresh water, easy to collect, and destined to be "ruined" if you will by mixing with salt water. Granted this would not be as clean as water from an iceberg but if we are only talking about getting fresh water, this has to be cheaper and infinitely easier than dragging an iceberg across the planet.

@siberian, you state the wonderful obvious. You are right! We do loose a large portion of water every day do to
'water run-off'.

How about a different idea. Take a small nuclear reactor and put it near the coast (maybe like those small scale units like those being proposed in India). Using the generated electricity and electrolysis, separate the water into hydrogen and oxygen. Release the oxygen to atmosphere, ship the hydrogen to the drought area. Use fuel cells to generate energy and produce water which is then used. Basically you are transporting water but using the atmosphere to transport the heavier oxygen component and only shipping the lighter hydrogen. You could build tankers or pipelines to ship the hydrogen.

You won't get as much energy back as it took to split the water molecules but hydrogen is a lot lighter and easier to transport plus the receiving area gets power in addition to water.

Or for that matter simply use heat from a reactor to flash desalinate large amounts of sea water. Seems that would be a lot more efficient than hauling an iceberg across half the globe.

@nonapod:

Regarding the 30 million tons, I get 7.92 billion gallons, or 43.4 gallons per person per day, which is similar to your estimates.

BUT, as they stated in the article, they estimate that they'll lose about HALF of this in the transport, so it's only about 22 gallons per person per day. And I agree, if you include farming and livestock (and even some menial industrial activities, including washing) it's a reasonable number.

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1 ton of water is 240 gallons
30,000,000 tons of ice would be 7,200,000,000 gallons of water
7,200,000,000/500,000 = 14,400 gallons per person per year
14,400/365 = 39.5 gallons of water per person per day.

Seems a little high unless you're counting crop irrigation and water for livestock as well.

hey, lets put a few icebuergs in the gulf to lower the power of haricains.

@Brian Kuttig, who are haricains and why do we need to lower their power and how does this effect you or this article, Curious?

Well as i know food and water is very essential for humans to live...But why...why cant we get rid of this things....
Can we find an alternative to energy(Replacement for food) everyday eat eat eat drink drink.....we are trying to automate all things in world to save time...So why not find an alternative to this.....

@krocks. I may have your solution. They say the source of all evils is 'desire and want'. So if we just stop wanting and desiring so many things and just focus on our needs, perhaps all our resources are then plentiful.

@krocks
you are right. i was thinking the same exact thing the other day. im pretty sure someone someday will find a good solution for both. we as a species have that technology to find that cure. maybe it could have been done long ago but there is just to much money in food. thats the #1 things we as humans spend most our lives spending hard earned cash on. cash that really doesn't have any real value. they keep use working and working like machines to make themselves richer while the poor starve.

@jediMindset, there are some moss that live in trees and get all they need from the air.

ok let make it happened now some state r desperated needed of water rite now so tow it now while is still frost n fresh b4 it melt n gone