The Water Shortage Answer

Last month articles in The Australian and other newspapers suggested Sydney's water shortage could be solved by piping water from the Murrumbidgee via Canberra.

It was suggested water could be bought from inefficient irrigators.

I suggest instead of our cities looking to agriculture for their water, we build a water desalination plant for every capital city in every Australian state.

After all, our State capitals are ideally situated beside the ocean.  The supply of water from the oceans is really unlimited.

As Professor Bjorn Lomborg, Danish statistician and author of Cambridge University publication The Sceptical Environmentalist has said, "Desalination puts an upper boundary on the degree of water problems in the world.  In principle we could produce the Earth's entire present water consumption with a single desalination facility in the Sahara, powered by solar cells.  The total area needed for the solar cells would take up less than 0.3 percent of the Sahara".

Water from desalination is a bit more expensive because energy is used in its production.  But then metropolitan Australian has been saying we should pay more for our water -- that we don't really value water because we don't pay enough for it.

However, now that NSW Premier, Bob Carr, has announced the plan for a desalination plant in Sydney everyone is complaining that the water will cost too much!

The NSW Opposition is suggesting we should instead be using recycled water.

I scratch my head when I hear people talking about reuse and recycling as the solution.  There needs to be some water in the system before it can be recycled.

If you believe CSIRO climate modelling reports then there might not be very much water in our dams to recycle in the future.  Indeed the latest announcement from the Queensland Government, based on this modelling, suggests it will be 40 per cent drier in 70 years.

Tim Flannery from the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists once suggested that it might never rain on Perth again.

I don't have much confidence in the output from the CSIRO climate modelling and it has rained buckets in south western Western Australia since Dr Flannery prediction.

But I still think we should ensure a diverse source of water for our capital cities and also rural and regional centres.

I am tired of everyone playing politics -- water is just too important an issue.

Let's recognise that desalinisation may be a novel concept for Australia, but that overseas desalination capacity has increased at about 12 per cent per year over the past 30 years.

There are now more than 12,000 desalination plants world wide, with about 20 per cent of these in the US.

Let's stop pretending there is a water shortage in our State capitals and concede it is a question of political will.

Dams, desalination and water recycling all have their place.

Instead of the war of words, I would like to see proper cost to benefit analysis and risk assessments, taking into consideration climate change including the possibility that we may experience longer and drier periods in the future.

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