Alaska Bulk Water joins the parade of companies with hare-brained schemes to ship water to California, cost be damned. These have included building a pipeline from the Great Lakes, towing icebergs, and their idea to fill tankers with lake water and transport by sea to California. The cost would be extravagant and there is no infrastructure in California to handle it. Desalination, which is expensive, would still be cheaper than shipping water by tanker from the spelling and grammar-challenged Alaska Bulk Water, whose website looks like it was designed ten years ago and contains this gem “There are four principle ways to move bulk water from Sitka to it’s destination.”
California uses about 151,000 acre feet of water a day. A big tanker holds 307 acre feet. Do the math.
Ideas like this “are technologically feasible but economically unreasonable,” said Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute, a global water think tank in Oakland. He lumps Trapp’s idea in with others such as shipping water in pipes from the Great Lakes, large-scale “mining” of groundwater far underneath the Mojave Desert, or towing icebergs from the Arctic.
“There are no shortage of people with ideas about how to ship water around with no economic savvy,” he said.