The Outrageous Plan to Capture and Sale Greenland Meltwater
Fresh water is becoming scarcer in many countries. But not in Greenland. Greenland’s ice sheet is estimated to contain 6.5 percent (or 350 trillion liters) of the fresh water in the world. This amount of water runs into the ocean every year. The Greenland government has partially approved a startup’s ambitious business venture to harvest glacier meltwater and ship it abroad. This has inspired a startup to pursue an unusual and ambitious business venture that has been partially approved by the Greenland government–harvesting glacier meltwater and shipping it abroad.
“We have one of the world’s finest resources in this area and plenty of it, and we want to push that message out to investors and potential markets,” says Naaja H. Nathanielsen, Greenland’s minister for business and trade.The startup behind the idea, Arctic Water Bank, plans to build a dam in South Greenland, capture meltwater, and then transport it around the world by boat in bulk water carriers. If all goes according to plan, the company says the project will be completely carbon-neutral and inflict minimal damage to the local environment.
“This is some of the cleanest water in the world. Anyone who has tried Greenlandic water knows that it’s pure, white gold,” says Samir Ben Tabib, cofounder and head of international relations at the startup.
Arctic Water Bank is first and foremost, Ben Tabib stresses, a business, but he believes it could also provide a service to Greenlanders and the wider world. Ben Tabib argues that the company’s goal is to help Greenlanders by using the natural resources of the country and paying taxes from the income generated. This ambition is shared by the government. Nathanielsen says that the goal is to create jobs and new sources of income for the national treasury. Ben Tabib believes that Arctic Water Bank could help to mitigate the global water crisis in the future. It’s not something that our small business can do alone, but fresh water in Greenland is a precious resource that is being washed into the sea.”
Right away, the startup already has the permissions needed. WIRED has seen documents that show the government is granting the company exclusive rights to use water and ice near Narsaq for the next twenty years. This river, which is almost exclusively meltwater from Greenland’s ice sheet, produces on average 21.3 billion liters per year. But before any water can be shipped, a dam must be built, and Arctic Water Bank will need an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) to be completed to get started on construction.
This isn’t as great a hurdle as it might seem. Karl Zinglersen is the head of the Department of Environment and Minerals of the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources. Although Greenland has a relatively untouched environment, it’s not uncommon to build dams. The first hydroelectric power dam in Greenland was built for the capital Nuuk. Since then, several smaller hydroelectric power dams have also been built throughout the country. Zingerlsen says that the EIA is thorough but it has rarely, if ever, stopped a project.
