Freshwater is Water is becoming increasingly scarce in many countries, but not in Greenland. Greenland’s ice sheet contains about 6.5 percent of the world’s freshwater, and it’s estimated that more than 350 trillion liters of it leaks into the ocean every year. And as climate change causes the Arctic ice to melt faster, more and more of Greenland’s water is expected to leak off the island each year.
In places facing water scarcity, those very same water molecules may be extracted from the ocean and turned back into fresh water through desalinization, at cost to electricity and money. This has prompted one startup to take on an unusual and ambitious undertaking, with partial approval from the Greenlandic government, to harvest glacial meltwater and ship it overseas.
“This region has some of the greatest resource wealth in the world and we want to get that message out to investors and potential markets,” said Greenland’s Minister of Commerce and Trade, Nadja H. Nathanielsen.
The idea’s creator, a startup called Arctic Water Bank, plans to build a dam in southern Greenland to capture meltwater and then ship it onto bulk water carriers for shipment around the world. If it goes ahead as planned, the company says the project will be completely carbon neutral and cause minimal damage to the local environment.
“This is some of the cleanest water in the world. Anyone who has drunk Greenland’s water knows it’s pure white gold,” says Samir Ben Tabib, the startup’s co-founder and head of international relations.
Ben Tabib stresses that the Arctic Water Bank is first and foremost a business, but he believes it can also serve the people of Greenland and the world at large. He argues that the bank will help Greenlanders by exploiting Greenland’s natural resources and paying taxes on the income it earns from them, an ambition the government shares. “The goal is twofold,” Nathanielsen says. “New revenue sources for the state treasury and the development of local enterprises and the associated job creation.”
In the long term, Ben Tabib says the Arctic Water Bank could help alleviate the looming global water crisis: “It’s probably not a problem that our small company can solve on its own, but in Greenland, freshwater is a resource that goes into the ocean.”
Now, the startup has received the initial permits it needs: According to documents reviewed by WIRED, the government is granting the company exclusive rights for the next 20 years to use all the water and ice from the river near the town of Narsaq. On average, the river produces 21.3 billion liters of water each year, most of it from meltwater from the Greenland Ice Sheet. But before the water can be transported, a dam needs to be built, and Arctic Water Bank must complete an environmental impact assessment (EIA) before construction can begin.
This isn’t as big an obstacle as it seems. Greenland may be one of the most unspoiled environments in the world. Although it’s roughly the size of Western Europe and has a population of fewer than 60,000, dam construction is not unheard of, says Carl Zinglarsen, head of the environment and minerals department at the Greenland Natural Resources Institute. The first hydroelectric dam was built in the early 1990s to provide water to the capital, Nuuk, and several smaller hydroelectric dams have been built around the country since then. Zinglarsen says the EIA process is very thorough, but in his experience, projects are rarely stopped.
