Canada will face growing pressure to share its abundant freshwater with an increasingly parched U.S. but needs to safeguard its most vital resource. We’ve written about this in previous blogs.
Research Money—a publication serving Canada’s science, technology, innovation and investment community, invited us to contribute an op-ed diving deep into this question. We thought readers of this blog might enjoy it too. There’s a strong connection to Alberta.
Here’s the Link: The Future of Canada’s Freshwater amid America’s Growing Thirst
This column is the consensus opinion of the writers Donna Kennedy-Glans & Don Hill. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to BEYOND POLARITY — scroll down on your phone or tablet, or look to the right in the panel beside this post. Enter your email to FOLLOW, a wheel spins, hamsters get fed.
A very interesting column, folks.
Just to put a different take on your column, if JT is so insistent that Canada “do it’s part” in terms of global warming, doesn’t if follow that we should similarly “do our part” in sharing our water resources?
Please don’t suggest it to him. The truth is, I shudder to think of what that charlatan in Ottawa would do if it did occur to him.
In any event, yes, I do agree that we should start to consider the issue. One thing I can guarantee, however, is that “the usual suspects” in the NDP and the Liberal Party will be outraged at any such evaluation as they will claim it an obvious sell-out to the US, even if it is oriented to figuring out just what our actual water resources are so that we can ensure that we have enough for our own needs. Of course, they would claim that determining our needs is simply to determine what we can export. Whether or not we wish to export water, I agree that at some point that issue will come to the fore so it is useful to have information prior to that point.
Donna, within this grander picture there are also curious implications for the energy transition. From Edmonton, south, virtually all the fresh water is licensed for agriculture and industry. Yet, there are many proposals to make hydrogen from water: steam methane reforming (SMR) and electrolysis! Electrolysis needs ultra pure water. SMR uses water and natural gas but produces huge amounts of CO2 that must be sequestered. If water is locally scarce, Alberta will need to turn to Microwave Plasma Pyrolysis (MPP) of natural gas to produce its hydrogen. This process produces no CO2 and consumes no water but will increase, not decrease, our consumption of natural gas. Canada may have water to export but southern Alberta will not.
Lori Lightfoot, mayor of Chicago just sealed a 100 year, $1billion dollar contract with the Illinois city of Aurora for industrial water. Pretty sure this is coming out of Lake Michigan.