Viable ? : Underwater fresh water aqueduct harnessing Greenland melting Glaciers?

[Dante Monson]

12 million M3 of water could replace the entire current desalinated water production of Spain two times.

And save 3,5 kWh x 12 million  per day or 42 000 megawatts.

At current market prices, saving 8,4 million dollars per day.

More than 3 billion dollars per year worth of electricity.

The project could pay itself off in a few years. ( Within one and a half years at market price?)

About 2000 km to New York 

Or 3600 km to Houston

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https://www.progressivepolicy.org/blogs/ppis-trade-fact-of-the-week-greenland-is-losing-280-billion-tons-of-ice-each-year/

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Certainly. Here are some estimates for the maximum water flow rate through an underwater pipeline:

 * Small diameter pipe (e.g., 12 inches): 10,000 to 20,000 cubic meters per hour

 * Large diameter pipe (e.g., 48 inches): 100,000 to 500,000 cubic meters per hour

These are very rough estimates and the actual flow rate could be higher or lower depending on the specific conditions.

[Dante Monson]

Absolutely all good points. 

Trying to find the discharge / flow rate of the glacier rivers in Iceland and Greenland would be useful. 

As per the pipelines, they would likely need to be more or less floating at a certain depth. 

On Sat, Jul 13, 2024 at 4:06 PM Eric Hunting <erich...@gmail.com> wrote:

Probably not. It would need to include the capability to capture this water, which isn’t all in one place, but dispersed across a vast and very complex landscape that is itself about four-five times the size of Spain. The glacial runoff is mostly where the glaciers meet the seawater, where calving and falling ice in office-building-sized pieces would make building structures to capture the runoff before it gets to the sea a bit difficult. So any of this would be limited to places where glaciers have been depleted enough that they have retreated up valleys. The sea floor is not flat and vastly varying in depth. Between Cape Farewell and Cape Finisterre are many seamounts, abyssal valleys and the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which is all tectonically active because the ridge is where the plates are separating, constantly increasing the distance across the Atlantic and letting magma up the middle, making all those Icelandic volcanoes go. ( https://www.shadedrelief.com/atlantic/North-Atlantic-Map-Type.jpg ) And, of course, there’s the curvature of the Earth. So you’re probably looking at an impossible set of constantly remade structures to create a gradient between those two points for a traditional gravity-driven aqueduct. An alternative approach might employ a floating or neutrally buoyant tube structure which would basically run a bit below sea level (to avoid shipping and the motion of what is some of the roughest seas in the world) but then must deal with the constantly varying stresses of sea currents, tides, ocean thermal expansion. This would probably need some kind of actively rigidized flexible structure to compensate for these many forces, and a means of power for those systems. Imagine something like a giant garden hose with a streamlined profile and muscles like a snake. And since it wouldn’t use gravity, you would need many pumps and the energy to power them. So, yeah, we’re getting into ’space elevator to the moon’ megastructure territory… If possible, it might take Diamond Age technology and structural systems capable of self-construction and continuous self-repair, as I’ve sometimes imagined might be used for much smaller spanning intercontinental railways of the distant future bridging the eventually ice-free Arctic Circle to link the Earth Island. (and even that probably being somewhat indirect and possibly having to skip the Atlantic part) ( https://www.geographyrealm.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/map-arctic-circle.jpg ) But, of course, if we had anything approaching that technology there wouldn’t be a water problem in Southern Europe in the first place.  

Eric Hunting

erich...@gmail.com