Let’s Make A Deal
Most of the people who drop by seem to agree that blowing up more of Syria doesn’t seem to be the most intelligent solution for the current problem. So, what would be a better solution?
The root cause is a lack of water, and Badtux mentioned a desalination plant as a solution to that problem and it sounds good to me?
This needs to be as local a solution as is possible to really work. This can’t be something imposed from outside, so how do we get there?
Both Iran and Qatar want to run natural gas pipelines through Syria to the Mediterranean to export to Europe. Currently Europe is heavily dependent on natural gas from Russia. The Europeans would certainly like the pipelines. Since the gas is coming from a field that is shared by Iran and Qatar, perhaps they would consider a single, shared pipeline to reduce costs and overhead.
With the pipeline, Syria would have the energy source for a desalination plant, and they might want to consider a power generation / desalination combination facility.
As the world apparently has no problem coming up with tens of millions dollars to blow things up in Syria, wouldn’t it make more sense to use it to build something the entire area really needs – a reliable source of water for people and agriculture?
The governments of the Gulf states and Iran have a lot of experience with desalination and have working examples of most of the different types, so they have the people that can put this deal together, if they want a solution. When there was rain, Syria grew enough wheat for export, so the water will benefit the region with lower food prices.
The politics can sort themselves out after it is certain that something has been done about the underlying cause of the war in Syria, because the lack of water is going to be a continuing problem in the area.
I don’t have the training, but I wonder if it is feasible to feed the clean water into the existing aquifer and use that as a natural storage tank and distribution system, rather than a network of pipes? There are already wells drilled into the aquifer, and if the level can be elevated they will function.
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We do aquifer recharge here in California, but we’re talking about far more water than you’ll get from a typical desalination plant. As in, we store entire rivers in reservoirs and then use aqueducts to fill percolation ponds with it as we release it from reservoirs over the course of a year. The water sinks into the water table at that point, from which it is withdrawn during drought years like the current one. We have several years of water stored underground, so it’ll take a pretty long drought to really hurt us.
The Israelis just finished building the biggest desalination plant in the world. It desalinates 7 million gallons of water per hour. Sounds like a lot. But the Los Angeles Aqueduct moves 18 million gallons of water per hour, basically the entire flow of the Owens River, and barely suffices to provide enough water for the 3.2 million residents of the City of Los Angeles. Syria has 20 million people. Syria has about 12 million acres of arable land. An acre of wheat takes approximately 1.75 acre-feet of water to grow. Multiply by 12 million and that’s 196 million acre-feet of water needed to irrigate land that has been cultivated in recent history. Israel’s four desalination plants produce 480,000 (that’s *THOUSAND*) acre-feet of water per year — or roughly enough to cultivate 275,000 acres of wheat. Out of 12 million acres of arable land, of which around 6.5 million acres were actively cultivated in wheat or barley this past year.
Of course, it’s not really *that* bad, in that the northern part of Syria not only gets more rain than the rest of the country but gets irrigation water from the Euphrates River (which alas only manages to irrigate a narrow strip along the river due to bluffs on either side of the river valley) and the coastal area, where desalination plants would be built, also get the most natural rainfall so the desalination plants could augment that rather than being forced to totally replace it. But the reality is that desalination plants just don’t make enough water for irrigation use. Israel’s plants are providing 80% of the *drinking* water requirements of its population, but not a drop is going to irrigation.
They will need something above 330 million gallons of water/day to satisfy the UN minimum of 15 gallons/day for 22 million people. If they can make a significant dent in that number, the pressure on the aquifers and rivers will be reduced.
Any more water available will help, but they need to switch to a more reliable source for drinking water.
Turkey is pulling more water out of the rivers before they reach the border with Syria, so they are impacted by that in addition to the lack of rain.
My personal opinion is that any kind of a water project is a better use of money than blowing things up. I keep hearing ‘We have to destroy Syria to save it.’ in the background of these Congressional hearings.
Shades of Ben Tre. Yeah, that worked out well.
I do agree that some water is better than no water. The biggest problem, however, is that Damascus, the biggest city in Syria, has no water at all other than groundwater. Furthermore it is at the complete opposite end of the country from the coastline. It really wouldn’t work unless Syria decided to re-absorb Lebanon — something not feasible, they tried to turn Lebanon into a client state back in the 80’s and never really managed more than an outpost in the Bekaa Valley. And that was when they had actual Soviet support.
I just finished working some big numbers on my own web site, building on the above numbers. To provide the amount of water you suggest is necessary would require roughly the 40 desalination plants that I hypothesized for California, at a total cost of around $40 billion and yearly operating costs of around $4 billion/year. It’s feasible from a conceptual point of view, but given Syria’s limited coastline (120 miles long), that’d require a desalination plant every three miles, and then a massive aqueduct to carry water to Damascus, complete with massive turbopumps that would chew up hundreds of millions of dollars per year more in operating costs.
In other words, Syria is fscked good and hard. And blowing things up isn’t going to un-fsck it.
As for the notion of the USA providing $40B in construction costs to Syria, hah! Trillions for blowing sh*t up, not a dime for building sh*t! So it goes…
– Badtux the Numbers Penguin
There really needs to be a major breakthrough in the technology to make it a total solution anywhere the population hits the millions, but people need to start working on it, because no-rain could be the new ‘normal’ for the area, while Saudi Arabia may have to put in flood control.
I’ve worked with map overlays and the ‘grease pencil of doom’ to make a spot on that map disappear, but what in hell is there to mark in a country filled with world heritage sites and people packed together. The empty spaces are even more empty, as the farms are generally deserted, and anything that is left is being eroded by time and sand. The targets, like command and control, are probably in underground bunkers that will require the destruction of thousands of years of history to get to. Where is the ‘humanitarian purpose’ that will be served by that?
That’s why I latched onto the water issue. That does have a real, constructive purpose. That is something that could improve conditions.