Forget oil and gas, Alaska could export water to India.

A small Texas company says it hopes to start exporting water from Sitka to a port along the west coast of India, which it will call its “World Water Hub.”

S2C Global Systems, Inc. said last week it could be dispensing water in six to eight months from an unnamed port in India, hauling it by tanker from Baranof Island in Alaska. The firm created a limited liability company with “True Alaska Bottling” to export billions of gallons of water to a thirsty world. The LLC is “Alaska Resource Management.”

True Alaska Bottling was founded eight years ago to focus on bottling and exporting water from Blue Lake, seven miles from Sitka. The company has a contract with the city of Sitka for 3 billion gallons of water a year, at a penny a gallon, according to a report on the Circle of Blue website, which covers the global water crisis.

The water sales could gross $90 million a year, the company says on its website. S2C stands for “source to consumer.”

National Geographic says that Terry Trapp, a Colorado businessman and head of the True Alaska Bottling Co., acknowledges there are major economic and logistical issues to be solved.

“Anytime you do something that’s never been done before, you’re going to have a lot of challenges," Trapp said.

There are water shortages and people who need water all over the world,” Trapp told the magazine. “But the people in the most dire straits are in the Middle East.”

At Sawmill Cove in Sitka, tankers would be loaded by underwater pipe at a rate of up to 32 million gallons a day. The World Water Hub in India would be a big step, the promoters say.

"For security reasons the port will not be disclosed, however this first hub will include a berth for a Suezmax vessel (156,000 cubic meters/41Million USG), an offloading system to a dedicated tank farm and a distribution complex for packaged water. Within 18 months after that we will be able to switch to a very large class vessel (302,833 cubic meters/80 Million USG), as both the ship and the berth for her will be completed within this time frame. Contracts for the distribution hub and ships are being finalized.

“The company will be able to sell from its hub bulk fresh water by way of smaller ships that can deliver to shallower ports, like Umm Qasr in Iraq (located within 4 days of India’s west coast). S2C will also sell fresh water in 20-foot containers with flexi-tanks (4623 USG) suitable for pharmaceutical/high tech manufacturing and packaged water (18.9 and 10L) for the consumer markets anywhere containers are delivered in south and west Asia from India.”

"India itself provides a particularly significant growth market for the packaged waters with a current population of 1.15 billion people, an emerging middle class and an increasing clean water shortage.

“Our Alaskan mountain water is so pure it requires no treatment except to remove organics that might be present through the natural cycle. During its 30-day voyage from Alaska to the Arabian Sea we will protect the water using an “Ozonating” system in the ships holds.”

“S2C Global has an exciting future in India and the region” the press release quotes Rod Bartlett as saying. He is managing partner of Alaska Resource Management and President of S2C Global Systems.

“After recently spending time in India meeting port authorities and potential distributors, our vision to distribute water globally became real. We fully expect the India World Water Hub to fulfill our minimum expectations of a half a billion gallons sold annually”.

Tankers would be just one of the ways in which water could be transported. A Japanese company is studying the option of filling giant plastic bags of fresh water that would be towed through the ocean.

A writer for TheAtlantic.com says that S2C Global has tried various enterprises in the last nine years, starting off as the “Sun Vacation Club” in 2001 and later becoming “United Athletes.” It changed its name to S2C Global and entered the water business. The most recent annual SEC report said, “to date the company has little or no revenues,” TheAtlantic.com editor Alexis Madrigal wrote in  a posting on the Sitka export plan.

The SEC report said the company plans to sell water for two to three cents a gallon at the loading point in Sitka, which is two to three times as much as it pays the city for the water.

The license requires the company to pay at least $200,000 a year to Sitka, whether or not water has been sold.

“The market for the water is significant as more than 50% of the world’s population lives in water stressed areas,” the company says. “The cost of shipping and the lack of offloading facilities are major stumbling blocks to ARM’s success in this endeavor.”


Shades of Wally Hickel and the water pipeline. But in a world where people will pay $1 for a glass of bottled water, anything seems possible.

Source : News Miner