Matt Maynard investigates the strange world of iceberg towing and meets the people convinced that it could alleviate the world’s freshwater crises
The clag is down and the icebergs loom out of the dark fjord. Our captain cuts the outboard motor and we glide silently through the grey water. The fibreglass hull grinds alongside a serrated frozen slab. It sounds like a kayak being shredded in a sawmill. ‘No pasa nada,’ he reassures us.
For the past hour, on our final approach to the San Rafael glacier, we’ve been increasingly sighting icebergs. Now, at the head of the fjord, we’re surrounded by them. In front of us, finally, is the ten-storey snout of the iceberg factory itself.
I have come to the Chilean Patagonian region of Aysén on the trail of the 19th-century iceberg hustlers. One hundred and seventy years ago, seamen from the port city of Valparaíso ventured 1,600 kilometres south to the relatively unexplored Patagonian territory. At the foot of this oceanic amphitheatre of ice, they lassoed their cargo and attached it to a tug. Round-up complete, they sailed out into the open sea, dragging their icebergs back up the Pacific coast for more than a month. Back at the dock, they unloaded the thousands of years old ice, which would be transported to breweries to refrigerate the city’s beer.
It sounded like the most fantastical cottage industry of modern history. I imagined piecing together a frozen-fingered, hemp-snapping, cargo-melting tale from the past. But then, as we drift ever closer to the glacier, our captain tips me off. Just ten years ago, he says, local police detained a clandestine cargo of icebergs extracted 160 kilometres south of here in Bernardo O’Higgins National Park. He pauses. A sound like an entire forest being snapped in half cracks across the water. A townhouse-sized slab dislodges from the glacier, depth-charging into the sea. The iceberg lorry, he continues, unrattled, was headed for the nation’s capital. He even knows the driver.
I sense that modern iceberg smuggling to make pisco sours for well-heeled Santiaguinos is a much better story. And it doesn’t stop there. By 2015, I discover, the contractor mentioned by the captain had formed Merchant and Exporter Patagonice Limited, a registered company dedicated to the extraction, transport and sale of icebergs. I find other companies, too, attempting to sell premium iceberg water in Chile and even to use it to make vodka in Canada. And then I hear about the modern iceberg haulers: about Abdulla Alshehi and the UAE Iceberg Project planning to bring an Antarctic iceberg twice the size of Wembley Stadium to the Gulf of Oman and the city of Fujairah.
The water prince
Towing icebergs to the Arabian Peninsula was an idea first seriously floated at Iowa State University on 2 October 1977. Prince Mohammed bin Faisal Al Saud of Saudi Arabia had just arrived and on the steps outside, an iceberg was waiting for him. Four days earlier, some 4,800 kilometres away, he’d hired a helicopter and a team of scuba divers to extract a one-tonne iceberg from the Portage Glacier at Point Barrow, Alaska. From there it was flown to Anchorage airport and on to Minneapolis by commercial airline. Finally, a refrigerated truck brought it to the university, where it became the guest of honour at the First International Conference and Workshops on Iceberg Utilization for Fresh Water Production, Weather Modification, and Other Applications.
Mohammed bin Faisal had footed the bill for bringing the iceberg, paying a total of US$50,000 to cover the lion’s share of the conference’s costs. He had also brought another iceberg. It was just a concept at this stage, but this one was the size of 42 football pitches and 250 metres deep. It contained 105 million cubic metres of water and would be propelled by a nuclear-powered waterwheel (both the power plant and the rotor mounted directly on the iceberg). The concept, he claimed, had the potential to double global water supply. As the founder of Iceberg Transport International, he would be ready to make the first deliveries to hydrologically stricken nations by 1979.
Superficially, 40-year-old Mohammed bin Faisal’s iceberg dream had all the hallmarks of a Saudi prince’s midlife crisis. Yet beneath the surface, international iceberg interest ran far deeper. Plans to tow an Antarctic iceberg across the equator to supply water to parched California had been espoused in 1949 by the US oceanography professor John Isaacs – considered by many the father of modern iceberg-towing endeavours. By 1973, a 90-page iceberg-towing feasibility study had been prepared by the RAND Corporation for the US government’s National Science Foundation. Singled out by RAND for their acute freshwater deficiencies were the USA’s Pacific South West, Chile and the Middle East. In answer to this impending hydrological crisis, it proposed towing a ‘narrow train’ of multiple tabular icebergs, measuring 300–600 metres wide and a total of 20 kilometres long on a yearly basis to the Californian coast. NASA satellite imagery was employed to study sea ice. A very ambitious costing of US$8 for every 1,000 cubic metres of freshwater harvested in California was calculated. The tentative plan, in this Cold War-era US government report, was to tow a nuclear power plant on the train’s leeward side, ‘thus eliminating competition for fossil fuel resources’.
Mohammed bin Faisal’s ambitious ice-related plan wasn’t his only foray into solving the Middle East’s water problems. Before jumping ship to icebergs, bin Faisal had masterminded the Saline Water Conservation Corporation. ‘His role in setting up desalination in Saudi Arabia is revolutionary,’ says Michael Christopher Low, assistant professor of history at Iowa State University, whose lecture ‘The Water Prince’ explores the historic conference held on his campus and its outcomes. He views it as ‘arguably the most important scientific and industrial infrastructure advance in the history of the Arabian Peninsula. Right along with the discovery of oil.’
Before the international meeting, a team of 30 French scientists, including one Georges Mougin (a key name in this world) had reviewed bin Faisal’s iceberg-towing plans. The project, New Scientist enthusiastically reported in 1977, could supply drinking water in Saudi Arabia, Chile and California at costs 30–50 per cent cheaper than contemporary desalination. ‘Water is becoming a much more lucrative enterprise than oil,’ the Saudi prince said after the conference’s conclusion. ‘You don’t know what you have with oil until you dig… But in the iceberg project, you can tell exactly how much you have and where it is.’
Icebergs of the Arabian Peninsula
Lack of support from the Saudi Arabian ruling family ultimately stifled bin Faisal’s plan. And in 1978, the USA declared iceberg towing an ‘immensely difficult project that may well be feasible’. Since then, relatively small-scale iceberg-towing techniques have been developed as standard practice by Atlantic Canada to protect its offshore oil and gas infrastructure. Great Britain dabbled briefly with iceberg towing in 1992 when the National Rivers Authority considered, then rejected, a plan to tow icebergs from the Arctic to quench drought.
The concept received a publicity boost in 2011, when Georges Mougin (the Frenchman who had supported the research of Mohammed bin Faisal more than 30 years earlier) claimed that long-distance large-scale iceberg towing was theoretically possible. After decades of scoping icebergs at both poles by boat and even close-proximity hot air balloon flights, the engineer collaborated with 3D computer modellers Dassault Systèmes to test his hypothesis. By harnessing the power of ocean currents, icebergs would require very little towing, travelling almost as if on a ‘conveyor belt’, the team wrote. After progressively tweaking the departure dates of the computer model to avoid eddies, Mougin successfully swung a virtual seven-million-tonne iceberg on a current from Newfoundland to the Canary Islands using just a single 130-tonne traction tug.
When Mohammed bin Faisal died in 2017, a real-life large-scale iceberg had still never been towed, but rapid population growth and unsustainable water consumption had exacerbated water scarcity across the Arabian Peninsula, with all countries consuming more than 100 per cent of their renewable water supply. In managing both financial and hydrological resources, nations such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE were at a ‘critical juncture’, a 2016 study warned. In balancing development needs for current citizens and future generations, the need to tap oil revenues to fund water projects – just as bin Faisal had implied four decades earlier – was now essential.
The modern dreamers
I connect with Abdulla Alshehi via zoom. He’s agreed to talk me through his UAE Iceberg Project. I’ve seen the promotional video, with its extraordinary computer animation. Backdropped by the desert city of Fujairah and the barren Al Hajar mountains beyond, citizens in traditional dress and their children share a beach with penguins and paddling polar bears. They gaze across the 24°C water at a giant Antarctic iceberg parked in the Gulf of Oman.
‘We were inspired by the 1970s project,’ Alshehi tells me. ‘We have met with Georges Mougin and we have learned a lot in terms of technical details and obstacles met at the earlier trial.’ Alshehi’s CGI mock-ups share similarities with Mougin’s 2011 design, including a geotextile skirt – a thin strip of permeable fabric starting just above where the haul-line meets the ice, then, like an inverted protective headdress, wrapping around the bottom of the iceberg. Alshehi is guarded. Proof-of-concept models are ‘confidential’ he had curtly informed me by email. Ditto information on potential financiers, although he admits on our call that no funding has yet been received, citing Covid issues, as well as Russian investment confounded by the war in Ukraine.
Alshehi has been trying to get eyes on this project since at least 2017, with limited interest beyond the emirate’s national press. He has a self-published book, Filling the Empty Quarter: Declaring a Green Jihad on the Desert. In it, he shares other seemingly far-fetched hydrological ideas such as the Endless River project: a plan to capture water from Pakistan’s Dasht River delta and pipe it some 560 kilometres through the Gulf of Oman’s shipping lanes to irrigate the desert of the UAE.
‘Abdullah Alshehi is one example of a broader set of trends,’ says historian Low. On the one hand, the businessman is the successful franchise owner of UAE Geo Wash, cleaning cars with only three litres of water. On the other, he also works for GASCO, a natural gas subsidiary of the state oil company. ‘There is a lot of greenwashing happening,’ Low states of the region in general. The UAE playbook, he believes, involves showing an active interest in environmental causes, sometimes for very legitimate purposes, but sometimes as a branding exercise to detract from the nation’s role as a purveyor of fossil fuels. The UAE Iceberg Project is perhaps indicative of the latter.
As for actually assessing the viability of Arabian Peninsula iceberg-towing dreams, I speak to South African marine salvage master Nicholas Sloane, whose high-profile work, including refloating the doomed cruise ship Costa Concordia, has earned him some notoriety. A serious man of the sea, he has his own iceberg dreams, but discredits those of the UAE Iceberg Project. ‘You can’t go faster than the currents,’ he begins, of his own plan to bring an Antarctic Ocean iceberg to Cape Town in fewer than 90 days. Going all the way to the UAE, he says, would take 400–450 days. ‘Once you get close to the equator, all your cold currents become warm. You are not going to have anything left by the time you get there.’ Sloane’s plan involves recovering 63 per cent of a 100 million tonne iceberg. The rest, he calculates, would be lost in meltwater.
In the wake of Cape Town’s ‘Day Zero’ water crisis of 2018, when it was feared the city would run out of water, Sloane says interest in his proposition has increased. He too has partnered with the now 92-year-old Georges Mougin to produce his scheme. The iceberg, his theory goes, would be ‘captured’ at Gough Island, some 2,400 kilometres from Cape Town. Harnessing the orbit of the Benguela Current, a tug would only need to coax the payload, weaving it between 800-kilometre-wide eddies to a single-buoy mooring off the coast of Melkbosstrand. Here, Sloane believes it could last up to a year while open-cast-like mining techniques siphon off up to 150 millon litres of water a day. Sloane calculates that getting his first iceberg water to the point of sale would cost him US$0.5 per litre. Once he brings a second iceberg to town, he claims that the cost per litre would dip below the equivalent cost of desalination. No desalination infrastructure will be ready in Cape Town until at least 2026.
Dreams versus reality
In practice, towing an iceberg the relatively short distance to South Africa rather than the UAE is still riddled with problems. Water temperature off the cape fluctuates around 17°C. Ocean modeller Alan Condron believes that, once docked, Sloane’s floating ice-mine would break up in a matter of weeks or even days. Condron works at the MIT-affiliated Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and ran the successful computer model on the salvage master’s iceberg. He also stresses that before the cargo arrives and begins to melt, fully understanding the effect on marine life from all the additional cold water would be ‘critical’.
Potential for the iceberg’s centre of mass to become destabilised when mining its surface is another thorny issue flagged by South African environmental advisor and water expert Anthony Turton. Sloane advocates a complete wrap around the iceberg ‘like a giant condom’, but that appears to be yet another costly fix.
Legal issues surrounding iceberg extraction could also confound this emergent industry, although it currently seems unlikely. Merchant and Exporter Patagonice Limited (the Chilean venture I discovered during my Patagonian trip) briefly legalised its activities in Chilean territory, simply by extracting icebergs from just outside the protected Bernardo O’Higgins National Park. Nothing more has been heard of them since 2017. That year, Canada’s Iceberg Vodka Corporation paid an undisclosed fee to the government of Newfoundland and Labrador for a four-year licence to extract an undisclosed quantity of ice from sections of the coast, on the condition that harvesting be conducted out of sight of tourists. The provincial government subsequently limited the extraction to 1,000 cubic metres in 2021 and it appears that the company hasn’t renewed its licence for 2022.
Alshehi tells me that he would source his much larger icebergs from Australian-held Heard Island, on the 53rd southern parallel. He hopes that the Australians will allow him to install a base on this foreign territory, hedging that ‘the icebergs are floating outside the protected (national) zone around 1,000 kilometres south of the island’. International waters are understood to start roughly 12 nautical miles (22 kilometres) off the coast of a territory. Sloane’s South Africa-bound iceberg would theoretically be captured on the 40th southern parallel, off the coast of British-held Gough Island. The lack of international consensus about what activities are permitted in international waters means that iceberg extraction on the high seas exists in what the Boston College Environmental Affairs Law Review describes as a ‘legal vacuum’.
But beyond all of these issues lies an even more uncomfortable question. Even if iceberg towing is possible, should we really consider it? The concept of towing icebergs perhaps sits best at the intersection between the human ingenuity that could save us from the climate crisis and the human hubris that caused it, sharing company with space mirrors and other elaborate, unpredictable and unlikely schemes. There’s an elegance and even a purity, proponents of iceberg harvesting might argue, to unlocking the water otherwise ‘lost’ in the oceans. But pinning our hopes on snows that fell and compacted into glaciers before our species even existed, then pulling them around the world in a last-gasp attempt to treat a symptom rather than solve the source of our greatest problem, is perhaps missing the point.
