Dubai company dreams of harvesting icebergs for water

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — A Dubai company’s dream of towing icebergs from the Antarctic to the Arabian Peninsula could face some titanic obstacles.

Where many see the crumbling polar ice caps as a distressing sign of global warming, the National Advisor Bureau Limited sees it as a source of profit, and a way of offsetting the effects of climate change in the increasingly sweltering Gulf.

The company has drawn up plans to harvest icebergs in the southern Indian Ocean and tow them 9,200 kilometers away to the Gulf, where they could be melted down for freshwater and marketed as a tourist attraction.

“The icebergs are just floating in the Indian Ocean. They are up for grabs to whoever can take them,” managing director Abdullah al-Shehi told The Associated Press. He added that he hopes to begin harvesting the icebergs by 2019.

It is perhaps no surprise that the idea would originate in Dubai, which is already famous for its indoor ski slope, artificial islands and the world’s tallest building.

But the plan to harvest icebergs faces a wide array of legal, financial and logistical hurdles and environmentalists are less than thrilled.

The firm would send ships down to Heard Island, an Australian nature reserve in the southern Indian Ocean, where they would steer between massive icebergs the size of cities in search of truck-sized chunks known as growlers. Workers would then secure them to the boats with nets and embark on a yearlong cruise to the United Arab Emirates.

The company believes that, as most of the icebergs’ mass is underwater, they would not melt significantly during the voyage. Al-Shehi said each iceberg would hold around 76 billion liters of fresh water that could be harvested without costly desalinization, which currently provides nearly all of the Gulf region’s water.

The company declined the reveal the cost of the plan, but Robert Brears, the founder of the climate think tank Mitidaption, has studied the feasibility of Antarctic ice harvesting and estimates the project would require an initial outlay of at least $500 million.

Green investment groups are unlikely to finance the iceberg project, said Charlotte Streck, director of the consultancy firm Climate Focus. She says the project is “an exceptionally futile and expensive way” to solve the Gulf’s water woes and “seems to run counter to all ideas of climate change adaptation.”

Al-Shehi is undeterred, and insists the project will have no impact on Antarctica or any other natural environment. The whole process, he said, “will be a drop in the ocean”.