It’s a truly dreadful irony: for many of the 400 million people in sub-Saharan Africa who lack access to even a basic water supply, there is likely to be a significant reserve in aquifers sitting just a few metres below their feet.
Groundwater – the water stored in small spaces and fractures in rocks – makes up nearly 99% of all of the unfrozen fresh water on the planet. Across the African continent, the volume of water stored underground is estimated to be 20 times the amount held in lakes and reservoirs.
The opportunity that groundwater presents for increasing access to water is widely recognised, with more than half of the global population already believed to be relying on it for drinking water.
When you add the ability of solar energy to power the necessary infrastructure and the fact that groundwater supplies are much more resilient than surface water during drought, the potential for harnessing this water source to provide a clean and regular supply to communities in chronic need comes into focus.
So, that’s another problem advamncing tech has solved. Aren’t we the lucky ones.
but it must be sustainable and fair
Typical bleedin’ Guardian.
There’s a bit in one of the Reacher novels. He’s down by the Tx/Mx border. Land’s dried out. Old V8 engines (the old 5.7 litre hemis I guess) appear regularly along the roadside. Used to be used – back in the days of fixed and low oil prices – to pump up the groundwater to irrigate. Rising oil prices stopped that decades back now it’s just scrub, near desert.
I realise that I am weird but reading that bit of it – while waiting for the next punch up in the story – my thought was, well, wouldn’t solar powered pumps solve that? And put that land back into agricultural production?
You know, buy southern TX land?
If 400 million people in sub-Saharan Africa lack access to even a basic water supply, how are they alive?
Guardian invents the well. Is there no-one amongst those 400 million people who can’t see and act on a commercial opportunity? Colonialists would have. I suppose post-colonial Adricans aren’t allowed to have anything unless approved by some do-gooder NGO or kleptocrat locsl.
I’m proposing flathead Ford V8s from the Model A. Hemis are too good for that job.
And it only costs £3 a month !
Yes, this seems to be a situation where solar actually will work. You can pump the water up all day, and you don’t need to keep pumping at night. Pretty much the opposite of the UK.
And, of course, the Chinese will be more than happy to supply all those pumps and panels on very reasonable terms.
Or use child labour
https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2010/07/01/the-playpump-what-went-wrong/
It’s a truly dreadful irony: for many of the 400 million people in sub-Saharan Africa who lack access to even a basic water supply, there is likely to be a significant reserve in aquifers sitting just a few metres below their feet.
It’s a shame that Black people invented and built everything, everywhere in the world, except Africa.
What on earth do they mean by “fair” groundwater?
The Victorians invented wind pumps which opened up semi arid parts of Oz and Africa to permanent settlement with the added advantage they are easy to repair and don’t pollutethe water table as they decay
Can’t you see a problem here? Groundwater is a finite resource. Why are there 400 million sub-Saharan Africans? Answer. Because if you raise the standard of living of Africans they breed like rabbits. So tap the groundwater & very quickly you’ll have 800 million sub-sub-Saharan Africans. And then 1.6 billion. Until the wells run dry.
Or: A mate was down in Tanzania in the late 70s. Came back with this tale. His company were working on an aid project. Of their own bat, they thought they’d try & help some of the local people. The village women had to walk a long way to fetch water from the river. So they drilled a well & installed a pump in the village. The aid project was paused for a while but when the went back to recommence, the village was deserted. Apparently the pump had been sold for ready cash. Africans. So the net result of you’re clever idea is you might be able to pick up a solar powered water pump for your garden going cheap.
This isn’t about the technology for getting the water out of a hole, its much more fundamental. This report is from 2009 but it is still relevant:
As always politicians and NGOs what the glory of being seen in their hard hats when the capital project is commissioned but as we know from our own failing infrastructure there’s not many votes in demanding more Opex.
As the report tries to say, some form or market is needed with users actually paying for what they take but they propose socialist solutions.
(see ‘When a borehole fails’)
Well there you go. I left out of the Tanzania tale why my mate reckoned the village was deserted. His theory was when they went back to using river water they’d either lost their resistance to the bugs in it or forgotten where it was possible to dip out potable water. Or even they just forgot to boil it before using it. Whatever reason, the village was deserted due to lack of villagers. Seemed unlikely, but perhaps not. I know his general take on Africa when he returned was he didn’t believe it was possible for people to be that stupid. I know in my extremely brief & thankfully relatively uneventful excursion to Sierra Leone I got exactly the same impression. In spades ,if you’ll excuse the expression.
A mate was down in Tanzania in the late 70s. The village women had to walk a long way to fetch water from the river. So they drilled a well & installed a pump in the village. When they went back to recommence, the village was deserted. Apparently the pump had been sold for ready cash. Africans.
A mate of mine grew up on a farm in Namibia, right out in the sticks a fair way from Windhoek and what passes for civilisation there.
They had no electricity until he was 14 (mid 1980s) when wires were finally put in.
Within a few months it had all gone and they were back to no electricity again.
These days they have some solar, but it’s inside the compound patrolled by two ‘night dogs’ behind wire, where his 80+ year old parents sleep inside a locked bedroom, reached via a locked corridor, in a locked section of a locked house with RPG windows (a hangover from Angola admittedly), with multiple firearms to hand.
And they’re popular with their black employees.
Entirely dependent upon the whims of comrades Tarquin and Jacinta of Oxfam, no doubt.
If no one owns the well no one will pay to maintain it.
The main problem is that aquifers are a finite resource unless you have some way of recharging them – like rain from time to time. Keep pumping out water and the water table will fall so that you have to dig your well deeper and then deeper and then deeper – that probably accounts for a lot of abandoned wells. I was in Oman in the mid-80s. Development of the coastal area north of Muscat (in fact in the whole of the Sultanate) began in 1970 when Sultan Qaboos kicked his father out. Wonderful, lashings of groundwater to provide irrigation for agriculture and other things. The trouble was so much water was extracted without replacement that within 15 years Nature intervened and re-filled the aquifers with sea water and the die-back along the coast was very marked.
The other problem is that ground water commonly contains poisons such as arsenic.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352801X22000236
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2352801X19300360#:~:text=Groundwater%20in%20South%20Africa%20contains,contain%20high%20level%20of%20arsenic.
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/arsenic
https://news.yale.edu/2021/02/01/study-shows-consequences-arsenic-tainted-well-water-across-bangladesh
@ Tim
Rather than buy up cheap south TX land to irrigate with ground water pumped by solar power to make it agricultural it might be more effective to use the land for solar power farms. The land is cheap, the sun shines a lot and there is plenty of cheap labor near for the low skill work of cleaning the panels from time to time. Most importantly the big user of power in the southern states is air conditioning, so demand for power peaks in those longest and sunniest summer days when solar power is at its best. Unlike the UK where peak power demand is in winter where the days are short and the sun is feeble.
andyf:
The expense here is connecting it to the grid, and balancing it with other loads and power.
If you want to use it for air-conditioning, it must be connected to the grid. Nobody lives close to these desert areas. Probably because they are desert.
Texas, like all other jurisdictions with grid-connected solar, is vastly subsidizing these connections and the sale of power thereof. Without requirements to use solar and those subsidies, no project would ever have have been connected because they’re just too intermittent.
For pumping groundwater the panels don’t have to be connected to the grid at all. Irrigation might attract other people as well.
There’s other reasonable solar projects, such as using it to make hydrocarbons, which you can then e.g. use in a vehicle. When the sun shines, you’re in business. It does need modification of the processes as some of them don’t react well to starting and stopping.