These are a few of my favorite things: Kenya and New Water Sources, that is

Yesterday was a big day for Kenya and its water budget.  As the NYTimes, NPR, and Kenya’s Daily Nation reported, there has been a big discovery of underground water, an aquifer, in Turkana County, located in the far north-west corner of Kenya.  The thing is massive, supposedly holding 207 bill cubic meters of water.  Considering the entire country uses about  ________ cubic meters per year, that’s one heckuva lot of water.  It seems that they were able to discover this aquifer through remote sensing, which is pretty cool, in and of itself, and then was only confirmed through some limited drilling.  Check out these awesome images care of RTI Exploration, the firm that did the remote sensing work.

And Turkana could really use it.  This is a very poor and very drought-prone region, rife with ethnic tensions.  So, yay!  Let’s crack open the bubbly, do a gig! Celebrate Good Times, Come ON!

And while I hate to be a Debbie Downer, I think a not-so-fast attitude is probably in order.  There are still LOTS of unanswered questions.

Here we go: 

Ownership:  Someone commissioned the remote sensing exploration in the first place.  And this kind of awesome imaging and interpretation doesn’t come cheap.  So who paid for the exploration?  And what does that entitle the person/group/country who did?

Governance: Someone is going to be given the go-ahead to distribute this valuable resource.  If an organization like USAID has a hand in it (which it likely already does) then there will be a strong push to have full-cost pricing involved and likely a fully privatized water utility at the helm.  Now, I don’t actually know whether a privatized corporation would be better or worse for the local folks, but it does seem clear to me that the poorest people in Kenya are in no condition to pay full-cost recovery pricing.  If they can’t pay, they may not be able to benefit from this resource at all.  Let’s hope that the governance regime is better thought out than that.  UPDATE:  I’ve now read that they are handing this resource over to the Rift Valley Water Services Board to manage.  I have no idea what this means in terms of pricing.

Ethnic Conflict:  As I mentioned before, this region of Kenya is home to a variety of ethnic groups and has seen its fair share of conflict.  The assumption made by lots of folks is that the presence of water will dampen those conflicts.  But I’m not really sure that this bears out in real life.  Think of some oil-rich locations, such as, say… Nigeria.  Michael Watts has made much of his career about explaining some of the ethnic clashes that are exacerbated by the oil industry.  I’m not sure where the assumption of reduced tensions with the presence of resources comes from, but it doesn’t necessarily hold water to me. 

Recharge Rate:  I saw that the aquifer might hold 207 bcm,  but underground resources like this in arid areas tend to recharge very slowly.  Like,  painfully slowly.  I read that this particular aquifer recharges at a rate of 3.4 bcm/y.  That’s cool.  Actually faster than I would have expected.  (It’s an estimate, of course, because deciding for certain how quickly water recharges is hard to predict and depends on annual rainfall and other climatic conditions that vary over time, etc, etc.)  But it means that you can only withdraw that amount each year without depleting the aquifer over time.  And what happens kiddies when you deplete an aquifer?  A whole host of negatives:  saline levels go up, pollution of all kinds become a problem, potential for sinkholes or other ground subsidence, crops that do grow now have to be irrigated instead of tapping into that ground source and last but not least the aquifer disappears over time.  So it’s a good idea to think about extraction sustainably.

Water Quality:  Just because water exists does not mean that it is certainly H2O in a pure sense.  In fact, that hardly exists on Earth.  Instead groundwater is often laden with metals, sometimes ones that are very hazardous to human health.  And even if the water quality is awesome today, it must be protected so it doesn’t suffer in the future and render the whole aquifer useless to human consumption.  One of the news outlets said something like they wanted to create a man-made lake on top of the aquifer.  This is just not a good idea.

Water-Energy Nexus Concerns:  This is a pet issue of mine, something I think about a lot, so please hear me out.  Water and energy (especially electricity) are intimately linked.  Water is used in the extraction of electricity resources (think hydrofracking) and water is used to generate other types of electricity (such as hydroelectric power).  Water cools power plants.  Electricity is frequently used to get water to where it needs to go (such as pumping it uphill to a place like Tucson or uphill in the case of Israel’s National Water Carrier) and electricity is also needed to get water out of the ground in all but the most artesian wells.  So when you think about water, it’s best to also think about electricity.  So, where is the energy to come from to get this water out of the ground.  Well, it just so happens that oil was recently discovered in Turkana County as well.  How about that?!  Case closed.   Well, not really.  I don’t know enough about the water and energy management in Kenya, but they are often in the hands of different utilities and sometimes even different ministries, oftentimes at odd or in competition with one another.  I just raise the specter of a water-energy conflict without knowing enough to say that there is one or not.\

 

Whew.  These are just open questions to me, many of which can be solved.  But the news hasn’t reported on these satisfactorily, so I’ll keep digging and let you know what I find.