FENNER CONFERENCE ON THE ENVIRONMENT
The knowledge-base on Australia’s climate and water: How good is it, what do we know, and what do we need to know?
Dr Roger Jones
Roger Jones is Principal Research Scientist with CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research. He joined CSIRO in 1996 to develop and implement methods for assessing the risks of climate change. These methods have been used in Australia and overseas and have contributed to the National Climate Change Adaptation Framework, the United Nations Development Program Adaptation Policy Frameworks, and are being used by researchers in a number of countries. He is a convening Lead Author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Working Group II Fourth Assessment Report Chapter on New methods and characterisation of the future. He recently contributed to the CSIRO report to the Australian Greenhouse Office and National Water Commission on Climate change and Australian water resources. Dr Jones has a BSc (Hons) in Earth Sciences, a PhD in palaeoclimate studies and has published over 100 papers, book chapters and reports.
I couldn't have asked for a better warm-up act than Sam Austin's. For Yarra Valley we could transplant Perth, except that mostly we could reuse the water all year round, because we have got deep sandy soils.
I would like to acknowledge my co-authors. David Luketina is Manager Environment, which is a suffering-post that I used to hold, and Paul Ferguson has just recently been promoted but at the time this was prepared he was our Manager of Infrastructure Planning.
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Basically, I am going to tell you how water utilities apply science to their business and from Sam Austin's talk you can see that there is a lot of it. Obviously, we depend on the work of demographers, as we have already seen in this meeting. Demand planning is vital, and we have to stay ahead of the demand. We are in a pull situation, as Darryl Low Choy said in his talk.
There is a lot of very advanced fluid dynamics science applied to the modelling of behaviours of fluids in pipe networks. If you are, for example, releasing water from an elevated reservoir down onto a plain environment, you have to make sure that the force of that water doesn't blow the pipes out of the ground or cause other catastrophes. So there is a lot of work involved in understanding the energetics and controlling those flows properly.
There is an enormous amount of science in process control. The treatment of water for potable purposes, and in fact recycling and wastewater treatment are all increasingly high-technology systems. We are in some cases capturing biology sewage treatment is quite like brewing beer or making yoghurt, in that we are actually containing microbial populations to deliver reduction in nitrogen, phosphorus, metals and other things that come in wastewater. There is an increasing use of membranes for all sorts of purposes, both in potable and in wastewater areas, and so on.
Also, we have to understand the dispersion and impacts of both the gaseous and liquid emissions from our businesses. Obviously, odour is a significant problem from the wastewater side of the business, both in sewers sewage actually decomposes as it travels through long pipe networks, and hotter environments are worse than cooler ones and also because there are treatment plant gases and potentially the problem of annoying the neighbours. Sometimes water treatment can also give odours that people will complain about, particularly in Perth, where we use a lot of groundwater. We have natural sulphides in the groundwater which can give quite nasty hydrogen sulphide smells.
Life in the water business is always interesting. Things go wrong all of the time. For example, the recent Canberra fires have given ACTEW an enormous problem in terms of managing the catchments of the Cotter and Corin dams, where sediment, ash and all sorts of other things suddenly went into very high-quality water supplies. That suddenly gives the water utility enormous treatment problems that need to be analysed and the correct solution to them worked through.
So there is a lot of science in our business.
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This is a demand graph for Perth, showing you what we are doing at present. Perth is currently, in my view, the unfortunate recipient of an enormous economic boom relating to minerals and gas extraction, which is driving our population growth well above the national average. Like south-east Queensland we are getting very large losses of coastal plain woodland and bush, that being substituted with fairly poorly planned, poorly water- and energy-efficient 'red brick fungus' that is my term for it. That is putting a lot of stress on the Water Corporation, as it does any water utility or any water provider, as this demand grows to almost microbial proportions.
Basically, as you have already seen from the Western Australian graph, we have got a very severe environmental water deficit, and that creates all sorts of suggestions for how we should manage it. The seawater desalination plant in Perth is now commissioned and nearly at full operation, and the science we applied to the predictions of the effects of the returned brine and so on is turning out to be substantiated.
The big blue bar at the top of the graph relates to our proposed additional 45 GL of water per year from the south-west Yarragadee aquifer. It is a huge aquifer which runs roughly from Geraldton to Augusta, for those of you who know the south-west of Western Australia. The water must be moved about 250 km to Perth, so it is energy-intensive, and because of our own in my view mismanagement of the social issues, we have created a water war where the local people feel as though any removal of water from their region will be blighting their own futures. So this sort of high-demand, high-growth situation drives a lot of things.
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Here is the famous water availability graph, slightly updated. You can see that last year was just slightly better than 1911, which was the driest, or the lowest run-off, year on record. I just make the technical comment that we really must, at a national level, understand the relationships between changing rainfall patterns and what I would call effective rainfall, which is the water that ends up in our aquifers or surface waters. I think the Bureau of Meteorology has been given that job just recently by the new Commonwealth Minister for Environment and Water, but the linkages between rainfall and run-off and recharge are non-linear and extremely complex, and are critically dependent, for example, on the relationship with the progression of fronts in the south-west. If fronts and rain happen every three to four days, we get consistent run-off and recharge, but if the same fronts just expand to about seven- to nine-day intervals, catchments dry out and we start getting no run-off again. And you can get the same total of rain in a year and about half the run-off, depending on whether you are getting three- to four-day or seven- to nine-day fronts.
This is the context within which the Water Corporation in Western Australia, which is effectively a state-wide utility, has to operate in a very high-growth situation.
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One of the heroic suggestions for drought-proofing Perth was to bring water from the Kimberley. I wanted to use this as a case study for explaining the limits of science and how they get inserted into public debate.
This is the third review, to my knowledge, of water from the Kimberley it has been done twice before and has sunk without trace, simply on economic grounds. That has had absolutely no effect on public opinion. This particular review was put in place by a colleague of mine, Jos Mensink, when he was the Director of State Water Strategy in the Premier's Office, and unfortunately it got caught by the previous state election. The people on the review panel are eminent in various aspects of relevant science and economics.
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The options that were looked at in detail were to use ocean transport routes, using super tankers from the Kimberley, either the Ord or the Fitzroy (the Fitzroy is to the west, the Ord is to the north), or using heavy-duty towing to take bags of water, which would float because they are lighter than sea water I will show you some pictures of these in a moment or to use various combinations of canal or pipeline routes. Pipelines have been analysed before.
The distances are enormous. From Perth to the Fitzroy is about 3000 km, and it is even further if the water has to come from the Ord, because the Fitzroy is about 800 km east-west separated from the Ord.
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These are the concept sketches of the channels. This whole analysis, or re-analysis, was generated by the company Tenix (a major engineering company in Australia with interests in defence and all sorts of other technology) proposing that they could build a canal from the Fitzroy to Perth to deliver 250 GL of water a year for about $2 billion. The then opposition leader, Colin Barnett, took that to heart and basically said, uncritically, 'We're going to build it.' That gave the government quite a problem, particularly in the milieu of an election, so the Kimberley review panel was established.
Gutteridge, Haskins & Davies and Clough Engineering were asked to review the Tenix proposal, and these other options I have just outlined, and to treat them as if they were real projects that were going to be built. They were not asked to find fatal flaws but to design them as if they were going to be operated in a competent, reliable, safe way. That is a big difference. It is quite easy for an engineering critique to find all sorts of wrinkles with such a project.
One thing I will point out is that in Tenix's proposal, this several-thousand-kilometre-long canal would not have had any check structures in it, any methods by which the water flow could be stopped. That is a fundamental design flaw, which was dealt with, but if you think about it, if you have got 250 million tonnes of water flowing towards you and something happens for example, the canal develops a leak or there is an earthquake or other natural events you really have to be able to isolate that flow of water within a limited distance, dry out the canal and do something about the problem. And exactly the same philosophy applies to pipelines.
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This shows the sort of pipeline that you would have, except that there would probably be three in parallel. These are 1.4-metre-diameter pipes, which are the common trunk mains used by the Australian water industry. Last time I looked, they were about $10,000 a length, for one 10-metre length. So the costs of piping are very high in capital terms.
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Super tankers are ships capable of carrying hundreds of thousands of tonnes of liquids, and obviously they can be customised for potable water. In fact, I understand that Bob Hawke, one of our previous Prime Ministers, is involved in a company wanting to do that from Tasmania.
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Water bags are basically just large membranes which can be towed. They exist and are used.
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Greece has water problems very similar to ours, and what you see here is a water bag actually being towed, with visual markers so people don't run across the top of it, through the port of Piraeus.
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The main findings of this rigorous analysis were, firstly, that the lowest cost of bringing water was $6.70 per kilolitre. That compares with the average retail price of water in Perth being about 70c, if you take the cost of connection into account. The new desalination plant's water is costing the Water Corporation about $1.16, and the highest cost was $20 a kilolitre via the canal.
A previous minister in Western Australia had the vision of 'greening the desert' on the way down. Agriculture pays between 3c and 50c a kilolitre for water. So if you just do your sums you would find a navel orange would cost about $20 per fruit with water at $20 a kilolitre.
The other potential source is for the integrated water supply scheme. Southern Western Australia has a highly networked scheme with a lot of redundancy, so basically all of our dams and groundwater sources are interlinked and we can move water at a cost anywhere, through Greater Perth to the Goldfields and all through the Great Southern. In fact, it is the longest pipe network into rural areas in the world. But we are talking about competing options being about 80c to $1.20, and I think we are quite rapidly approaching $1.50 as a benchmark price for new water.
While 200 GL per year could be provided for about $5, it would require mothballing of large parts of the existing water infrastructure. So there would be, effectively, a cost of stranded assets. To make water from this distance feasible, we would need to use all of it and probably abandon local sources.
The average household bill would increase by between 100 and 400 per cent.
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The pipeline or canal water is 100 to 200 times more expensive than irrigation water and so greening the desert with that water would not happen. The costs would have to be reduced by 80 per cent to make it competitive, and that is highly unlikely.
With the new membrane technologies involving reverse osmosis, local capture and recycling can be done, either with sea water or with treatment and reclamation of wastewater.
There is the issue of reliability. The Water Corporation recently has abandoned two proposals for taking water from dams, simply because the reliability of environmental supply into those dams is now so suspect. In fact, the past hydrological record is useless in terms of predicting the future at this stage, because we are clearly in transition in terms of climate, and nobody knows where it is going to go. I'll be delighted if it gets wetter again, but a water utility can't afford to be wrong.
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There would be enormous social unrest from damming the Fitzroy it is an area of major Aboriginal cultural significance and there is an increasing body of science for northern Australia. This issue was discussed at the Northern Australian Water Use Summit last December, to say that virtually all the water in northern Australia is valuable environmentally and culturally, and it isn't wasted. So although there may be a southern perception of a surplus, that is not the view of the people who live in northern Australia.
The current renewable energy technology would not be adequate. Water from the Kimberley would require about 600 MW of power. The Water Corporation currently uses about 55 MW, so the energy use would be enormous, about a 10-fold increase above current levels.
And the environmental and other risks with the canal, quite frankly, are enormous. The report concentrated on the economics, but quite a lot of environmental analysis was also done. For one thing, the canal was supposed to be lined, covered with a Colorbond type roof, to reduce evaporation and prevent wildlife from falling in. But the investigation team interviewed some local pastoralists, who said that if camels or scrub cattle smell water when they are thirsty, there's no fence you can build that will keep them out and a Colorbond roof won't sustain the weight of a camel. These are genuine practicalities.
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The other issue that the Tenix proposal didn't consider was that the Fitzroy is an absolutely mighty river. On the left here is what it looks like most of the time if you drive to the Kimberley this is the bridge at Willare. The Fitzroy has a peak discharge similar to that of the Amazon. It doesn't happen very often, but when it does, the amount of water is mildly embarrassing. At the right you see the same bridge. I don't know how you would protect a canal from that sort of event. The water there was about 20 m deep in the middle of the bridge, and this flood was well over 20 km wide. In fact, this bridge failed two years after it was commissioned at a cost of $80 million, because the flood frequency and intensity data for the Fitzroy were so poor. So basically our Main Roads Department spent $80 million, only to watch it wash away two years after the bridge was opened.
And there are large rivers with this sort of behaviour all the way down from the Kimberley into the Pilbara.
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I will briefly touch on why this is such an important issue not just for the water industry but for all applications of science. Extreme application of the precautionary principle causes great difficulty. There is a huge embedded lack of comprehension, and in fact belief in magic, by many people in the community using horoscopes and similar things. There is a very uninformed and formulaic approach by the media to complex issues. When Perth got into trouble with water supply, the Water Corporation endured about 6½ years of continual criticism that we had no planning in place or that planning had failed. This criticism has now stopped, but we didn't get an apology!
The trouble is that the combination of these factors leads to polarised, completely fruitless debates, and climate change is a very good case in point and the water consequences of climate change are a subset of that.
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These are some of the headlines that appeared during the last state election on the Kimberley canal proposal.
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There are some serious consequences from all of this. We need to be much better in how we deal with them, to make certain we get the best policy and application of good science to outcomes.
Distorted perceptions of risk: for a water company, if there is a genuine requirement for more supply, the issue doesn't just go away. It can be delayed, but all that happens is that several years may go past because of political upheaval and then when the new facility is built it will cost the community more because of inflation and other problems.
All water companies in Australia are suffering the problem of excessive expenditure by overtreating wastewater, for example, because of the regulatory assumption that less nitrogen and phosphorus in treated wastewater is better. If you are going to high levels of secondary treatment there is a very large energy and chemical use penalty, possibly for little or no environmental benefit.
Approval processes are highly politicised and often dominated by minorities.
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Every urban area in Australia is now very, very short of space, so finding somewhere for, as Sam Austin was saying, a lake larger than Albert Park Lake is not a trivial problem.
There is also a lot of baseless fear. The Toowoomba debate was a good case in point, where there were completely inaccurate things being said: that it would feminise males, and so on.
There is also widespread public enthusiasm for demonstrably poor options.
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I will illustrate that last point with the Western Australian newspaper poll in February this year, showing that despite all of the economics and science I have just told you about, water from the Kimberley is still the second most popular option. So the economics and science have had absolutely no traction in terms of changing people's minds.
Discussion
Question: I wonder if you could elaborate on what you mean by extreme application of the precautionary principle.
Bob Humphries: Yes. The best case I can think of is the new desalination plant for Perth, in Cockburn Sound. Cockburn Sound is a fairly poorly flushed embayment but there was absolutely rigorous state-of-the-art modelling done on the dispersion of the brine for that. And, quite frankly, getting the brine properly dispersed is simply a matter of good engineering. You can calculate to very high levels of precision what the dilution rates and the mixing regime will be for brine returned into any water body. That has led to probably about $2 million worth of monitoring, with in situ things, and the most onerous regulatory regime on that plant, basically with a trigger of bottom oxygen levels in the Sound which would shut the plant down for about 40 per cent of the year. Yet those oxygen levels occur naturally, on a recurrent cycle. So that is what I mean. Because it was politicised and because of various people in the regulatory agencies, they were not even looking at the background behaviour of the Sound and then addressing any possible induced effect in a rational, rigorous way.
It is not in the Water Corporation's interests to be wrong about the deoxygenating of Cockburn Sound. We know very well that the cost in terms of humiliation and other things would be very great. That is the best recent case I can think of.
