Bottled Water

We are in the middle of a bit of a stramash in New Zealand regarding bottled water.  Some folks are all a twitter (jealous?) of companies which are bottling this natural resource and selling it overseas.  I sort of see where the nay-sayers are coming from.  Bottling water is a license to print money.  What the complainers want to do is to put a price per liter on the water these companies use but this is the thin edge of the wedge.  If you charge these folks, why not other users such as industries and agriculture for their water use.  This would be a complete can of worms for an agricultural export country such as New Zealand.

Just to put things in perspective, New Zealand is not a desert.  We have some dryish places like the East Coast of South Island where I live but even here we have above 500mm per year. The West coast of South Island, is quite literally a temperate rain forest.

 

So let's first look at how much water  various industries use.  For bottled water each bottled liter uses 1.39liters of water, for soda, 2.02, for beer 4, for wine 4.74 and for hard liquor, 34.55 liters.  Note that this is only for the processing.  It doesn't include, for instance, the water needed to grow grapes or hops or the water to produce the bottles .  The table below gives some of the agricultural figures.

Typical values for the volume of water required to produce common foodstuffs

Click heading to sort table. Download this data

Foodstuff	Quantity	Water consumption, litres
Source: IME  Note that these figures are only for the production of the product, not for the processing.  Let's look at our primary, number one industry in New Zealand, the production of milk.  The over-all world estimate is just over 1000 liters of water to make a liter of milk   The whole calculation is fought with whichevers and whatevers.  Do you go as far as calculating the water needed to produce the oil that powers the tractor, or the water needed to produce the plastic or glass that the milk is packaged in and so forth. The 1000liter figure is just for the farm that produces the milk. However far you decide to go in the chain, it is a lot of water. New Zealand produces about 21.3billion liters of milk per year.  Using the above figure, she therefore uses about 21.3 trillion liters of water.  That is 21,300,000,000,000 liters of water.  If the bottled water industry produced the same amount of bottled water as the milk industry produces milk, she would use 1.39/1000 = 0.00139 as much water or 29.6 billion liters of water.  To put this into perspective one of our modest rivers, the Clarence, on the East coast (dry side of South Island) sends 50.5billion liters of water per year to the sea.  A little over half of this modest sized river would be enough to allow the sale of a volume of water equal to the volume of milk produced in New Zealand. Note that the dairy industry at present uses the equivalent of 421 Clarences to produce its milk ie, 842 times as much water as would be needed to produce the same volume of bottled water. Incidentally, we actually sent 9m liters of water overseas last year (2017) so the bottled water industries actually used 0.00025 of a Clarence (one Clarence equals 50b liters).  Lots of room for expansion before the amount of water taken for bottling becomes a significant drain on our wet little country.  Surly this water bottling has to be a more efficient use of our water, economically, than producing milk.  I'm not suggesting that we stop producing milk but surly in a country like New Zealand, we could locate a bottling plant, say, at  somewhere on the West Coast,  and bottle vast amounts of the best water in the world without even noticing that some had been removed.  West coast rivers are vastly larger than east coast rivers.  For that matter, the aquifers under the alluvial plains of Canterbury contain vast amounts of fabulous water. Think for a moment about the production of milk and wine.  You use expensive land, expensive equipment and expensive expertise.  For bottling water you need a factory with ultra filtration and UV sterilization situated beside a source of pure water.  Bottling water really is a license to print money. But as usual we are missing the important question. The important question is who owns our water bottling industries.  It is my understanding that at present, overseas companies bottle our water.  Surly in a technologically modern country such as New Zealand were we can totally own and run a massive dairy industry with all the technological challenges associated with such a perishable product, we can manage, run and finance our own water bottling operation.  We also finance, produce and market our own wine.  Surly we can market water.  How about if our pension funds, our iwi or our local governments finance the industry.  As I said, water bottling is a license to print money.  If our National pension funds owned the industry, in essence, water bottling would be owned by the people of New Zealand and contribute to our pensions which are under some pressure at present.  If our local governments owned the operation it would keep rates down.  If the pension fund owned the operation, we could completely shelve this current idea to raise the pension age if we really went after the bottled water market. If Christchurch Council owned the business we could fill in the gap in our finance left by rapacious insurance companies that fight paying compensation with every means available following the Chch earthquake. It is obvious that any foreign company worth the exorbitant salaries of it's  executives, and which has a license to sell one of our renewable products will do their best to make her profit overseas* and will  take the profit they earn in New Zealand overseas as well.  We allow this with our foreign banks which were reported last year to be taking one Billion dollars a month overseas.  Are we a little simple in the head, or do we lack confidence or are we just plain lazy. Are we going to allow big multi nationals to make money from our water. * One common dodge is to sell the water (or other resource) at a very low price to a subsidiary overseas.  The overseas subsidiary then ups the price and makes most of the profit in that country. We don't do our own banking, fish our own water, value add to our own logs, build our own rail stock and a mirad of other economic activity that should enrich the exchequer.  No wonder we don't have the money to pay our medical and education personnel. No, we must own our own water bottling industry and tax it as we would tax any other export business, no more and no less.  Absolutely no need to put a price on water.  The government could sweeten the deal by giving a percent of the tax from the industry to the local district where the water is extracted.  The revenue must stay in New Zealand and the taxes go to the exchequer.  With a hugely profitable business such as this, the contribution to the exchequer would be huge. Just a couple of days ago one of our economists on National radio was commenting on how much more valuable a dollar is when it is earned and spent in New Zealand than when it is earned and sent overseas.  Hardly rocket science. It might take some time to penetrate overseas markets if we went it alone but we did it with milk and we did it with wine.  Surly we can do it with water. Are we just being lazy, inviting foreign companies to do what we should be doing. Always follow the money. Who is benefiting from us having foreign companies bottle our water.  Who owns shares in these companies.  For that matter, who is benefiting from having foreign companies fish our waters, build our rail stock, buy our raw logs instead of finished wood products and so forth.  You fill in the gaps.  There are many other examples. Apropos, the head line in today's Press (Sat 25 March, 2017) is Can China save New Briton*.  Are we becoming some Micky Mouse third world country that can't look after her own  affairs for the benefit of her people. *A place in New Zealand threatened by sea level rise.
Chocolate	1 kg	17,196
Beef	1 kg	15,415
Sheep Meat	1 kg	10,412
Pork	1 kg	5,988
Butter	1 kg	5,553
Chicken meat	1 kg	4,325
Cheese	1 kg	3,178
Olives	1 kg	3,025
Rice	1 kg	2,497
Cotton	1 @ 250g	2,495
Pasta (dry)	1 kg	1,849
Bread	1 kg	1,608
Pizza	1 unit	1,239
Apple	1 kg	822

Interglacials, Phosphine and Diphosphane

As usual in my blogs, this theory is a bit of speculation; a hypothesis or if you like brainstorming so read it as such.  

First let's get the terminology right.  We are in the middle of an ice age which started some 2.5million years ago. It is called the pleistocene although some define the Plistocene as having started 1.8m years ago.   Within this ice age have been approximately 30 glacials and an equal number of interglacials.  At present we are in the Holocene interglacial and the previous one, centered about 125,000 years ago, was the Eemian (given different names by various scientists).  The Holocene Interglacial started about 20,000 years ago by definition, at the peak of the recent glacial but melting really got underway about 11,500 years ago.

Not to get too precious about this but we have to decide what words we are going to use for which periods. It is confusing to the layman and doesn't aid in informing the general public.  Above is the way I learned it but any terminology would be fine with me as long as we all agree on what we mean when we say 'ice age".  If the term Ice Age is to be used for the glaciation between the Eemian and the Holocene, then we have to have a new term for the 2.5m year period of warm and cold we have been experiencing.

What is problematic, is to explain is why Carbon dioxide rises steeply as the ice melts and oddly enough seems to follow the ice melting rather than leading it.  The most accepted theory today has to do with the ocean circulation powered by the production of heavy, cold salty water at both ends of the earth and the relationship between the temperature of the surface of the sea and the amount and speed it can take up Carbon dioxide (or release it) from/to the atmosphere.  The basic physics is pretty simple and undeniable.  Cold water can hold more Carbon dioxide than warmer water.  The chain of cause and effect after this is a tad more tenuous.

The following hypothesis in no way negates the ocean current/water-temperature theory.  It is just  suggesting another source of Carbon dioxide as the ice melts.

Regardless of the source, what seems to happen is that as the ice begins to melt, Carbon dioxide rises a little later and  the released Carbon dioxide then accelerates the melt etc. etc.

Previously, I  hypothesized that over the approximately 100,000 years that ice covered large parts of the continents, a huge amount of methane clathrate would have accumulated under the ice.  Methane clathrate forms when methane is in contact with water under a pressure equivalent to about 300m of water or more.  The cooler the temperature the less pressure is needed but under sufficient pressure a clathrate can exist even up to 30 degrees C.  This higher temperature clathrate is not really relevant to our discussion since the bottom of deep ice sheets tends to be around zero degrees C so clathrates will begin to form when the ice reaches, say 400m or so.  The extra depth is necessary since the top 70m or so of the ice tends to be firn (porous snow which is turning into ice due to the weight of snow above it) which is lighter that ice.  All above figures are approximate.

Incidentally, there is also a carbon dioxide clathrate so any Carbon dioxide coming out of the ground to meet the bottom of a deep glacier would likely form a clathrate as well.  The formula for Carbon dioxide clathrate is thought to be CO₂.6H₂O*

* In a Carbon dioxide saturated clathrate, there is a sixth of a mole (gram molecular weight) of Carbon dioxide for every mole of water.  So a mole of water (18g) could contain 7.3g of carbon dioxide(a sixth of 44g)  In a liter of saturated CO2 clathrate you would have 407g of CO2.  This is 9.26 moles of Carbon dioxide.  Since one mole of any gas occupies 22.4liters at STP, then one liter of methane clathrate at STP would release 207 liters of the gas if it disintegrated.  Pretty amazing, no? The formula for saturated methane hydrate is CH 4 · 5.7H 2O.  Work out what volume of methane could be released from one kg of water ice saturated methane  to form methane hydrate.

 
The source of the methane includes organic material buried by the ice, which when deprived of oxygen decays by methanogenesis.  Other sources are deposits of coal, oil, tar sands, natural gas and shales.  Since an accumulation of ice tends to push down the land  approximately a third of the height of the ice (ie a km of ice will depress the land a third of a km) a sort of natural fracking may occur.  In other words,  cracks could well be opened up which would release gas that had been capped by layers of impermeable rock. In addition there are methane seeps all around the world which would create clathrates under ice without any need to invoke the cracking of the earth under the weight of ice.

I'm not sure what the composition of "swamp gas" is but when you operate a biogas generator, the composition of the gas is approximately 70% methane and 30% Carbon dioxide.  If this is similar for organic material breaking down under an ice sheet then both CH₄ and CO₂ clathrate would accumulate.

I also hypothesized that since the ice at the height of a glacial would be pushing  into areas too warm for ice to form, it would only need a nudge from the Milankovitch cycle to start the melt.  If sufficient melting occurred then enough  methane would be released to produce a negative feed back and accelerate the process.  Hence the transition into an interglacial.

Note that the greater the ice sheet, the more unstable which may explain why every Milankovitch nudge didn't cause an interglacial in the latter half of the present ice age. Apparently it was necessary for the ice sheet to be really big and hence really unstable.

When I suggested the methane theory to a number of scientists, they assured me that such an outpouring of the very powerful greenhouse gas, methane, would appear in the ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica.  Further they said that there is no evidence that methane converts to Carbon dioxide within ice bubbles.  When the analysis was done and no methane signature was found.  I argued that methane has a half life of about 7 years and so would disappear rather rapidly and the Firn layer is some 70m deep and so gas exchange would occur through this layer, softening the edges of the signature.  I was assured that there still would be a methane signature and none was found.

So,,, what if the methane ignited as it was released from under the ice.  One could suggest lightening as an igniter but this seems rather unlikely and once the methane is sufficiently diluted in the air, it is no longer ignitable.  Methane will ignite when it is between 5 and 15 percent of the air.  Of course pure methane will ignite at the edges where it is mixing with the air, just like happens in your gas hob.   If it came out in sufficient quantities and with sufficient velocity, it would produce its own mini lightening and ignite but this too seems to be somewhat far fetched to explain the ignition of all this methane from all sources.

No, the methane, if it is ignited and thus is responsible for the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, it has to be ignited as it enters the air before it has been diluted too much to burn and it needs a source of ignition that it carries with it.

Then I remembered phosphine (PH₃)  It is also produced by the rotting of organic material in swamps along with diphosphane (P₂H₄).  Methane is the main component of swamp gas.  These two phosphorous compounds ignite on contact with the air and would ignite the methane.   This phenomenon is observed around the world in swampy areas. A common name for this in English is Will o' the Wisps.

From Wikipedia (Sorry, links don't work.  They work in the original article)
In modern science, it is generally accepted that most ignis fatuus are caused by the oxidation of phosphine (PH₃), diphosphane (P₂H₄), and methane (CH₄). These compounds, produced by organic decay, can cause photon emissions. Since phosphine and diphosphane mixtures spontaneously ignite on contact with the oxygen in air, only small quantities of it would be needed to ignite the much more abundant methane to create ephemeral fires.^[32] Furthermore, phosphine produces phosphorus pentoxide as a by-product, which forms phosphoric acid upon contact with water vapor. This might explain the "viscous moisture" described by Blesson.

All this is great but leaves a huge number of questions unanswered.  Since two ice sheets are in the process of disintegrating at present (West Antarctic and Greenland) we may see evidence for or against this hypothesis as the ice melts.

Questions:
1/ Are there indeed large amounts of methane (and Carbon dioxide) stored under the ice sheets as  clathrates.

2/ Do these deposits contain phosphine and diphosphane.

3/  Has anyone observed a  Methane coming from under an ice sheet, say, when a river appears from under the ice and which therefore exposes part of the bottom of the ice sheet to atmospheric pressure. (low pressure allows clathrates to break down)

4/  Has anyone ever observed the spontaneous ignition  of methane (other than above swamps where it regularly occurs).  Note that in daylight, a methane flame is almost invisible.

5/  If there is phosphine and diphosphane in such methane deposits, what happens to it as methane plumes rise through ocean water.  Is it scrubbed out or does it rise with the methane.  The composition of the gas from the ocean bottom as it leaves the water and enters the air could be quite different from an outpouring of gas on land. For instance, if a mixture of methane and Carbon dioxide bubbles were rising through a column of water, likely the Carbon dioxide would be scrubbed out.  It would, though, show up as a decreased alkalinity of the surrounding sea water.  I don't know what the relationship is between water and phosphine and diphospane.

To increase the credibility of the above hypothesis for the source of at least some of the carbon dioxide that is seen in the atmosphere as the ice sheets melt, we would have to see a similar phenomenon with the presently disintegrating ice sheets.