Investing in water

The upcoming water crisis, as well as promising developments in desalination technology, should attract major investors .

World water consumption is growing twice as fast as the population. One billion people on the planet today do not have access to drinking water, and by 2025 half of the world's population will experience a shortage of life-giving water.
96.5 percent is ocean water, which contains too much salt to be used for human consumption or agriculture. We are facing water shortages all over the world, and there are two possible solutions to the problem - water conservation and cost-effective seawater desalination.
More and more municipalities are setting themselves water conservation goals. Companies with breakthrough water-saving technologies have unlimited potential. Agriculture consumes 70 percent of the world's water. Many irrigated farms are making great strides in reducing irrigation water loss to evaporation. There is also great potential here for investors in innovative technologies for agricultural water use.
Meanwhile, the world is competing to find cost-effective methods of desalination. Today there are two costly methods of removing salt from seawater: distillation and reverse osmosis (seawater passes through membranes). It costs about $ 4 per 1,000 gallons to obtain drinking water by distillation and somewhat less by reverse osmosis. That's a lot more than we usually pay for water from traditional sources. Today, there are about 5,000 desalination plants worldwide with a capacity of 10-13 billion gallons of fresh water per day, or about 0.2 percent of global consumption. But that share will grow rapidly in the coming years. Saudi Arabia has a distillation desalination plant with a capacity of 250 million gallons of fresh water per day. It is an energy-intensive system, but Saudi Arabia has enough energy to use it.
Australia is another arid country in dire need of fresh water. The recent drought has exacerbated water problems. Australia has large desalination plants operating near Sydney and Perth. The country's nine major universities are vying for supremacy in creating cost-effective desalination methods. General Electric Corporation and other companies and agencies are getting involved in this competition as water shortages become widespread. In the coming years, freshwater scarcity could supplant concerns about the global energy supply. Smart investors should be on the lookout for breakthrough technologies in water conservation and desalination.

Based on foreign press for ForTrader.org