Host: Antoine Walter
Guest: Olivier Narbey | Senior Business Development Manager - Water Network Performance | GF Piping Systems
Category: 🤖 Technology
Podcast’s Essential Bites:
[15:35] “There are huge amounts of water that are lost every year […]. The latest I had in mind was 126 trillion cubic meter of water loss per year. […] Some countries […] when they have water scarcity, they’re not trying to fix leaks. They don’t have time to fix leaks. […] They just go for new infrastructure. And I think over the past 30-40 years, this is what you see most of the time [with] especially large municipalities, […] as long as they have the cash to pay for this extra infrastructure, […] a desalination plant, a new plant, a new dam reservoir.”
[16:32] “What is at stake in terms of money […] is actually I think much more than 40 billion, […] because […] you have to commit to huge investment to satisfy the constancy of supply. Plus, add the urbanization wave that is going on in the large municipalities, add climate change on top of that, the water resources that you’re having today, like coastal aquifers […] get damaged by the rise of salinity and you can’t use them anymore. So, […] over the course of 10 years, you just lose 20-30% of your water resources. Take the city of Algiers, for instance, there’s a saline intrusion, partly due to overuse of the aquifer, but also linked to climate change. […] So the economic impact is absolutely.”
[19:56] “Algeria is a good example of the stress the big cities are under. 10 years ago […] they decided to go for additional desalination capacity, […] which greatly helped them to improve the quality of the service. And I think desalination plants in Algeria are […] one of the top ecosystems of desalination in the world, after Saudi maybe. They are operating this quite successfully, but at the same time, they feel the climate change impact quite harshly […] on the water reservoirs. […] This year is absolutely catastrophic for them. They didn’t have the rainy season in during the spring and they are not working with reservoirs and dams that are lower than 20% of their capacity. And they have to restrict water supply to most parts of the country or almost. […] In a normal year the desalination capacity should be that extra bit that you need from time to run the water supply system. At the moment they are the main source of supply for some of the cities.”
[23:36] “It’s not easy to improve a water system. There are many things you need to understand and consider. And I think the key thing you see in systems that [have a] poor performance is the limited knowledge people have of that system. And there can be many reasons [for] that. I would say wars have a terrible impact. […] The condition of the system itself, when the system was just designed in a way that it would basically corrode in 15 or 20 years, like it was the case in Armenia, it was all a system full of […] unprotected steel pipe. So […] you have thousands and thousands of kilometers of pipe that are leaking. So, the only solution is to replace the pipe. […] So, [considering replacing water infrastructure as] low-hanging fruit really doesn’t resonate with my experience.”
Rating: 💧💧
🎙️ Full Episode: Apple | Spotify
🕰️ 1 hr 6 min | 🗓️ 09/21/2021
✅ Time saved: 1 hr 4 min
