According to the United Nation, by 2030, 47% of the world’s population will experience a considerable shortage of water. Access to pure drinking water is one of the major humanitarian issues that we are facing today and it will continue to be a pressing issue if measures are not taken to ensure that clean drinking water can be secured for the future. It has been found that there is a high probability that areas like South East Asia, Africa and the Middle East will suffer from a lack of drinking water by the second half of the 21st century.
However, at WETEX this year, Energy Review met with Vladimir Gonchar, one of the founders of ICETECH to discuss their latest innovation in solving one of the greatest issues of mankind. The company is set to transform the way in which we store and create clean drinking water.
ICETECH, a company that comes under the cluster of companies owned by Business Russia, provides a unique solution and technology to create icebergs through which fresh water could be transported to countries in need of it and all this is done through a single logistic facility.
Provide us with some background into ICETECH and the company’s mission?
We are basically creating artificial icebergs through a technological complex. It involves an artificial refrigeration method which is essentially natural for us in some of the Earth’s coldest regions.
We have invented a special polymeric membrane, so-called iceberg’s endoskeleton, which serves two purposes. The first purpose is to make the iceberg solid, ensuring that it will not break during a storm or while it is being transported to the region in need of it while the second purpose is the logistics technology which enables us to carry this out. One large logistics facility of pure water allows to supply over 125 million adults or almost 158 million children with clean drinking water for three months at a time.
The main goal of the technology, and our mission, is to bring pure drinking water to the people who do not have access to it, wherever they might be in the world, to solve one of humanity’s most significant problems.
The United Nations have found that in ten to fifteen years, water will be the main resource on earth and the regions without it will be at a serious risk of death thus we are happy to have invented this unique technology so that we can solve this issue in advance.
Could you tell us, more specifically, about how this works? How do you go about creating the iceberg?
First, we make the polymeric membrane, we put it somewhere in a very cold region, we take river water and filter it, and then we make it layer by layer through freezing it with the help of natural frost.
Once the iceberg is complete, we attach it to a ship and deliver to the area where the water is needed. This polymeric membrane ensures the ice will not melt very fast. It can lose only 10 percent maximum of its volume.
This project is absolutely eco-friendly, it does not pose any adverse consequences on the environment.
Which regions have you focused your work on so far?
In the Asia Pacific region, we have been working with Indonesia and China for the past two years and have all the calculations for the Asian region as well as Russian Far-East.
In fact, this is our first time in Dubai and the purpose of our presence here at WETEX is to expand our network and our recognizability in order to make new contacts and create partnerships to spread this technology all over the world.
We don’t only want to solve the problems of Asia, we want to use this technology to solve the problems of the world. We aim to locate our factories not only in Russian Far-East, but also in Northern Europe.
We have the proposals for potential partners and we have recently decided that we are going to sell 40 percent of our company to an investor for $10 million.
