Abstract
The supply of raw water to the inhabitants of metropolises is not a trivial problem, and involves many challenges, both in terms of the quantity and quality of this water. When these metropolises are located in semiarid regions, this challenge takes on enormous proportions, and in many situations, there are no sustainable solutions, especially in times of global climate change. One hypothesis to try to mitigate this problem in coastal cities is the underwater adduction of rivers. The objective of this paper was to make the abstraction of drinking water in the mouths of great rivers near semi-arid regions. This water would be led by a pipeline below the water level and would follow the route of the seacoast, where the energy to move the water would be supplied by an axial hydraulic pump embedded in the pipeline by water-cooled electric motors driven by the energy generated from offshore wind turbines. Estimates have been made for the four metropolises in semi-arid regions: Fortaleza-Brazil, Dalian-China, Tel Aviv-Israel, and Gaza-Palestine, where it was possible to calculate economic viability through the Present Worth Value, the internal rate of return, and payback. The results indicated that Fortaleza had economic viability under restrictions. Dalian proved the ideal result. Tel Aviv and Gaza both had great economic viability, but only if Egypt agreed to supply water from the Nile. This paper proved that the management of the water supply for human consumption through the underwater adduction of rivers could be achieved with real clearance for any deficits in the volume of water that due to global climate change are becoming more frequent.
Highlights
A major problem for human populations in semi-arid environments is the lack of water for domestic consumption
In trying to provide an innovative proposal, this paper proposed a solution to the water supply of cities in coastal semi-arid environments through the underwater adduction of rivers
Four metropolitan regions were chosen due to their location in semi-arid regions that suffer the negative effects of climate change, and because they have a population of several million people: Fortaleza, Brazil; Tel Aviv/Gaza, Israel/Palestine; and Dalian, China
Summary
A major problem for human populations in semi-arid environments is the lack of water for domestic consumption. The authors in [3] affirmed that 81 L per capita per day was sufficient for one non-agricultural economy that used water efficiently These volumes of water per person are very difficult to obtain in environments where the average annual rainfall is low (less than 800 mm), a value that characterizes the semi-arid environment [4]. This difficulty is even more important when considering that the rivers that exist in these environments are not permanent but go through periods without flow and the occurrence of a dry period has a probability greater than 60% [4]
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