Greenland Warms to a Glacier Water Proposal

To say that Jacob Evar could sell ice to Eskimos is not flattery of his salesmanship but a serious business proposal.

The Iraqi-born businessman, whose empire already encompasses everything from pita bread to a multicultural retirement village in France, has embarked on a campaign to capture Greenland’s melting glacier water and sell it for domestic and foreign consumption.

Evar and other backers of the Greenland Water Production company that currently is more concept than reality point out that 20% of the world’s drinking water reserves are encased in the icecap that covers 85% of the world’s largest island.

Even if only 5% of the fresh ice that forms each year were melted and poured into containers, the company could produce 132 million gallons of drinking water each year and rack up sales of $200 million, Evar predicted.

“It’s the purest water in the world because there has never been industry or animals here, so there’s no organic material that can put bacteria into the water,” the Copenhagen entrepreneur said. “Unlike other bottled water, Greenland water would never spoil.”

Worldwide sales of bottled water amounted to nearly $36 billion in 53 countries in 1998, the last year for which the Euromonitor statistical agency has figures. For the last five years, sales have grown at a steady 10% annually, and water now commands a higher price by volume than gasoline in North America, Evar noted.

Last month, he and former Danish Interior Minister Thorkild Simonsen brought their proposal to Greenland’s home-rule government in the capital, Nuuk, and to investors meeting at this air travel hub that serves as a business crossroads. Evar reported that the project, which initiators say needs both government guarantees and private financing to get started, drew “very, very positive interest” among the authorities who administer this territory, which is 50 times the size of the Danish mainland but home to a mere 56,000 people.

Greenland depends on annual subsidies from Copenhagen of about $350 million. If the ice-melting project becomes a reality, the shareholder returns plus income from expanded shipping and 90 new jobs planned at a Nuuk bottling plant could go a long way toward making Greenland more economically independent.

The water project also would create diversity in Greenland’s export profile, which is focused almost exclusively on shrimp and other seafood products.

Evar, along with two Greenlanders and a Dane, wants Home Rule Prime Minister Jonathan Motzfeldt to approve a two-tiered arrangement for ownership and management of the product--already named Greenland Water--that is aimed at competing with government-owned bottlers in Norway, Iceland and Canada.

Greenlanders would retain full ownership of the resource through the sale of shares in Greenland Water to the government, while the entrepreneurs would be guaranteed exclusive sales and distribution rights for at least 25 years in exchange for bearing the brunt of the project’s estimated $40-million start-up costs.

The entrepreneurs propose to build an elevated pipeline from a glacier field 13 miles from Nuuk to carry water that either melts naturally as a result of global warming or gets a helping hand from heaters. The pipeline effluent would be filtered for clarity and put into plastic containers without ever being exposed to the plant atmosphere or human hands, Evar said.

Under the proposal, the 13,000 residents of Nuuk also would be provided with Greenland Water for drinking--eliminating the need for fishermen to hack off chunks of icebergs in the harbor and tow them home to be melted.

The home-rule government and holding companies in which the state has the dominant share own most of what little industry exists in Greenland, where the unemployment rate is 10%. The dearth of private enterprise stems from a constitutional guarantee that Greenland’s natural resources--be they fish, minerals or the ubiquitous ice--belong to the indigenous people and that any sale or exploitation should benefit each Greenlander equally.

The wheels of government turn slowly in Greenland, where smaller-scale proposals for making drinking water from the icecap have come and gone over the last 20 years. The Greenland Water idea has been met with the patience and lassitude traditional in a culture accustomed to long reflection amid 10-month winters, but it has moved farther and faster toward a government go-ahead than any of the previous proposals.

“There’s been no decision on this yet. We’re still looking into its consequences for the economy as well as the environment,” said Per Berthelsen, deputy mayor of Nuuk and head of the Greenland Financial Council that ultimately will decide the merits of the Greenland Water project.

But Motzfeldt, who has sought to wrest Greenland from its dependence on Danish subsidies and enhance the protectorate’s political autonomy, was intrigued by the broad scope and preparation of the latest plan to exploit Greenland’s most abundant resource, said home-rule spokeswoman Susan Frydendahl.

“The prime minister believes that this is a resource that can be exploited without damage to the environment, although there will have to be lab tests and other investigations,” Frydendahl said.

Hydrology specialists will be called in to evaluate the environmental consequences, she said. “But we don’t know of any negative influences, and global warming is going to melt some of the inland ice anyway,” she added, noting that the collection and bottling of the water might actually help, to a small degree, reduce the expected rise in sea levels over the next century.

The casual nature of the governing structures here complicates any prediction about timing, but Frydendahl said she could envision the certification and licensing procedures being completed within a year.

Evar said he expects to have his papers in order, his financing secured and his bottling plant and pipeline built and ready to handle production within two years. And then, he asserted, “drinking water will be one of the most important sources of income in Greenland.”