Australia is the driest continental landmass on earth. Right next door, the mountains of Papua New Guinea are some of the wettest places on the planet. Now the government in Port Moresby has decided to fund a plan to build a fresh water pipeline to connect them. More from Neal Conan in the Pacific News Minute.
Australian adventure tourism operator Fred Ariel told the Sydney Morning Herald that the idea came to him on a rafting trip in Papua New Guinea 25 years ago. "We know the supply is there," he said, "we know the demand is there. It's not rocket science to hook up point A to point B with a long hose."
A very long hose. Something like 1500 miles from the second highest mountain in Papua New Guinea, under the Torres Strait and on to the often parched farmland of central Queensland where Eight gigalitres of water would gush into the northern headwaters of the Murray-Darling River system daily. The pipeline would drive 6 hydroelectric plants along the way, and no pumps needed as gravity provides all the power.
If that sounds too good to be true, skeptics point out that pipes able to handle that much pressure don't yet exist, that the expenses of monitoring and maintenance on the pipeline could be huge and that no one's studied the ecological impact of the equivalent of 8,000 Olympic size swimming pools of water arriving every day into what's now a seasonal river.
This week, Papua New Guinea’s National Executive Council authorized a $6.5-million dollar feasibility study. Fred Ariel has asked a so far dubious Australian government to match that amount to map the route, calculate the value of the water and estimate infrastructure costs on a pipeline that might start to flow in 2020.
