Siberia's Lake Baikal 'ideal source'
AT LEAST one Chinese researcher concerned about the country's shortage of water has argued that it need look no farther than Siberia for supplies.
Click on graphic to open PDF. -- Graphics: LEE CHEE CHEW
According to Dr Xin Xiangyang, who works for a think-tank advising the Beijing city government, Lake Baikal would be a good source.
Located in the Buryat Autonomous Republic and the Irkutsk region of Russia, it is the world's oldest and deepest lake.
Covering 31,500 sq km, or 46 times the size of Singapore, it holds 23,000 cubic km of water, or about one-fifth of the world's reserves of fresh surface water.
Scientists have estimated that water from Lake Baikal, which has an average depth of 730m, can satisfy the entire world's needs for 20 years.
Dr Xin has calculated that a pipeline delivering fresh water from the lake to China would be no longer than 2,000km - and would cost a lot less to build than the estimated US$2.5 billion (S$4.3 billion) required for the 2,400km oil pipeline which Beijing wants from Angarsk, also in Siberia, to Daqing in north-eastern China.
Although Beijing and Moscow have reached an initial agreement over the oil pipeline project, it now appears that Russia is dragging its feet, not least because Japan has come up with a competing, and more lucrative, offer.
'There are likely to be fewer complications in a water deal than one over oil,' says Dr Xin.
'After all, the water is there in the lake and Russia has no use for it.
'Russia has everything to gain and nothing to lose if it sells us the water.
'And given the foreign reserves we have, the project cost is going to be just a drop in the bucket.' -- Leslie Fong
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