In Tanzania, amidst a serious water crisis, a geological exploration decided to use seismic information to find drinking water. In other words, they turned to the data held by oil companies to locate the subterranean resource.
Fridtjov Ruden, one of the hydrogeologists behind the project, had an unorthodox idea that turned out to be a success.
Instead of blindly drilling or assessing only the surface layer of the earth, he relied on the wealth of geological data from the oil industry to pinpoint where freshwater could be stored underground.
Seismic Information: A Radiograph of the Earth
After months of unsuccessful drilling, the seismic information, a kind of radiograph of the Earth, revealed that freshwater was very close. They just had to dig a little deeper than they had been searching.
Ruden pushed his team to drill three new wells, each 600 meters deep. This time, the water gushed out abundantly.
“Everyone got excited because it was the discovery of an aquifer that no one knew existed,” says EuropaPress to Elizabeth Quiroga Jordan, a petroleum engineer at Ruden AS.
It is the company that the geologist founded with his daughter Helene Ree four years later.
The aquifer turned out to be sufficient to supply water to two million people for over a century. This crucial discovery shows a solution that could drastically reduce the cost of solving Africa’s most atrocious problem: lack of clean water.
Water Scarcity in Africa
Water scarcity is an insidious problem that affects 1.34 billion people across Africa, approximately two-thirds of the population, triggering a cascade of consequences.
Residents of water-scarce countries are not only more exposed to deadly diseases and higher levels of poverty, but also face a higher risk of conflicts and forced displacement.
The climatic pattern of El Niño, which started globally in July 2023, led to a severe precipitation deficit across the region, with temperatures five degrees above average.
The Challenging Task of Persuading Oil Companies
Despite this significant discovery, according to Abbe Brown, a professor of intellectual property specializing in the energy sector at the University of Aberdeen, persuading oil and gas companies is not an easy task.
Sharing their seismic data remains a legal tactic. “It is quite rare for a country to mandate sharing information nationally and internationally,” Brown states.
Nevertheless, there are signs of progress in some places. Countries like the UK and Canada, through regulatory bodies, have recently pressed for making this data more accessible, reducing the time until it becomes public, as explained.
However, these efforts quickly encountered a barrage of litigation and legal obstacles, exposing the future challenges that companies like Ruden AS could face.
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