Coastal reservoirs – an Australian water storage option

Abstract

Besides dams, technologies such as desalination, wastewater recycling and rainwater tanks are being employed in urban water supplies. From the fact that Australian water consumption is only 5–6% of annual run-off – as it is worldwide – the coming shortage is not of water, but of storage. New dam sites are becoming increasingly difficult to find and develop on land surfaces, so a paradigm shift is suggested: water storage may be located in seawater environments. The first generation of coastal storages has been successfully constructed in China, Singapore, Hong Kong and Korea. Their water quality problems have been essentially overcome with the second generation of coastal reservoirs which bypass or select against poor quality floodwaters. At a concept level, coastal reservoir technology is compared with other urban water supply technologies.

Keywords:

• Urban water supply
• coastal reservoir
• inland dams
• water quality
• the triple bottom line