Spragg Bag
Encyclopedia
A flexible barge is a fabric barge (non-rigid) for the transportation of bulk fresh water
or other liquid bulk items (i.e. chemicals, oil, etc.).
invented in 1956 and another simililar type is called the Spragg Bag invented in the 1980s.
Terry Spragg of Manhattan Beach, California
, builds flexible fabric barges for the transportation of bulk fresh water and is the reason why his product is referred to as the "Spragg Bag." In the 1970s Spragg was a promoter of icebergs as a large source of fresh water, but soon realized this was impractical. He then put his skills into developing the waterbag technology starting in the 1980s. Spragg has worked on and perfected this over the last twenty years with his associates. The first field test of his waterbag was in December 1990. The waterbag was 75 meters long (245 feet) and it contained approximately 3000 cubic metres (792,516.1 US gal) of fresh water. It was towed from the Port Angeles harbor in the state of Washington. Another test was done in 1996 with a 100 miles (160.9 km) voyage from Port Angeles to Seattle, Washington
. Spragg says that his next goal is to run another test voyage demonstration between Northern and Southern California and a demonstration of the waterbag technology in the Middle East as well as around the world. There are various reasons why it has been difficult to gain support for demonstrating the viability of waterbag technology in California and around the world. Spragg claims when two waterbags pass underneath the Golden Gate Bridge for the first time in history the media will let the whole world know about it. A novel, Water, War, and Peace, has been completed that details the solutions waterbag technology offers to the complex political problems surrounding water issues throughout the Middle East, the United States, and the world.
material. The main body portion of a flexible fabric barge fle is cylindrical in shape. The barge can be used by itself or as several connected flexible fabric barges that can be towed through the open ocean under extreme conditions. The patents further explain that the goal of Spragg's inventions are a practical water delivery system of fresh drinkable water that could be delivered to dry regions worldwide that have a shortage of potable water.
One of the flexible fabric barge concepts aims at an economical delivery system for fresh water that would be considerably cheaper than desalination plants, rigid ship
s, tanker trucks
, conventional barge
s, aqueduct
s or pipeline transport
. Waterbags are more economical and better for the environment than desalination of the seas and oceans.
The flexible fabric barge is a plastic container that is buoyant. It can be linked together with an attachment system to other flexible fabric barges to make a "train." The "waterbags", which are sometimes referred to as balloons or bladders, are made up of a vinyl lining inside a stronger material net. It is a type of "fabric water pipeline" when several are strung together for transport of liquids by tugboat through seas or open oceans to remote locations.
s in a "train" fashion to increase the amount of liquids delivered at a time. It is estimated that the flexible badges could be as large as 14 meters in diameter and 150 meters in length, holding up to 17,000 cubic meters of fresh water or any other transportable liquid. Theoretically as many as 50 to 60 "waterbags" could be connected to one another and towed, although such a test has not been done to date. Engineers suggest that the fabric badge can hold a "train" of 4500000 gallons (17,034.4 m³) of liquids.
A zipper coupler system is 10 times stronger than what is pulled by a 4,300 hp tug. Laborde Marine estimates a 4,300 horsepower tug with a bollard pull
of 110,000 pounds can pull a "train" of fifty or so flexible barges weighing up to 1,300,000 tons. The "train" speed would be about 3 knots. This is over 700 acre.ft of fresh water or other liquid per trip.
is lighter than seawater
the filled "bladders" (as they are sometimes referred to) float on top, similarly to iceberg
s, with little above the surface and most below the surface. Fresh water can be taken from rivers just before it discharges into salty seas or oceans, which then would not interfere with salmon spawning
.
The associated coupler and zipper patent describes that to be economically feasible there should be several such flexible barges towed at one time. The greater the volume of water that can be delivered per trip, the better the economics. This string of barges would typically consist of barges in size from 25 to 50 feet (15.2 m) in diameter and 200 to 800 feet (243.8 m) in length each. The unique characteristic of the Spragg Bag system is not the large volume of water in each bag, but what is called the world's strongest zipper that allows connection of several bags together in long trains. The large connecting zipper can be operated manually or by remote control with radio signals. The string of such flexible fabric "waterbags" may be coupled to a barge via a reinforced fabric nose cone where a tow line is attached. Each "waterbag" is generally filled to 90% capacity and is flat across its top.
district and solution to the shortage of fresh water in the area. He reports that the average family of four uses one acre-foot of water a year. This costs over $1000 for delivery using conventional methods, however this same amount of water delivered by Spragg Bags would cost about 30% less. Another newspaper reporter explains that towing Spragg Waterbags is environmentally friendly and is more economical than carrying water in ships or water tanker trucks or even using conventional rigid pipelines. An article in the July issue of ECONOMIST Magazine in 2008 explains that worldwide there is enough water for all, however most is often in the wrong place at the wrong time and it is just too expensive to transport.
Waterbag technology offers an easy and inexpensive solution to the problem of today's expensive conventional water transportation. It eliminates the difficulty of transporting water long distances by using the ocean as the means of transport. Waterbags considerably lower the capital costs and operating costs of moving fresh water from place to place. If a train was able to only move one or two box cars at a time, rather than in a train of dozens of boxcars at a time, it would not be very efficient and extremely expensive. Linking waterbags into "trains" of strings of waterbags and moving them through the ocean increases the economics of water transportation making it a viable practical option.
The cost to transport water 300 to 800 miles (1,287.5 km) through the ocean, based on deliveries of 5000000 USgal/d to 10000000 USgal/d, is estimated to be between $350 to $450 per acre foot, depending on the length of the voyage and the amount of water delivered per trip. Increasing the amount of water delivered per day in each waterbag train will help to significantly reduce the cost of the water delivered. Once the reliability of the waterbag delivery system has proven its economics and reliability it will just be a matter of adding more waterbags to the trains, and more trains to the system in order to increase the amount of water delivered to selected locations, while also reducing the cost of the water delivered. Based on the increasing reliability of the waterbag delivery system over time, it should be possible to be able to economically deliver 100,000’s of acre feet per year to many coastal locations around the world.
According to the inventor of the Spragg bag, the total cost of delivering fresh water down the California coast by his waterbag technology for a distance of 800 miles (1,287.5 km) from British Columbia to Monterey
would cost about $966 per acre-foot per year. Keith Spain in a study for a Master Of Arts then shows in an analysis that it would save the residents of the Monterey Peninsula
some $1,134 per-acre foot otherwise using a desalination plant. This is a savings of over $19 million per year for the Monterey taxpayers. This number assumes a usage of approximately 17000 acre.ft per year (17,000 X $1,134 = $19,278,000 savings).
coast.
Another application is the delivery of fresh water from the state of Washington to dry regions of Southern California. He has also proposed delivering water from Mad River
in Northern California to the San Francisco area. Other applications are that it:
Spragg has proposed to deliver water from the Manavgat River
in Turkey across the Mediterranean Sea
to Israel and the Gaza Strip, which has an extreme shortage of water, which presently is being reviewed by the World Bank
.
Spragg has proposed to the Australian government that bulk fresh drinking water using his waterbag technology could be applied to urban water supplies that have a shortage. It would establish an economically sound new industry for bulk fresh water transport. An analysis of the economic and environmental advantages for waterbag technology by using the ocean currents from the Tully River to Brisbane, Queensland has been completed.
On the Gold Coast the Tungen desalination plant is being built to supply 120 megaliters of drinking water daily at a cost of approximately $1.2 billion. Operation of the Tungen desalination plant will produce 235,000 tons of CO2 greenhouse gases
annually. Preliminary cost estimates indicate that using waterbag technology to deliver the same amount of water from the Tully river to the Gold Coast may be 30 times less expensive than desalination, and that waterbag technology may emit 60 times less greenhouse gas. These figures suggest that waterbag technology would deliver water for much less cost than the proposed pipeline from the Burdekin River to Brisbane which is projected to cost approximately $7.5 billion for infrastructure and about $250 million for annual operation.
Spragg has proposed to the White House the idea of a peace offering in the Middle East by supplying 20 to 30 of his waterbags with fresh water and transport them from Turkey to the Palestinians and Israelis. The technology could also be used for the collection of Australia’s factory waste water outputs, storm water, and sewerage for processing and reuse.
Bulk cargo
Bulk cargo is commodity cargo that is transported unpackaged in large quantities. This cargo is usually dropped or poured, with a spout or shovel bucket, as a liquid or as a mass of relatively small solids , into a bulk carrier ship's hold, railroad car, or tanker truck/trailer/semi-trailer body...
or other liquid bulk items (i.e. chemicals, oil, etc.).
History
One such barge is called the Dracone BargeDracone Barge
A Dracone Barge is a large flexible watertight tube intended to carry a liquid cargo while towed mostly-submerged behind a ship. One large current example of the type has a capacity of 935 cubic metres while weighing only 6.5 tonnes empty.The Dracone Barge was invented in 1956 by Professor William...
invented in 1956 and another simililar type is called the Spragg Bag invented in the 1980s.
Terry Spragg of Manhattan Beach, California
Manhattan Beach, California
Manhattan Beach is the wealthiest beachfront city located in southwestern Los Angeles County, California, USA. The city is on the Pacific coast, south of El Segundo, and north of Hermosa Beach. Manhattan Beach is the home of both beach and indoor volleyball, and surfing. During the winter, the...
, builds flexible fabric barges for the transportation of bulk fresh water and is the reason why his product is referred to as the "Spragg Bag." In the 1970s Spragg was a promoter of icebergs as a large source of fresh water, but soon realized this was impractical. He then put his skills into developing the waterbag technology starting in the 1980s. Spragg has worked on and perfected this over the last twenty years with his associates. The first field test of his waterbag was in December 1990. The waterbag was 75 meters long (245 feet) and it contained approximately 3000 cubic metres (792,516.1 US gal) of fresh water. It was towed from the Port Angeles harbor in the state of Washington. Another test was done in 1996 with a 100 miles (160.9 km) voyage from Port Angeles to Seattle, Washington
Seattle, Washington
Seattle is the county seat of King County, Washington. With 608,660 residents as of the 2010 Census, Seattle is the largest city in the Northwestern United States. The Seattle metropolitan area of about 3.4 million inhabitants is the 15th largest metropolitan area in the country...
. Spragg says that his next goal is to run another test voyage demonstration between Northern and Southern California and a demonstration of the waterbag technology in the Middle East as well as around the world. There are various reasons why it has been difficult to gain support for demonstrating the viability of waterbag technology in California and around the world. Spragg claims when two waterbags pass underneath the Golden Gate Bridge for the first time in history the media will let the whole world know about it. A novel, Water, War, and Peace, has been completed that details the solutions waterbag technology offers to the complex political problems surrounding water issues throughout the Middle East, the United States, and the world.
Technology
The 1995 associated Spragg patents (#5,413,065 and #5,488,921) indicate that the inventions relate to a flexible fabric barge technology or combination of several barges made of a rubber polyurethanePolyurethane
A polyurethane is any polymer composed of a chain of organic units joined by carbamate links. Polyurethane polymers are formed through step-growth polymerization, by reacting a monomer with another monomer in the presence of a catalyst.Polyurethanes are...
material. The main body portion of a flexible fabric barge fle is cylindrical in shape. The barge can be used by itself or as several connected flexible fabric barges that can be towed through the open ocean under extreme conditions. The patents further explain that the goal of Spragg's inventions are a practical water delivery system of fresh drinkable water that could be delivered to dry regions worldwide that have a shortage of potable water.
One of the flexible fabric barge concepts aims at an economical delivery system for fresh water that would be considerably cheaper than desalination plants, rigid ship
Ship
Since the end of the age of sail a ship has been any large buoyant marine vessel. Ships are generally distinguished from boats based on size and cargo or passenger capacity. Ships are used on lakes, seas, and rivers for a variety of activities, such as the transport of people or goods, fishing,...
s, tanker trucks
Tank truck
A tank truck or road tanker is a motor vehicle designed to carry liquefied loads, dry bulk cargo or gases on roads. The largest such vehicles are similar to railroad tank cars which are also designed to carry liquefied loads...
, conventional barge
Barge
A barge is a flat-bottomed boat, built mainly for river and canal transport of heavy goods. Some barges are not self-propelled and need to be towed by tugboats or pushed by towboats...
s, aqueduct
Aqueduct
An aqueduct is a water supply or navigable channel constructed to convey water. In modern engineering, the term is used for any system of pipes, ditches, canals, tunnels, and other structures used for this purpose....
s or pipeline transport
Pipeline transport
Pipeline transport is the transportation of goods through a pipe. Most commonly, liquids and gases are sent, but pneumatic tubes that transport solid capsules using compressed air are also used....
. Waterbags are more economical and better for the environment than desalination of the seas and oceans.
The flexible fabric barge is a plastic container that is buoyant. It can be linked together with an attachment system to other flexible fabric barges to make a "train." The "waterbags", which are sometimes referred to as balloons or bladders, are made up of a vinyl lining inside a stronger material net. It is a type of "fabric water pipeline" when several are strung together for transport of liquids by tugboat through seas or open oceans to remote locations.
Zipper
The large waterbags are connected together like boxcarBoxcar
A boxcar is a railroad car that is enclosed and generally used to carry general freight. The boxcar, while not the simplest freight car design, is probably the most versatile, since it can carry most loads...
s in a "train" fashion to increase the amount of liquids delivered at a time. It is estimated that the flexible badges could be as large as 14 meters in diameter and 150 meters in length, holding up to 17,000 cubic meters of fresh water or any other transportable liquid. Theoretically as many as 50 to 60 "waterbags" could be connected to one another and towed, although such a test has not been done to date. Engineers suggest that the fabric badge can hold a "train" of 4500000 gallons (17,034.4 m³) of liquids.
A zipper coupler system is 10 times stronger than what is pulled by a 4,300 hp tug. Laborde Marine estimates a 4,300 horsepower tug with a bollard pull
Bollard pull
Bollard pull is a value that allows the comparison of the pulling force of watercraft, particularly tugboats. A mooring bollard may be used as a point of attachment for measuring the force, or pull of the craft.-Background:...
of 110,000 pounds can pull a "train" of fifty or so flexible barges weighing up to 1,300,000 tons. The "train" speed would be about 3 knots. This is over 700 acre.ft of fresh water or other liquid per trip.
Invention
The basic invention is a device for the delivery of huge amounts of fresh water (700,000 to 4500000 gallons (17,034.4 m³) in each bag) at one time in a hostile wind and wave environment typical of oceans and large seas. Since freshwaterFreshwater
Fresh water is naturally occurring water on the Earth's surface in ice sheets, ice caps, glaciers, bogs, ponds, lakes, rivers and streams, and underground as groundwater in aquifers and underground streams. Fresh water is generally characterized by having low concentrations of dissolved salts and...
is lighter than seawater
Seawater
Seawater is water from a sea or ocean. On average, seawater in the world's oceans has a salinity of about 3.5% . This means that every kilogram of seawater has approximately of dissolved salts . The average density of seawater at the ocean surface is 1.025 g/ml...
the filled "bladders" (as they are sometimes referred to) float on top, similarly to iceberg
Iceberg
An iceberg is a large piece of ice from freshwater that has broken off from a snow-formed glacier or ice shelf and is floating in open water. It may subsequently become frozen into pack ice...
s, with little above the surface and most below the surface. Fresh water can be taken from rivers just before it discharges into salty seas or oceans, which then would not interfere with salmon spawning
Salmon run
The salmon run is the time at which salmon swim back up the rivers in which they were born to spawn. All Pacific salmon die after spawning. While most Atlantic salmon die after their first spawn, about 5-10% return to the sea to feed between spawnings. The annual run is a major event for sport...
.
The associated coupler and zipper patent describes that to be economically feasible there should be several such flexible barges towed at one time. The greater the volume of water that can be delivered per trip, the better the economics. This string of barges would typically consist of barges in size from 25 to 50 feet (15.2 m) in diameter and 200 to 800 feet (243.8 m) in length each. The unique characteristic of the Spragg Bag system is not the large volume of water in each bag, but what is called the world's strongest zipper that allows connection of several bags together in long trains. The large connecting zipper can be operated manually or by remote control with radio signals. The string of such flexible fabric "waterbags" may be coupled to a barge via a reinforced fabric nose cone where a tow line is attached. Each "waterbag" is generally filled to 90% capacity and is flat across its top.
Economics
One San Francisco area reporter writes that waterbag technology would be an economical fresh water delivery to the Monterey PeninsulaMonterey Peninsula
The Monterey Peninsula is located on the central California coast and comprises the cities of Monterey, Carmel, and Pacific Grove, and unincorporated areas of Monterey County including the resort and community of Pebble Beach.-Monterey:...
district and solution to the shortage of fresh water in the area. He reports that the average family of four uses one acre-foot of water a year. This costs over $1000 for delivery using conventional methods, however this same amount of water delivered by Spragg Bags would cost about 30% less. Another newspaper reporter explains that towing Spragg Waterbags is environmentally friendly and is more economical than carrying water in ships or water tanker trucks or even using conventional rigid pipelines. An article in the July issue of ECONOMIST Magazine in 2008 explains that worldwide there is enough water for all, however most is often in the wrong place at the wrong time and it is just too expensive to transport.
Waterbag technology offers an easy and inexpensive solution to the problem of today's expensive conventional water transportation. It eliminates the difficulty of transporting water long distances by using the ocean as the means of transport. Waterbags considerably lower the capital costs and operating costs of moving fresh water from place to place. If a train was able to only move one or two box cars at a time, rather than in a train of dozens of boxcars at a time, it would not be very efficient and extremely expensive. Linking waterbags into "trains" of strings of waterbags and moving them through the ocean increases the economics of water transportation making it a viable practical option.
The cost to transport water 300 to 800 miles (1,287.5 km) through the ocean, based on deliveries of 5000000 USgal/d to 10000000 USgal/d, is estimated to be between $350 to $450 per acre foot, depending on the length of the voyage and the amount of water delivered per trip. Increasing the amount of water delivered per day in each waterbag train will help to significantly reduce the cost of the water delivered. Once the reliability of the waterbag delivery system has proven its economics and reliability it will just be a matter of adding more waterbags to the trains, and more trains to the system in order to increase the amount of water delivered to selected locations, while also reducing the cost of the water delivered. Based on the increasing reliability of the waterbag delivery system over time, it should be possible to be able to economically deliver 100,000’s of acre feet per year to many coastal locations around the world.
According to the inventor of the Spragg bag, the total cost of delivering fresh water down the California coast by his waterbag technology for a distance of 800 miles (1,287.5 km) from British Columbia to Monterey
Monterey, California
The City of Monterey in Monterey County is located on Monterey Bay along the Pacific coast in Central California. Monterey lies at an elevation of 26 feet above sea level. As of the 2010 census, the city population was 27,810. Monterey is of historical importance because it was the capital of...
would cost about $966 per acre-foot per year. Keith Spain in a study for a Master Of Arts then shows in an analysis that it would save the residents of the Monterey Peninsula
Monterey Peninsula
The Monterey Peninsula is located on the central California coast and comprises the cities of Monterey, Carmel, and Pacific Grove, and unincorporated areas of Monterey County including the resort and community of Pebble Beach.-Monterey:...
some $1,134 per-acre foot otherwise using a desalination plant. This is a savings of over $19 million per year for the Monterey taxpayers. This number assumes a usage of approximately 17000 acre.ft per year (17,000 X $1,134 = $19,278,000 savings).
Applications
One application seen is in the Middle East where large quantities of fresh water that are available in the Turkey region could be delivered to other places around the Mediterranean Sea that have an extreme shortage of drinkable fresh water, like Israel and Gaza. Spragg believes that delivering fresh drinking water to water-poor nations can promote world peace. He also points out that using his waterbags towed through the Mediterranean Sea would be much more economical than transporting water through pipeline systems. Waterbags have been proposed to be used for emergency purposes in order to link the Gulf Cooperation Counsel countries' desalination plants all along the Persian GulfPersian Gulf
The Persian Gulf, in Southwest Asia, is an extension of the Indian Ocean located between Iran and the Arabian Peninsula.The Persian Gulf was the focus of the 1980–1988 Iran-Iraq War, in which each side attacked the other's oil tankers...
coast.
Another application is the delivery of fresh water from the state of Washington to dry regions of Southern California. He has also proposed delivering water from Mad River
Mad River (California)
The Mad River is a river in upper Northern California. It flows for in a roughly northwest direction through Trinity County and then Humboldt County, draining a watershed into the Pacific Ocean north of the college town of Arcata near Arcata-Eureka Airport in McKinleyville...
in Northern California to the San Francisco area. Other applications are that it:
- could be used to move water through the Sacramento River Delta following an earthquake and a catastrophic levee collapse that could cut off Southern California's water supply for up to two years or more.
- could deliver large quantities of stormwater and/or recycled water to areas that need more fresh water to offset lower water levels and rising salinity.
- could be pre-positioned storage worldwide of large quantities of fresh drinking waterDrinking waterDrinking water or potable water is water pure enough to be consumed or used with low risk of immediate or long term harm. In most developed countries, the water supplied to households, commerce and industry is all of drinking water standard, even though only a very small proportion is actually...
for quick delivery after a natural disaster.
Spragg has proposed to deliver water from the Manavgat River
Manavgat River
Manavgat River originates on the eastern slopes of Western Taurus Mountains in Turkey, and flows south over conglomerated strata for about 90 km, then over the Manavgat Waterfall and though the coastal plain and into the Mediterranean Sea...
in Turkey across the Mediterranean Sea
Mediterranean Sea
The Mediterranean Sea is a sea connected to the Atlantic Ocean surrounded by the Mediterranean region and almost completely enclosed by land: on the north by Anatolia and Europe, on the south by North Africa, and on the east by the Levant...
to Israel and the Gaza Strip, which has an extreme shortage of water, which presently is being reviewed by the World Bank
World Bank
The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans to developing countries for capital programmes.The World Bank's official goal is the reduction of poverty...
.
Spragg has proposed to the Australian government that bulk fresh drinking water using his waterbag technology could be applied to urban water supplies that have a shortage. It would establish an economically sound new industry for bulk fresh water transport. An analysis of the economic and environmental advantages for waterbag technology by using the ocean currents from the Tully River to Brisbane, Queensland has been completed.
On the Gold Coast the Tungen desalination plant is being built to supply 120 megaliters of drinking water daily at a cost of approximately $1.2 billion. Operation of the Tungen desalination plant will produce 235,000 tons of CO2 greenhouse gases
Greenhouse gas
A greenhouse gas is a gas in an atmosphere that absorbs and emits radiation within the thermal infrared range. This process is the fundamental cause of the greenhouse effect. The primary greenhouse gases in the Earth's atmosphere are water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone...
annually. Preliminary cost estimates indicate that using waterbag technology to deliver the same amount of water from the Tully river to the Gold Coast may be 30 times less expensive than desalination, and that waterbag technology may emit 60 times less greenhouse gas. These figures suggest that waterbag technology would deliver water for much less cost than the proposed pipeline from the Burdekin River to Brisbane which is projected to cost approximately $7.5 billion for infrastructure and about $250 million for annual operation.
Spragg has proposed to the White House the idea of a peace offering in the Middle East by supplying 20 to 30 of his waterbags with fresh water and transport them from Turkey to the Palestinians and Israelis. The technology could also be used for the collection of Australia’s factory waste water outputs, storm water, and sewerage for processing and reuse.
Sources
- Barlow, Maude, Blue Gold: The Battle Against Corporate Theft of the World's Water, Earthscan, 2003, ISBN 1844070247
- Fridell, Ron, Protecting Earth's Water Supply, Lerner Publications, 2008, ISBN 0822575574
- Gleick, Peter H.; The world's water: the biennial report on freshwater resources, Volume 1998, pp. 203-205, Spragg Waterbags, ISBN 1559635924
- Lawrence Journal-World – April 27, 1996; Giant water bags proposed to quench a dry planet's thirst
- McCabe, Michael, San Francisco Chronicle, August 6, 1999; Full of Holes, or in the Bag
- Snitow, Alan, Thirst: fighting the corporate theft of our water, Publisher John Wiley and Sons, 2007, ISBN 0787984582
- Westneat, Danny, The San Diego Union – Tribune, San Diego, Calif.:Apr 28, 1996. p. A-3, He hopes water-bag idea will float. 'Fabric pipeline' could slake thirst worldwide, [1,2 Edition]