Water... commodity of future

My personal belief that one day Water will be traded like the way Oil is traded today. Excerpts from article recently ported on web:

At first glance a map of the world doesn’t exactly scream “water shortage!” After all most of the world’s surface is covered in it. The problem is that only 2.5% of all the world’s water is fit for human consumption – and around two-thirds of that is locked away in icecaps and glaciers. This percentage has been fixed for as long as scientists have been researching the matter and is not about to change. Water is not like other commodities – there won’t be a ‘eureka’ moment where new reserves are suddenly discovered. And unlike other commodities, there is no substitute for water and just about everything and everyone relies on it. By the time you’ve got up, showered and had breakfast, for example, you will have consumed 40% of the 135 ltrs without giving it a second thought.

Investing in Water:

Although there is no known substitute for water, some of the wealthier Middle Eastern countries with the harshest desert climates have grappled with what seems an obvious solution – turn the sea into something that you can drink, or at the very least wash in. Desalination is expensive, but is popular in places such as Israel (15% of the country’s water is derived this way), Dubai, Malta and the Canaries. The filtration process is not without problems. There’s the huge amounts of power required to drive the pumps, not to mention the waste produced as a by-product; according to Heather Cooley from the Pacific Institute, typically it takes 100 million gallons of seawater to produce 50 million gallons of desalinated water. The other 50 million gallons of heavily salted brine is dumped back into the ocean. This, along with the high cost of establishing each plant, has been one of the main barriers to the process being adopted outside of the Middle East.