A Norwegian company's plan to make ice cubes out of glaciers unsettles some

Glomfjord, Norway, is a coastal town of 1,120 residents just north of the Arctic Circle. For decades, it was home to a chemical plant that produced ammonia. After it was shuttered in 1993, two Norwegian solar power entrepreneurs saw an opportunity, and Renewable Energy Corporation began making solar panels in the former ammonia plant in 1997. Sadly, lower manufacturing costs in Asia forced REC to move its domestic production overseas, and it closed its doors in Glomfjord three years ago.

Now, a startup company called Svaice is occupying that old factory, and aims to make a very low-tech product – ice cubes – from an abundant (yet diminishing) local resource: glaciers.

Specifically, the ice would come from nearby Vestre Svartisen, the second-largest glacier in Norway. Since Svaice, led by local businessman Geir Olsen, announced its business plan last year, it has attracted both interest among local government officials eager to support a new local employer, as well as incredulity among people who cannot fathom commoditizing chunks of a glacier that is already receding rapidly.

In news stories and on the Svaice website, Olsen – who refused an interview request from the Guardian – has countered this objection, arguing that the glacial ice would be far from a commodity. Svaice plans to market its product as a luxury item to high-end bars and restaurants. If a connoisseur is willing to part with serious cash for a tumbler of 50-year-old scotch, Svaice’s pitch goes, why would’t that same customer opt for a high-end ice cube? Because it was formed under tremendous pressure, it is extremely dense and melts more slowly than manufactured ice.

The company says it has interested clients in Dubai and New York.

Svaice has also received grants totaling NOK 400,000 (nearly $50,000) from the municipality of Meløy and from Nordland County. The funds were awarded so that Svaice could run a pilot program to test its extraction process. According to an email exchange with Svaice project director Jan Helge Østensen, on 18 March the company received final approval from Meløy to move forward.

But Nordland County spokesperson Ola Torstensen said via email that the country had not yet given Svaice permission to begin full production and that the grant it awarded the company was designed only to help it conduct testing. Yet, he said, he was unsure what kinds of standards or parameters Svaice would need to meet in order to receive approval to go ahead, and Svaice does not appear to be waiting around for further permission from the county. In a recent Norwegian news story, Olsen says Svaice plans on beginning its operations this spring. That story also says the ice will be transported off the glacier via helicopter.

In a news story from February, Olsen was quoted saying Svaice would be limited to taking 3,600 cubic meters of ice per year. To put that into context, the ice removed would fill 93 cargo containers.

A lesser evil?

When compared to the environmental impacts of other extractive industries – namely oil and gas – ice mining is, at least on paper, small potatoes, says Sigurd Enge, who advises Oslo-based environmental group the Bellona Foundation on Arctic issues. But he worries that if the Vestre Svartisen glacier continues to shrink and “you start [ice mining] operations on top of this, you could accelerate the melting”.

That is hardly likely at the rate of operations Svaice says it is targeting. Miriam Jackson, a research scientist at the Norwegian Water Resources and Energy Directorate, says that compared to the amount of ice Svartisen is currently losing each year due to warming, harvesting somewhere in the range of 3,600 cubic meters of ice (4,000 cubic metres of water) is “negligible”. On balance, Jackson says that Vestre Svartisen grew during the late 1980s and 1990s, meaning that it gained more size in the winter than it lost during summer melt. But since 2000, Vestre Svartisen has become “substantially smaller”.

Looking specifically at Storglombreen, the arm of Vestre Svartisen from which Svaice plans to harvest ice, during the past two study periods (1985 to 1988, and 2000 and 2004), it lost roughly the equivalent of 39m cubic meters of water per year. That makes ice cube extraction seem insignificant.

There are other environmental impacts to Svaice’s plan, of course. One would have to account for the energy put toward shipping the ice to Dubai, New York or wherever else the demand for opulent ice exists.

Moreover, some are simply bothered by the conceit: “This is not a resource that the world needs in its drinks,” Enge says.

On the other hand, Jason Box, professor in glaciology at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, says glacial ice cubes might serve a helpful role by making consumers think about the purity and fleeting nature of glaciers.

“The proposed venture would have people cherishing the aesthetic of ice,” Box says. “The way even small pieces of glacier ice floats in a glass resemble identically the shape and form of icebergs; that fractal geometry of nature floating in your whisky glass is aesthetically far more pleasing than artificial ice.”

Besides, he notes, mining ice cubes from glaciers on the scale that Svaice is proposing would be tiny compared to the environmental impact of most extractive and energy-intensive industries, such as aluminum production.

On its website, Svaice defends its proposal by saying it will power its equipment with biofuel and use green electricity produced at the local hydroelectric plant (powered by glacial runoff). Besides, they add, the ice they’ll be taking would otherwise melt soon anyway.

Will people pay for artisan ice?

In a promotional video featuring two men clad in Nordic sweaters, using crampons and carrying antique ice axes, Svaice casts glacial ice collection as an important tradition for generations of villagers living around the glacier. These intrepid men would “travel by foot across the wild and tough land to collect the ice. A wedding or special dinner occasion was not complete without the ice. This made the party perfect, and memorable”. Now, the narrator concludes, “we are bringing the exclusive and prestigious ice to you”.

Geir Jørgensen, high-north advisor to the Norwegian Society for the Conservation of Nature, grew up in Glomfjord and says the video is ridiculous. “In Norway we have no such tradition at all,” he says. “But this video makes me laugh.”

If it starts production, Svaice will not be the first modern-day enterprise to harvest glacial ice and market it as a premium product. In the mid-1980s, Jim Harper owned a freight forwarding company, AK-Pacific, which shipped perishables between Seattle and ports in Alaska. Together with his friend Tim Dimond, based in Juneau, Harper wanted to test a theory that consumers would pay big bucks for glacial ice.

At the time, bottled water was just beginning to emerge as a niche consumer product, and companies in the Great White North started bottling glacier water. (This trend was short-lived, according to the International Bottled Water Association, and nearly all bottled water sold today is filtered municipal water or from a spring.)

One of these startups began shipping a chunk of glacial ice – to be used as a merchandizing prop – along with its products to the Lower 48, according to an article in The New York Times. So why not start selling the ice itself?

For Harper and Dimond, it was a no brainer: they could use the ice to fill empty southbound ships, and their only costs were from collecting and moving the ice. The product itself was free.

Turning glacial ice into profit

They started selling 3kg (7lb) bags of glacial ice cubes to grocery stores in Seattle, which garnered some attention and international press. That led to a phone call from a Japanese company that wanted to import the glacial ice as a luxury item. At that point, the Dimond Ice Company was on fire.The forward-thinking entrepreneur cornered the market.

“We had strong demand for the ice from Japan, and we didn’t want anything to happen that would keep us from operating,” Harper said. A permit to harvest glacial ice didn’t exist, so state officials had to figure out what it would and would not allow. Authorities conducted an environmental review and held public meetings. There were some local objections to adding a new industry to the sensitive marine environment and concerns that removing the ice would cause the coastal waters to warm. But in the end, the permit was granted.

By then, many other businesses were keen to mold glacial ice into profits. Harper contended that all this interest made the state rethink what it had done. “They got nervous and said, ‘wait a minute.’”

No other permits were issued. (Harper and Dimond have held on to theirs, and say they could restart the Dimond Ice Company by simply paying a fee to renew the permit.)

The permit required that only floating ice that had already calved off a glacier be harvested. The permit also placed a ceiling on how much ice the operation could take, but Harper said they never came close to meeting it – and they were taking more than three times the amount Svaice says it will harvest. They were also taking a very healthy profit.

“Our customer was selling the ice in 1kg packages, which contained three ice cubes, for $8,” Harper recalls. “It was a pretty spendy thing,”

It was also short-lived. The Japanese economy went soft, Dimond Ice Company lost its overseas client, and the enterprise was more or less over three years after it started.

Harper, who keeps up on his ice industry news, has been hearing the buzz about the Svaice project. His reaction? “How are the Norwegians getting away with this? Everyone is crying about the glaciers melting.”