In Poland, we use only 20 percent of the available groundwater resources, while drought is affecting successive regions. The Ministry is promoting micro-retention, while Szczecin and KGHM are using post-glacial aquifers.
Increasingly alarming reports are coming from across the country about a lack of drinking water in individual municipalities. The response of local authorities is to restrict its use for non-subsistence purposes.
The irrefutable argument is the depletion of current resources, which may threaten supplies even for the purely vital needs of residents in many towns. The proposed direction for solving this problem is archaic and consists of surviving the ongoing drought. The Ministry of Climate and Environment has taken active measures to prevent this situation.
Its flagship project is micro-retention, which involves capturing rainwater through household installations. True, this water is not suitable for consumption, but it can be used to water gardens and other green crops.
A drop of water
As Deputy Minister Urszula Zielińska said, we have launched a micro-retention program for households, because every drop of water retained matters today. Up to 8,000 zlotys in subsidies and up to 90 percent of investment costs can be allocated to rainwater tanks, soakaway drains, drainage systems, or rainwater storage.
This is a response to the challenges we are already observing across Poland. Sealed-off cities are increasingly unable to cope with sudden rainfall, and residents are facing flooding and flash floods. That is why we are investing in household retention, as well as green-blue infrastructure and surface permeability. These are no longer just environmental measures – they are investments in the safety and resilience of our cities and local communities to the effects of climate change.
A lake full of water
However, the gloomy water situation in most of the country does not affect many regions that have previously taken care of themselves without waiting for official programs.
One of them is the Szczecin area, where, as the local government portal reports, drinking water for the agglomeration is drawn from the nearby Lake Miedwie, which, according to hydrologists, is not experiencing any depletion. The spokesman for the Szczecin waterworks said on this occasion: we are glad that Szczecin residents are taking care of proper hydration on hot days, but it is also visible that they are filling garden pools and taking care of greenery.
Thanks to modernizations and the full readiness of our technical teams, we have handled this summer heatwave without any problems. Szczecin has not lacked clean, safe, and cool water.
Water for Lubin and KGHM
The solution for supplying drinking water to the country’s largest mining giant and the residents of nearby towns and housing estates can be considered exemplary, as there are probably more such situations. The discovery of copper ore deposits in the Lubin area in 1957 caused rapid development of the region.
The number of residents, workers, and industrial plants grew. Access to water became one of the priorities for the development of this region. Detailed studies carried out for this purpose led to the discovery of several post-glacial erosion channels filled with sands and gravels about 20 m thick.
The top of the aquifer is usually located a few meters below the surface, and sometimes deeper (a dozen or 20-30 m). The thickness of this level can reach about 40 m (most often up to 20 m). There are two water supply systems here for the city of Lubin and KGHM, using post-glacial aquifer structures.
The Koźlice intake for the city of Lubin consists of 10 deep wells, which during the city’s development period provided up to 24,000 cubic meters of water per day. Currently only 10,000, due to population decline, costs, and savings. Several similar solutions were also applied for the needs of KGHM, for which water distribution from six intakes in post-glacial formations is handled by Energetyka Spółka, which produces and distributes approximately 4,000,000 m3 of water annually for industrial customers from the KGHM Polska Miedź S.A. Capital Group and plants in the municipalities of Lubin, Polkowice, Rudna, Warta Bolesławiecka, Złotoryja, Chocianów, Głogów, Jerzmanowa, and Żukowice, as well as for individual and collective customers. Their total capacity is 2,700 cubic meters per hour.
Water resources are not lacking
The disposable resources of groundwater in Poland amount to 33.7 million m3 per day, or about 900 liters of water per inhabitant per day. According to a 2021 government report, the amount of renewable freshwater resources per inhabitant of Poland is less than 1,600 m3 per inhabitant per year, which indicates a threat of water stress.
The report notes that in nearly half of EU countries, freshwater resources are alarmingly low (below 3,000 m3 per person), including in Poland, Malta, Cyprus, and the Czech Republic, which are below the water security level. This happens when, according to the State Geological Institute (PIG) in Warsaw, subordinate to the Ministry of Climate and Environment, on a national scale we use only 20 percent of the available drinking water resources. Why the remaining 80 percent of groundwater resources are not being developed remains a mystery of that ministry.
A civilizational necessity
So far, the existing solutions to water problems in many cities and economic centers of the country exhaust further innovations in this direction. This is because, so far, this issue has been addressed according to local needs. And generally, after reconnaissance, a satisfactory effect was achieved on the scale of a plant, city, housing estate, or other community.
One could stop there and use the aforementioned gifts of nature according to need. These, in turn, are implemented according to the funds available for this purpose. As is known, a larger center, city, or production plant can more easily obtain them for the implementation of its water goal. About 60 percent of Poland’s population lives in cities, which can allocate larger or smaller financial outlays for this purpose.
About 15 million people live in the countryside, which supplies food to themselves and that 60 percent of the urban population. The countryside is generally dispersed, and collective water supply systems are rare there, not to mention the need to irrigate fields and gardens during droughts. The lack of water for agricultural purposes has a negative impact on the entire population. For this reason, a wider use of groundwater in dispersed underground structures than before is becoming a civilizational necessity.
Water in the Sahara
In the second half of the 20th century, while searching for oil in one of the driest deserts in the Sahara, gigantic amounts of groundwater were discovered, the resources of which were estimated at 150 cubic kilometers of drinking water.
According to calculations by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System hides between 150 and 500 thousand cubic kilometers of water, which is equivalent to seven Baltic Seas or 500 years of the Nile’s flow.
On the basis of this reservoir, Libya built a gigantic network of pipelines 4,000 kilometers long and 4 meters in diameter, consisting of concrete modules 7.5 meters long, laid in trenches, bringing millions of cubic meters to the coastal cities of this country.
Until then, these cities, with the capital Tripoli, had suffered from a chronic shortage of it. The resources of this water, previously considered non-renewable, according to the latest satellite research, are being replenished, because despite several decades of exploitation, they are maintained at the same level.
These investments were carried out by the Libyan government and the then president, Gaddafi. One of the engineers building this pipeline was a Pole, Witold Stanisław Michałowski, who described the implementation of this project in the magazine „Rurociągi” published by the Polish Pipeline Society.
