Water Resources Podcast - Matías Taucare
[00:00:21] Bridget Scanlon: I'm delighted to welcome Matías Taucare to the podcast. Matías is a Professor at the Department of Geology at the University of Chile in Santiago. Matías has been working on water resource issues in Chile for many years. We met a couple of years ago in São Paulo at the groundwater congress, and I was very impressed with his work. Today, Matías is going to give us some background information on Chile because we've never had anybody talk about Chile before on the podcast. And then we will discuss water resource issues related to agriculture, urban water use, and climate.
Thank you so much, Matías, for joining me today.
[00:01:02] Matías Taucare: Thank you to you for the invitation. I am very happy share the time with you in this podcast. Let's go with this conversation.
[00:01:10] Bridget Scanlon: Right, right. So, Matías as I mentioned, we've not had anybody talk about Chile before, and it would be nice to give the listeners some background information on Chile. You look at the map, it's more than 4,000 kilometers long from north to south
And I looked up, population of about 18 and a half million, that's about half of the population in Texas. Then the area similar to Texas 750,000 square kilometers. Texas is about 700,000. Maybe you can describe the physiography of the country, some of the political divisions and that sort of thing Matías.
[00:01:47] Matías Taucare: Yes, Chile is a very long country and at the same time it is very narrow indeed. You say the longitude is 4,200 kilometers, but in width is 200 kilometers around. So it's very narrow. Chile is a country that share the boundary with Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina in the southern part of South America in the southwestern part.
It has a population of about 20 million people, and to the west is bordered by the Pacific Ocean. Yes, the limit that I will talk about more, about the Andes Cordillera, because it's very important for Chile, the orography of this territory.
Economically Chile is a country that is strongly about the mining and the agriculture, especially mining. We are very famous because of our copper deposit. Now, for the lithium deposit related to the salt flats, located in the north part of Chile in the Atacama Desert. But also Chile is famous in the agricultural things about the wine, the vineyards, and the grapes. This is the most important things about the economic part of Chile.
[00:03:15] Bridget Scanlon: Right. You are on the West Coast and so a lot of your physiography is like California. You have the Andes and they have the Sierras, and then you also got a coastal range and similar to the coastal range in California.
The Andes, I see goes up to four to seven kilometers, elevation, but the coastal range is about two kilometers. In between those two mountain ranges, then you have the central depression where Santiago is, and it's similar to the Central Valley in California, but your base in thickness, I think is not as thick as the Central Valley. It's maybe two or 300 meters thick.
And you live in the capital, right? In Santiago, that's a lot of the population are located there, about 7 million people, is it?
[00:03:59] Matías Taucare: Just around 7 million people. Yes, I am living here in Santiago, but I am from the north of Chile. I am from Iquique that is close to Peru. Located in the Tarapaca area is a coastal city in the Atacama Desert. I study in Antofagasta. Then I come here to Santiago to do my PhD and then to work here.
For Chile, the Andean Cordillera, the physiography is very relevant. Usually as geographic name, the Andean cordillera is just the highest part. But from a geological point of view, the Andean cordillera comes from the Pacific Ocean and arrives to the east part to Argentina, and then you can subdivide as a general view. As you well said as Coastal Range to the west. Then you have in the middle a sedimentary basin that is called central depression. And then you have the Principal Cordillera, where is located all the volcanoes, and the main porphyrycopper deposit. And also the salt flats with the lithium deposits.
This is the general physiography, but you have some particularity. Chile is very long, so in the middle you can find some parts without this central valley and another particularities.
[00:05:22] Bridget Scanlon: You mentioned you are from the north- the Atacama Desert region. And so you go from desert in the north and Santiago, where you're now in central Chile. Maybe Mediterranean type climate, with wet winters and dry summers. And then for the south, then you've got the fjords and the glaciers.
The country's so long, you experience a lot of different climates as you go from north to south.
[00:05:46] Matías Taucare: Yes, indeed. Chile cover from the 18 degree of latitude to around 56 degree. We have a lot of kind of climate, but yes. If we talk about the general terms, the north area of Chile is characterized by the deeper arid climate that is the Atacama Desert, the driest desert in the planet. In the Atacama Desert, you can have around 10 millimeters per year, as an average of precipitation in the central valley or in the coastal area. You can reach around 70 to 100 millimeters a year in the highest part of the Andes because of the orographic effect in precipitation. Particularly the north is little bit different in kind of climate seasons from the rest of Chile. In the rest of Chile, you have the rain during the austral winter. Then you have an austral summer, very dry. In the north of Chile, we have the austral summer, very humid because we receive the humid vapor coming from the Amazonian basin and from Atlantic influence. It's a little bit different, while during winter despite that is a little bit cold, we don't have too much precipitation. Then when you go to the central area of Chile, you have a Mediterranean or semiarid climate with around of 300 millimeters per year. It depends, obviously, the altitude where you find here is Santiago, the capital city, is around 500 meter above sea level.
Here the main activities is the agriculture and also mining. Then if we go to the southern part of Chile, it is very humid. It is easy to reach 2000 millimeters per year in some area like Valdivia, for example; that is a very pristine place and obviously, you have glacier if you go to the fjords and is it's very beautiful. But we also have glaciers in the highest part of the Andes, in the central area of Chile that feed all the rivers downstream that arrived to the Pacific Ocean. This is in general terms the geography of Chile while related also with the climate.
[00:08:24] Bridget Scanlon: That's great. You mentioned how important mining is in Chile, and I was just looking up some stuff. Some data from 2022 and your exports, and it seemed mining accounted for maybe 75% of the total exports, is about a hundred billion in 2022. In the source I was looking at mostly to China and 75 billion was coming from the mining industry. You've had a very long history of mining silver, nitrate, and copper, and lithium, and rare earths. That has evolved over time.
Can you just describe that a little bit? Where are most of the mines and, what are the minerals that are being extracted?
[00:09:04] Matías Taucare: Yes, we have a very long history about mining. At the beginning when the Spanish arrived to Chile, they exploit silver and in some parts gold, that are most concentrated from central Chile to the north. Then during the eighties we have an explosion about the nitrate that is called caliche here.
We use it for fertilizers and explosives until the German invent the Haber Bosch process.
[00:09:38] Bridget Scanlon: --Synthetic nitrate, I think.
[00:09:40] Matías Taucare: Exactly, yes. Yeah. After this, Chile started to exploit the copper. Because we have different kind of copper deposit. You can find porphyry copper in the Principal Cordillera. You can find the oxidized copper and gold deposits in the Coastal Cordillera, but also you can find strata-bound copper deposit.
We have different types of mining here in Chile. And that's is why Chile is very famous about the copper exportation around the world. For China, for United States...
Now the last years, with this energy transition the lithium start being interesting in Argentine and in the southern west part of Bolivia. Particularly in Chile, the Salar de Atacama contains brines with almost 2000 ppm of lithium. We have a brines with high concentrations of lithium, and this is why some enterprises start to exploit this mineral here. While we have other salars like La Isla, for example, that have 1000 milligrams per liter of lithium.
Yes. It is a new kind of mining that is starting in Chile, the lithium.
[00:11:04] Bridget Scanlon: I saw the Salar de Atacama. So that's one of the large ones, in the Atacama Desert, related to the lithium mines.
[00:11:13] Matías Taucare: Yes indeed. The Atacama desert region, it is a touristic place. You have some dispute there about the people living there, about the tourist, relative to the mining extraction because the San Pedro Atacama is a very touristic place and have a very fragile ecosystem there. The first peoples living there, that the Atacameños have some conflicts with the mining exploitation because for extract lithium you have to extract groundwater. Well, the levels start to decrease and also disconnect with the wetlands that different animals or ecosystems depend; a very important issue here in Chile, the environmental aspect.
[00:12:00] Bridget Scanlon: When we met in Sao Paulo you had a poster about the groundwater over exploitation in the Central Depression and very large depletion of groundwater. You were reporting maybe 20 to 40 meters over the 10-year time period. That was really interesting, and you have a nice paper describing that now.
Chile has been experiencing what they call a mega drought or hyper drought since 2010. Many people have been attributing the groundwater depletion to the drought. But I think, your work has provided much longer-term context for what has been going on. Can you describe that a little bit Matías?
[00:12:42] Matías Taucare: Yes, the central Chile area, I said previously, is the area that concentrates most of Chilean population and also the most of economic activities. So water is very important either for agriculture, either for mining, or different economic activity and also for drinking water.
The thing is that since 2010 central Chile area is affected by a sequence of dry years that is called mega drought. Indeed, the last year the name change to hyper drought, because it continues. And it is around 14 years were the rain decreased 45% and up to 75% during '22, '21.
It was a difficult time. During the mega drought, since 2010, the rivers obviously start to decrease the flow rate and the people start to use the groundwater to support all the activities. When some people, especially the rural people, start to see that their wells don't have water-- the people say, "Oh, what happened?" and politicians say well, it is the mega drought. But when we start to see the long-term data, we see that is not only the mega drought because the aquifer is over exploited since the nineties. It is not so easy to say, "Oh, it is the mega drought."
I think this is the easy way because you can't control the climate, but you can control the exploitation of water. This is a problem in Chile because now we have problems with the groundwater depletion and this causes other problems. Like the disconnection with ecosystems along rivers in the coastal area for example, but also the land subsidence that was reported in north area of Santiago.
This is a long term over exploitation that obviously during the mega drought it was exacerbated because people start to use more groundwater. But at the same time, with the increase of temperature, we continue have groundwater recharge by indirect recharge. Because of the glacier melt that continues feed the rivers, and then we have the indirect recharge.
But the basins that don't have glaciers, are more affected indeed. La Ligua Basin, for example, in the north area of central Chile that does not have glaciers, have the water levels fall around 50 meters during a period of 10 years. So you can calculate that, a depletion rate of five meters per year-- that is too much!
At least I think that is too much.
[00:16:06] Bridget Scanlon: I was very impressed with your study, Matías. You looked at water rights, a couple 2000 to 3000 to water rights and the amount of water that was permitted to be used. Then you did detailed monitoring of groundwater levels. You looked at water table data. And then you used chemistry data. So It was a very nice analysis.
It's very easy for us to say, "Oh, we have a drought. We are short of water. It must be just the drought and we can't control anything." Chile is known for having probably one of the largest water markets, in many regions and since 1981. The water rights are a private property, you have consumptive and water rights for irrigation and for cities, and also non consumptive rights for hydropower.
Can you describe a little bit the water markets and the governance aspects of water resources?
[00:17:06] Matías Taucare: At the beginning the water market start around 1980 during the dictatorship period, they start this new water code that legally regulates water withdrawals in Chile, the water restriction. Yes, it is a kind of model where it depends of water allocation, but then is founded in the supply and demand law. It's a water market. At the beginning, all this water was free, and then the people start to sell these water rights.
But from another point of view, when we have drought, the water starts to decrease rights? Increase it’s price so this is a water market. We can say that and it is supported by the Dirección General de Aguas (DGA) [General Directorate of Water], that is the water directorate of Chile. And we have now some restrictions because the people see that in some parts we don't have too much water. Particularly during the mega drought. So some areas have some restriction to give or to sell the water right.
But this is from the last three, or four years. If we go before that, no. The people sell the water right, especially the rich people. It generates a kind of disconnection between the rich people, the poor people, the people living in rural area, the people living in the urban areas. We have this disparity. So this is what I can say.
Now we have another, a new water code. I think that one of the most important changes, it was that with the first water code, all the water rights are forever. Now it will be evaluated if the water right can continue since 2022, but all previous water rights are allocated for always. This kind of system generates a high stress period in different basins, particularly in the north one where we don't have too much recharge. It is a difficult system.
[00:19:35] Bridget Scanlon: Yeah, and you mentioned Matías, that Santiago is fed by surface water from reservoirs. I assume the reservoir storage has been declining a lot during this mega drought. Has the capacity of the reservoirs that feed Santiago municipality, has that been decreasing a lot in recent years?
[00:19:59] Matías Taucare: Yes. Here in Santiago, we depend mostly of El Yeso Dam. That is a reservoir located in the middle of the Principal Cordillera. We depend on that, but during the mega drought, the level decrease down to levels never seen here in Santiago. The drinking water and the water intended for agriculture or mining, etcetera, start to depend on groundwater.
Particularly, those extracted from the central valley aquifers, from alluvial aquifers. We have this very big dam and the water quality is very good. We have a sulfate, calcium facies of the chemistry, and the quality's usually very good.
[00:20:55] Bridget Scanlon: Yeah. The Central Depression, the aquifer there is maybe two or 300 meters thick. The Central Valley in California, I think maybe I don't recall, but may be over a kilometer thick or much, much thicker than that. Your aquifer, the Central Depression is not huge. It's not really that thick.
[00:21:12] Matías Taucare: No indeed Central Depression, here in Santiago, for example, has a depocenter with maximum thick of about 500 meters depth. But very local part, the average is around 300 meters there. This is the thickness of the Central Valley's aquifers.
[00:21:34] Bridget Scanlon: And of course, a lot of the water, reading some of the reports, it goes towards agriculture and maybe counting for 60%, 70% of the water use.
But when I was looking at your export data, it seems like most of it is horticulture and 20 billion dollars, maybe 20% of the total exports, is horticultural products. You mentioned chili and wine and avocados and all of these things that we all enjoy. These are not annual crops, these are trees. And, you can't just stop growing them during a drought. I guess that's a big user of water.
[00:22:10] Matías Taucare: Yes. This is why groundwater starts to decrease too much because here we have a lot of avocados. If you visit Chile and you go around from here the Central Valley to the coastal area, for example, you can see all the hills with avocado trees. You see that it is difficult to have this kind of tree that needs a lot of water, but we have avocados here and need water.
During mega drought, we didn't have too much rain. We didn't have too much surface water there, groundwater supports all of this kind of agriculture. And yes, you can see all of the hills with avocado trees-- it is very impressive. When you start to see the Google Earth, for example, and go to years before you can see all the hills at this natural state, but now you can see all of these hills with a lot of trees. It is amazing.
[00:23:17] Bridget Scanlon: It's obviously very economical. The economics is good and so that's why they do it, I guess.
[00:23:23] Matías Taucare: Yeah, and it is very strange because all of these trees are located in hills in the hill slope. But not only you need the water, but you need to pump the water upstream through this slope. This is why the avocados here are expensive also.
[00:23:42] Bridget Scanlon: I really like your work and I think there's a lot of comparisons that can be done with the California Central Valley and in the Central Depression in Chile. Your work established a strong connection between the Andes and the mountain block and mountain front recharge into the Central Depression.
I don't think we have a great handle on how much recharge the Central Valley gets from the Sierras in California. Can you describe the recharge sources to the aquifers in the Central Depression and how you were able to figure out what the recharge sources are?
[00:24:18] Matías Taucare: Yes. When you see the Chilean territory, you can see that around 85% is composed of hard rock. Mainly volcanic rock, intrusive rocks along all the Chilean territory. You have the around 15% of alluvial deposits.
If we consider the traditional view of aquifer that just sedimentary deposits are aquifers, that in Chile was the main view until 2020. Until few years ago. This is why all the water rights are located in the valleys, in all these sedimentary deposits. When you see the Cordillera, the mountains which is formerly considered as impervious or as a no-flow boundary condition.
When you see the mountain, you can see a lot of springs, outflowing groundwater from volcanic rocks. It is not consistent. This model of rocks as impervious. So we start this project with Linda Daniela my professor during the PhD.
We start to study how ground water circulates in the fractured media, in the volcanic rock. At the beginning was a little bit difficult because with this insight that the hard rock is impervious, we don't have wells in the mountains. So I had to work a lot in the mountains to collect ground groundwater from the different springs.
Sometimes I walk more than 14 hours to try to collect water samples from the peak of the mountain. But from this we develop a new conceptual model to try to explain the connection between the volcanic rock of the Andes Cordillera to the Central Valley alluvial aquifers. From this we can say that we have mountain block recharge, mountain front recharge. Especially mountain block recharge is associated to geological faults that crosscut the mountain front. We have a kind of conduit or a kind of pipe, we can say that connects the volcanic rocks with the alluvial deposits. This is the model that I try to explain. Now I am trying to investigate the different contributions from mountain.
Either mountain front or mountain block, but also other different recharge sources. We are trying to quantify the different contributions from irrigation canals, from mountain block with different geochemical tracers. This is the idea now because the beginning, the idea it was to identify the recharge mechanisms, and now we are trying to quantify.
[00:27:39] Bridget Scanlon: That's fantastic. So, you really changed the conceptual understanding of the system. I mean, if they thought, the Central Depression was just recharged in the Central Depression from rainfall that occurred there, and that there was a no flow boundary with the mountains. You've got this high precipitation in the mountains, and where's it going?
[00:27:58] Matías Taucare: Indeed we demonstrate that recharge from local precipitation does not contribute recharge. It's mainly from the high mountain through indirect recharge, from the high mountain river and another proportion from the mountain block recharge as inter aquifer flow. These two mechanisms are the main important recharge mechanisms from the alluvial aquifers here.
But direct recharge, I think that to the southern Chile, yes, contributes. Here where we have 300 millimeters per year and groundwater level around 100 meters depth, so it is a little bit difficult.
[00:28:44] Bridget Scanlon: But also, you have thrust faulting, I think, along the mountain front, but then you've got these cross-cutting faults then that you say provide pathways then for the water to get into the alluvial aquifer system. And then also in the Central Depression, you've got irrigation canals that leak, and so that's another recharge source, but also degrades the water quality some with the leakage from those canals.
[00:29:12] Matías Taucare: Yes indeed. We have these two main mechanisms. The irrigation canals come from the High Mountain rivers, distribute the water in the Central Valley. This kind of water has special chemistry, it's more sulfate and has some metals that are associated. For example, manganese, iron, nickel, has associated to the porphyry copper.
You can disengage this kind of water from the one coming from the mountain block that is more associated to bicarbonate water and more dilute water with less metals. We have that, but where agriculture usually uses the irrigation canal obviously. Well with this, with the irrigation, the quality of the water starts to decrease associated with the nitrate input.
At least it was. We see here in the central area of Chile, in different places in the San Felipe aquifer, that is my main study area; but also in another valley like Colchagua, Aconcagua, Chacabuco, et cetera. We have different study areas here. We always find nitrate up to, I don't know 70 milligrams per liter, for example, in some aquifers.
[00:30:39] Bridget Scanlon: So is that 70 milligrams per liter as nitrogen?
The World Health Organization limit is 10. So it's seven times the, or is it 50 milligrams per liter as nitrate?
[00:30:50] Matías Taucare: Yeah, it is a lot in some parts. The average is around 20 milligrams per liter in the alluvial aquifer. In the hard rock aquifer, in the volcanic rocks, we don't have too much nitrate. We don't have sources- yeah, it is less than five milligrams per liter.
[00:31:11] Bridget Scanlon: And that's fantastic how you were able to use the chemistry then to identify the sources and figure out where water is coming from. You mentioned coming from the mountains, then you have some iron and manganese high levels; you can distinguish that in the irrigation canals and all of these different sources.
So, good luck with the quantifying the relative contribution of these different sources.
[00:31:34] Matías Taucare: Thank you. Well, we have one PhD student Renata, who is working with different isotopic tracers, strontium, for example. We're trying to work with sulfate to try to determine the sources but also the mixing. It isn't, I think, that interesting project because we are working in an inter mountainous aquifer. It is our natural laboratory that allows us to try to give another tool for the water management.
[00:32:04] Bridget Scanlon: Right, right. The mega drought or hyper drought, whatever you want to call it-- I was looking at some papers and they were describing it, as this southern blob or, this Southern Pacific pressure trend dipole and causing pressure ridging.
The storm tracks are forced to move south, and you're missing out on these storm tracks and they're going further south towards Antarctica. Do you know much about this ?
[00:32:30] Matías Taucare: Oh, I am not so much expert, but the mega drought since the beginning, the rain in Chile is usually controlled by the ENSO and El Niño Southern Oscillation, yes? During El Niño we have the humid period. And during La Niña we have the dry period, but during the mega drought event rain it is uncorrelated with ENSO. It is more associated with the South Pacific pressure that, if I'm not mistaken, is coming from Australia or New Zealand.
It's more associated with this kind of severe drought phenomenon. I don't understand too much, so I don't want to lie. but, I can say that you can read the scientific articles of Rene Garreaud. That is a very big geophysicist of atmospheric research. So, I know that he studied this phenomenon.
[00:33:32] Bridget Scanlon: I did look at some of his papers.
So, you mentioned El Niño Southern Oscillation, and so being very important and similar to the southwest US. El Niño is generally associated with wet conditions and La Niña dry. Then in California, we see a lot of atmospheric rivers.
The atmospheric rivers landfall, oftentimes, they're drought busters, so they end these long-term droughts. In California they had major atmospheric river events in 2017 and January, December 20 16 and January, 2017. And also in 2023. Prior to that they had long-term droughts. I was just wondering, does Chile see many atmospheric rivers?
[00:34:18] Matías Taucare: Yes. And the last, I think three years, we have a lot of events of atmospheric rivers that triggers landslides or geological dangerous things. I think that atmospheric rivers impact in the central area of Chile and in the southern area with intense precipitation. The rain, the amount, is around the quantity that fall during all the year, but in one or two or three days. It was a very intense event when it occurred. While the people scare a little bit, especially the ones that are living in the mountains, because a lot of landslides occur, so it's a difficult event.
Chile is very known for this kind of event. Earthquakes et cetera. We have a lot of these kinds of events. Every year are different and every year we have to be prepared for this. It's a lot of water and we can say, "Okay, it is fantastic!" but no, it is not too fantastic.
[00:35:32] Bridget Scanlon: It's just too much. Basically, what you're saying is that you had the entire year of rainfall would fall in a couple of days. In a few days, and so very intense high rainfall. In California now, we try to capture that rainfall and so they use forecast informed reservoir operations (FIRO) to store more water and reservoirs and then put it into the depleted aquifers.
Maybe with time, you'll be able to try to manage these extremes and try to use it to recharge the central depression aquifers with time.
[00:36:06] Matías Taucare: This is one of the ideas that we have, but we have to try to form an interdisciplinary team to try to address this problem because. We as a hydrogeologist, we have some point of view, but the civil engineer has another point of view that is very important because it's infrastructure. So we are talking about that too, to how to manage this kind of event.
For example, a first idea is to open all the irrigation canals, for example, but it's not too easy because you can generate some floods. So, we, we have to, try to manage this event with the engineesr.
[00:36:50] Bridget Scanlon: Yeah. And I agree, engineering is very important in the US the US Army Corps of Engineers is very involved in trying to store more water and to change their regulations for their reservoirs to store it, and then maybe recharge aquifers downstream. And they're doing some of that Prado Dam in California and others.
Yes, connecting the infrastructure and the engineering and the regulations with the opportunities to store it and stuff. So it takes a lot of time and effort coordinating all of these different groups.
[00:37:25] Matías Taucare: Yes. And the problem in Chile is that we have a very fragmented communication between the different government agencies, we are trying.
[00:37:34] Bridget Scanlon: Right. So, lastly, Matías the Institute that you're working in or the center is is doing work related to geothermal energy. And so one of the aspects oftentimes linked to water is, what is the main sources of energy and electricity, and you've got a lot of potential for hydropower and you also have huge potential for geothermal energy because you are part of the Pacific Ring of Fire.
And, but I see also you import fossil fuels from the US and then you, I'm sure you have a lot of renewables now, wind and solar. So maybe you can describe that a little bit. Matías.
[00:38:13] Matías Taucare: Yes, I will. I work in the Centro de Excelencia en Geotermia de los Andes (CEGA). This research center works from 2010 and. And in 2022, around 2022, at least the funds, we are also working within this center as a name, as the spirit of this center because at least for me CEGA made a lot of good things for Chile. Particularly to try to give this notion of the geothermal energy because in Chile I think that in a lot of country Europe we try to see all the things that works over the land. But the geothermal is a kind of hidden energy. And when people talk about geo thermic the geo thermic is, seems like just for electricity, but now you can use the temperature of the aquifers, for example, the temperature of the subsurface.
You can use geothermal energy directly for climatization, for example, especially during long event swith a lot of temperature in summer and cold winter. It is very useful but people don't see too much that, and on another hand, the first version is a little bit expensive.
You can recover this in 10 years, for example, but well, if, we see that geothermal is a little bit difficult to procure here in Chile. Most of people try to see the wind, the energy, the hydroelectric, and also solar energy. For example, we have the Atacama Desert. So we have a lot of sun and big radiation.
But the thing is how to manage the solar energy plant because today all these solar panels are being trashed in the desert. Because in Spanish is chatarra something that is not useful because nobody, eh, keep the, this kind of solar plant, if in a point of view it's easy, but during the time is being difficult to manage because it is trash in the desert. For another part the wind energy, some people don't like too much because we have a very big infrastructure. For me it is a kind of touristic place in some areas because it, it is, impressive to see this very big molinos, how do you say molinos in, in English mills wind mills? righ
[00:41:27] Bridget Scanlon: Mills, Yeah.
[00:41:28] Matías Taucare: Yeah. Because they're very big. And well, if we see the hydroelectric in the high mountain rivers, we have this kind of electricity. Colbun for example, is a hydroelectric plant located in central Chile, but in a southern city and works very well.
If you asked me what I prefer the geothermal energy because it's stable during the year. It's located everywhere. Chile, particularly is located in the fire ring. So we have an anomalous, geothermal gradient. So I think that it is possible, so we have to meet up, the politics agree with that also.
[00:42:20] Bridget Scanlon: Matías, you wouldn't be biased because you are working on geothermal research in your institute. I'm just kidding. You mentioned the solar and you said a lot of potential, the Atacama, the problem could be transmission then, do you have a grid system going all the way from the north to the central part of Chile?
Do you have electricity transmission, or is most of the electricity generated locally? Say for Santiago, you have hydroelectricity and you have some local solar and local wind. You're not transmitting electricity from North.
[00:42:56] Matías Taucare: No, indeed it is transmitting to a lot of places, yeah. Yes, indeed. Despite that, geothermal is hidden, et cetera, and the people don't take more attention about that. We have the first geothermal power plant in South America that is Cerro Pabellon and contribute also to the energy in Chile.
[00:43:21] Bridget Scanlon: Okay, great. Groundwater is also hidden. We're used to being hidden, aren't we?
[00:43:25] Matías Taucare: Exactly. Ground water is very important in a lot of terms.
[00:43:31] Bridget Scanlon: Thank you so much Matías. Our guest today is Matías Taucare and he's a professor at the Department of Geology at the University in Chile. And I really appreciate your educating us on about the background of Chile and also the water resource aspects. Thanks a lot.
[00:43:49] Matías Taucare: No, thanks to you for this invitation. I really appreciate that especially because I read all of your papers. So this invitation for me was wonderful.
