The Promises and Perils of Petrohydrology: Hong Kong’s Lok On Pai Desalter, Singapore, and the Persian Gulf, 1963 to 1990.

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Tai Lam Chung Reservoir is now well known as a receptacle of mainland Chinese water, thence distributed to the Hong Kong mains. Alongside this mainland water, Tai Lam Chung has also been discussed drawing in and redistributing the water of its surrounding rural hinterland. But less well known is a two-mile tunnel running from Tai Lam Chung due southwest. Through this tunnel, at brief moments, ran water from the nearby Lok On Pai desalter. Eleven oil tanks sat at the desalter. Oil ran the plant, fuelling the process of desalination. This oil was delivered via the desalter’s jetty—thereby connecting the jetty, the plant, and the reservoir outwards to refineries in South Korea and Pulau Bukom (Singapore), and beyond them the Persian Gulf. 

Conceived at a moment of postwar abundance, the inauguration of the oil-dependent desalter in 1975 came by contrast at a perilous time. Middle Eastern geopolitics and decolonisation imperilled the desalter’s supply. At the same time that the colonial state was forced to deal with the thorny question of relations with mainland Guangdong, so too was another of its resource geographies troubled with geopolitical contestation and supply vulnerabilities. Alongside a rich literature on mainland-Anglo-American contestation over water, this paper discusses the relatively less examined predicament of Hong Kong’s brief experiment in ‘petro-hydrology’.