A small Texas company says it hopes to start exporting water from Sitka to a port along the west coast of India, which it will call its “World Water Hub.”

S2C Global Systems, Inc., a penny stock priced at two cents per share, said it could be dispensing water in six to eight months.

The effort to export Alaska water to a thirsty world is not without risk. The promoters have a contract with Sitka to buy

3 billion gallons of water per year at a penny per gallon. The water would come from Blue Lake, which is 7 miles from the town, and loaded onto tankers that would reach India in 30 days.

In a recent National Geographic article, Terry Trapp, a Colorado businessman and head of the True Alaska Bottling Co., a partner of S2C Global Systems, acknowledged there are major economic and logistical issues to be solved.

“Anytime you do something that’s never been done before, you’re going to have a lot of challenges,” Trapp said.

There are water shortages and people who need water all over the world,” Trapp told the magazine. “But the people in the most dire straits are in the Middle East.”

At Sawmill Cove in Sitka, tankers would be loaded by underwater pipe at a rate of up to 32 million gallons per day. The World Water Hub in India would be a big step, the promoters say.

From India, smaller ships could take water to Iraq in four days.

“India itself provides a particularly significant growth market for the packaged waters with a current population of

1.15 billion people, an emerging middle class and an increasing clean water shortage,” the company said in a press release earlier this month.

“Our Alaskan mountain water is so pure it requires no treatment except to remove organics that might be present through the natural cycle,” S2C said.

Tankers could be just one of the ways in which water might be transported. A Japanese company is studying the option of filling giant plastic bags of fresh water that would be towed through the ocean.

A writer for TheAtlantic.com says that S2C Global has tried various enterprises in the last nine years, starting off as the “Sun Vacation Club” in 2001 and later becoming “United Athletes.” It changed its name to S2C Global and entered the water business. The most recent annual SEC report said, “to date the company has little or no revenues,” TheAtlantic.com editor Alexis Madrigal wrote in a posting on the Sitka export plan.

The SEC report said the company plans to sell water for two to three cents per gallon at the loading point in Sitka, which is two to three times as much as it pays the city for the water.

The license requires the company to pay at least $200,000 per year to Sitka, whether or not water has been sold.

“The market for the water is significant as more than 50 percent of the world’s population lives in water stressed areas,” the company says. But the cost of shipping and the lack of offloading facilities are “major stumbling blocks” to be overcome.

Shades of Wally Hickel and the water pipeline. But in a world where people will pay $1 for a glass of bottled water, anything seems possible.