What about all these other nexuses? Nexi?

More and more, organizations are not only talking about the water-energy nexus — but the food-water-energy nexus, or the energy-water-food-climate nexus.

Academia and Research Institutions
Last year, on Earth Day, Stanford University started organizing an annual gathering that brought together many of its schools and institutes into conversation with each other. The “Connecting the Dots: The Food, Energy, Water, and Climate Nexus” symposium brought together the TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy, the Center on Food Security and the Environment, the Woods Institute for the Environment, and Stanford’s School of Earth Sciences.

The 2011 “Connecting the Dots” Annual Symposium. (Video courtesy of Stanford University)

In the above video, the opening speaker explains why the interdisciplinary gathering is important: “The great global challenges of the century of providing clean and affordable enrgy, adequate food and improved nutrition, clean water for people and ecosystems, a protected and sustained environment and planetary life support system–all these are tightly linked to each other.” The speakers presented on a range of topics, including global food challenge for the 21st century, competition for biomass as both a source for food and energy, and how aquaculture is linked to food security.

As a graduate student who is familiar with the bureaucracies of higher education, I realize that it is no small feat to bring so many schools and institutions together in one room and have them talk about the intersection of all these issues. The fact that these gatherings are happening signals to me that talking about these issues in an interconnected way is important because the challenges we face are becoming more and more urgent.

International and Regional Organizations
But it’s not only academics and researchers who are recognizing this. Just this past week, the United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP18, was held in Doha, Qatar. A panel discussion called “It Never Rains in the GCC” focused on the energy-water-food-climate nexus. The panel brought together experts from international, governmental, and organizations such as World Economic Forum, Global Water Partnership, Environment Agency Abu Dhabi, New York University, and UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

The GCC is the Gulf Cooperation Council, a loose political and economic alliance of six Gulf countries: Saudia Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Oman, Qatar, and Bahrain. The title of the panel refers to the fact that the Gulf region is very arid and suffers from extreme water scarcity. The area is heavily dependent on food imports and its freshwater supplies come largely from desalination processes. In response, GCC governments have announced over $100 billion of investments in desalination and water recycling by 2016, as well as over $200 billion of investments in energy efficiency and renewable and nuclear energy, following the development model launched the UAE.

Gulf countries are undertaking massive renewable energy projects to address water-energy-climate nexus issues. UAE has emerged as a pioneer in this sector with solar initiatives. (Image courtesy of AFP)

Despite the region’s well-known oil resources, the UAE wants to substantially incorporate renewable sources to the traditional mix of fossil fuels for energy generation. The country set the region’s first renewable energy targets, which mandate over 2500 megawatts of solar, waste-to-energy, and wind projects in coming years. To address issues related to the energy-water-food-climate nexus, it has also implemented things like sustainability building and public lighting codes, air-conditioning performance, agricultural and landscaping efficiency standards to reduce energy and water consumption.

Non-Profits
In the non-profit arena, environmentally-oriented philanthropic organizations such as Grace Communications Foundations are helping consumers recognize this at the individual level. Their food-water-energy nexus home page uses a venn diagram (remember these from elementary school?) to visually highlight the intersection of these issues. They explain that “because actions related to one system can impact one or both of the other systems, it is necessary to take a nexus approach.”

Grace Foundations focuses on education and provides suggestions on how people, at the individual level, can reduce their impacts on the nexus. Some of these suggestions include things like installing solar photovoltaic panels in the home, buying energy-efficient appliances, using mass transit or biking, saving water (and thus energy) by taking shorter showers, eating less meat (livestock requires a lot of water), etc.

So what?
It is important to recognize that these organizations aren’t approaching the food-water-energy nexus or the water-energy-food-climate nexus (pick whichever word you’d like to come first) in the same way.

Scholars and researchers at Stanford are looking at how issues in one of these areas affect those in another and at patterns of connections at different levels, for example, how climate change will disproportionately affect vulnerable populations in developing countries. GCC governments’ responses to the nexus is mitigation- and management-oriented, with a heavy development and investment component to it. Grace Foundations provides information and educational tools to make the public more aware, and aims at helping individuals, as consumers, make small changes to decrease their impact on nexus issues.

The “a-b-c” nexus terms are becoming buzzwords. First it was “a-b” — water-energy, energy-food. Now it’s “c-a-b” — food-water-energy. And even “a-b-c-d” — water-energy-food-climate. Which word or permutation of words will get tacked on next?

Despite the fact that the “nexus” terms may be getting a bit overused, it is important to not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Meaning that it’s very significant that people from different societal sectors — academia, government, civil society — are all recognizing that these environmental issues of water, energy, food, and climate are tightly interlinked. Our environment is a delicate ecosystem of checks and balances and what happens in one of these areas have significant impacts on what happens in the others.

The widening water-energy gap in China

To meet water demands, Beijing have started melting snow. (Image courtesy of Agence France-Presse)

On a wintry morning in Beijing in 2010, two large vehicles drove around Tiananmen Square with a rather odd objective. Instead of trying to melt snow to clear the roads, these vehicles, equipped with high-powered heaters, were instead melting snow and collecting it to increase the city’s water supply. Designated snow-melting areas were spread across the city. The snow collected would be stored in dammed sections of three rivers that run through the municipality and eventually be used for road cleaning, irrigation, and to supplement river levels.

Beijing had to take these snow-melting measures to meet the demands of its rapidly-growing population: the city’s consumption of 3.55 billion cubic meters (938 billion gallons) of water in 2009 surpassed its water supply of 2.18 billion cubic meters (576 billion gallons). In 2010, Beijing’s population was 19.6 million; in 2011, it was almost 20.2 million. In one year, the city grew by 600,000 people — basically the size of Boston.

The water-energy gap
What is happening in Bejing is a microcasm of China’s growing problem of increasing energy demands and decreasing water supply. This is not unique to China. In previous posts, we have seen examples of this in the U.S., the Middle East, and Australia. However, it is particularly stunning in the case of China because it is the world’s most populous nation and has the second largest economy. Furthermore, China is the world’s driest countries.

Over the last decade alone, China’s economy created 70 million new jobs. According to the World Bank, this year, the same economy generated the world’s largest markets for cars, steel, cement, glass, housing, energy, power plants, wind turbines, solar panels, highways, high-speed rail systems, airports — the list goes on. China’s economy has increased more than eightfold since the mid-1990s and water consumption has increased more than 15 percent in that period. At the moment that China is solidifying its standing as a superpower, competition between energy and water threatens to halt its progress.

The gap is signified by a converging of three important trends which highlights the crucial relationship of the water-energy nexus: rising economic development, increasing energy demand, and water scarcity.

The gap is exacerbated by growth and climate change
China has roughly 617 billion cubic meters (163 trillion gallons) of water available for all uses. About 63 percent is for agriculture, 12 percent is for municipal and domestic use, and 23 percent for industry use.

China’s total water resource has dropped more than 13 percent since 2000, meaning it has lost 350 billion cubic meters (93 trillion gallons) of its water supply. To put this in this perspective, each year, China has lost as much water as the amount that flows through the mouth of the Mississipi River in nine months. Chinese climatologists say a lot of this is because of climate change, which is disrupting patterns of rain and snowfall.

In that same period since 2000, coal production has tripled to 3.47 billion metric tons (3.83 billion short tons) a year. National projections say that the country’s coal industry will need to produce an additional one billion metric tons of coal annually by 2020.

Freshwater needed for mining, processing, and consuming coal accounts for 80 percent of industrial water use in China; at roughly 112  billion cubic meters (30 trillion gallons) a year, coal industry consumes one-fifth of the country’s water. China’s demand for energy, particularly for coal, is outpacing its freshwater supply.

Most of China’s precipitation occur in the south while the north and west are relatively dry. (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

Beijing’s dire need for water also reveals another constraint of China’s water supply, which in and of itself is not new. 80 percent of the rainfall and snowmelt (two major sources of freshwater supply) occurs in the south, while the mostly desert regions of the north and west receive 20 percent of the precipitation.

What’s new is that China’s surging economic growth is fueling a fast-expanding industrial sector. Industry uses 70 percent of the country’s energy, and more energy supplies is needed to meet the booming growth. However, unlike its water supply, China’s coal reserves (its main energy resource) are mostly found in the north. The problem, say government officials, is that there is not enough water to mine, process, and consume those reserves, and still develop the urban and manufacturing centers that China envisions for the region.

What the Chinese government is and is not doing
The national and provincial governments have been incredibly effective in enacting and enforcing a range of water conservation and efficients measures. These policies have sharply reduced waste, shifted water from agriculture to industry, and slowed the growth in national water consumption. For example, Beijing and China’s major cities are retrofitting their sewage treatment systems to recycle wastewater for use in washing clothes, flushing toilets, and other greywater applications. In short, China has been radically changing traditional approaches to water management.

Though it appears that many levels of government leadership and management clearly understand the crucial relationship between water and energy, they are focusing only on a particular aspect of the nexus. Fuqiang Yang, director of the World Wildlife Fund’s Global Climate Solutions project in Beijing, captures this mindset well: “People outside China talk about [greenhouse gas] emissions. Inside China, water is the highest priority.”

The irony is that the increasing greenhouse gas emissions coming from the fast-expanding coal industry is contributing to the water shortage problem. Emissions are the main contributor of climate change, which scientists say is responsible for disrupting patterns of and decreasing rain and snowfall in China.

Finding solutions to address freshwater shortages is important in the short term. However, most of the current efforts to mitigate water scarcity are “band-aid” solutions (melting snow, retrofitting sewage systems, rerouting water geographically, etc.), while the main cause of the issue — the the expansion of industry which demand more coal to be burned, which in turn affects climate patterns, causing less rainfall — remains largely unaddressed. For now, anyway.

The sutures won’t hold
Another way the government is trying to reduce freshwater consumption is through transitions to renewable energy sources, which require less water than fossil fuel sources. China has launched enormous new programs of solar, wind, hydro, and seawater-cooled nuclear power. However, this is not making that much of a dent on supplying current energy demands, 70% of which is supplied by coal.

The water-energy ravine is physically manifested in this image as a pipe drains used water at the Baorixile coal mine in Inner Mongolia. (Image courtesy of Greenpeace)

Today, China consumes more than 600 billion cubic meters (159 trillion gallons) of water annually. By 2020, China, the largest producer and consumer of coal, will mine and use up to 4.5 billion metric tons (5 billion short tons) of it. Largely as a result of this, the country’s consumption of water is projected to reach 670 billion cubic meters (177 trillion gallons) annually.

China has enough coal. The globally-significant question that needs to be answered is where China will find enough water to make developing new coal reserves possible. While they help, band-aid solutions such as melting snow won’t be able to bridge the increasingly gaping ravine between energy demands and water shortages.

Desalination, part II: A (relatively) short primer on the technology

In the last post, we looked at the tremendous growth of the desalination industry in the last few decades, as well as the benefits and drawbacks of desalination plants. This post will look at the technology of desalination, especially the major desalination methods in use globally today.

Desalination Technologies

Although the illustration shows the desalination system for a reverse osmosis process, the key elements are largely the same for all desalination methods. (Image courtesy of OnEarth Magazine)

The two main water sources for desalination are seawater and brackish water. The five key elements of a desalination system are largely the same for both sources. They consist of:

1) Intake — getting the water from its source to the processing facility;
2) Pretreatment — removing suspended solids to prepare the water for further processing;
3) Desalination — removing dissolved solids, primarily salts and other inorganic matter, from a water source;
4) Post-treatment — adding chemicals to the desalinated water to prevent corrosion of downstream infrastructure pipes; and
5) Concentrate management and freshwater storage — handling and disposing or reusing the waste from the desalination, and storing freshwater before it’s provided to consumers.

We will mainly focus on the third stage — desalination — where the majority of advancements in technology have happend. There are three categories of desalination methods: membrane, thermal or distillation, and ion exchange. The thermal and membrane methods are the two most widely-used today. The ion exchange process won’t be discussed here since ion exchangers are only economical in removing small amounts of salt. The process of ion exchange is very effective at producing ultrapure water, but is limited at desalting on a large scale.

Cumulative global capacity of installed desalination plants for thermal and membrane technology. (Image courtesy of Desalination: A National Perspective)

Before 1998, most desalination plants were thermal. However, in recent years, technological improvements in reverse osmosis (RO) desalination, a membrane filtration method,  has made the number of plants using membrane technology surpass that of thermal. As of 2008, membrane processes accounted for 56 percent of desalination capacity worldwide while thermal processes accounted for 43 percent. Small-scale ion exchangers and hybrid processes accounted for the remaining one percent.

Below, I’ll provide an overview of the membrane and thermal methods because currently, they are the two primary categories of desalination used at the utility scale. Although a number of different desalination processes fall under each of these categories, for each category, I will focus more on the specific process that is most prevalently used in desalination plants worldwide. For the membrane process, this is RO filtration; for the thermal process, this is multistage flash distillation (MSF).

Membranes Methods
Membranes can be designed to selectively allow or prevent the passage of certain ions, including salts. Membranes play an important role in the separation of salts in natural processes (such as osmosis and dialysis), and this principle has been adapted for commercial use. Commercially-available membrane processes include RO, nanofiltration (NF), electrodialysis (ED), and electrodialysis reversal (EDR).

Membrane technologies can be used not only for desalting brackish water and seawater sources, but also for treating wastewater because of their ability to remove contaminants other than salts (e.g., organic contaminants, bacteria, and viruses). Typically, 35 to 60 percent of the seawater fed into a membrane process is recovered as product water. For brackish water desalination, water recovery can range from 50 to 90 percent.

Reverse Osmosis Filtration

Natural osmosis and reverse osmosis. (Image courtesy of http://www.filterfast.com)

In the natural process of osmosis, solvents (such as water) diffuse or pass through a semipermeable membrane (think cheese cloth) that blocks the passage of solutes (such as salts). More specifically, when solvents of different concentrations of solutes are separated by a membrane, the solvent wants to move from the low to the high concentration of solutes to achieve equilibrium. At this point, osmotic pressure across the membrane becomes equal (usually 350 pounds per square inch).

RO, as the name implies, is the opposite of what happens in osmosis. A pressure greater than the osmotic pressure is applied to saline water to cause freshwater to flow through the membrane while holding back the solutes, or salts. The water that comes out of this process is so pure that they have to add back salts and minerals to make it taste like drinking water.

As mentioned in the section above, new membrane desalination capacity has surpassed new thermal capacity mostly due to significant advances in RO technology. RO desalination is popular because of its sustainability, cost effectiveness, and simplicity. RO plants typically use less energy than thermal distillation, which has led to a reduction in overall desalination costs over the past decade.

The largest RO plant in the world, located near Ashkelon, Israel, produces 320,000 cubic meters of water daily (m3/day) — about 6% of the country’s total water needs.  The cost of producing one cubic meter of water is a bit more than $0.50 USD, one of the world’s lowest prices for desalinated water.

 The Ashkelon plant located on the Mediterranean coast is the world’s largest seawater reverse osmosis (SWRO) plant that is producing water at one of the lowest costs. (Video courtesy of YouTube)

Thermal Methods
The basic principle of the thermal processes is to apply heat to create water vapor, which then condenses into pure water, separating it from most of the salts and impurities. Thermal processes include multistage flash (MSF), multiple effect distillation (MED), and mechanical vapor compression (MVC). Thermal processes are configured to use and reuse the energy required to evaporate water.

Thermal distillation was the earliest method used to desalinate seawater on a commercial basis. Thermal processes are used across the Middle East and will continue to be a logical choice for the region for several reasons.

First, the regional seas are very saline, hot, and periodically have high concentrations of organics, which are challenging conditions for RO desalination technology. Second, RO plants have only recently approached the large production capacities required in this region, so much of the existing desalination capacity is thermal-based. Third, dual-purpose cogeneration facilities built there combine water production with electric power generation to take advantage of shared intake and discharge structures, as well as to improve energy efficiencies (usually by 10-15 percent). These cogeneration facilities allow the thermal desalination processes to use low-temperature waste steam from the power generation turbines. These reasons, combined with the artificially-low cost of energy in the region, make thermal processes the dominant desalination technology in the Middle East.

Multistage Flash Distillation

MSF is the most robust of all desalination technologies and is capable of very large production capacities. The number of stages used in the MSF process is directly related to how efficiently the system will use and reuse the heat that it is provided.

The general process of a multistage flash distillation plant. (Image courtesy of http://www.sidem-desalination.com)

The MSF process consists of a series of stages, or chambers, maintained at decreasing pressures from the first stage (hot) to the last stage (cold). In this illustration of the process, seawater flows in on the right side through tubes in the upper part of the chambers where it is warmed by the water vapor produced in each stage. Its temperature increases from sea temperature to the temperature of the heater on the left as it travels in that direction. The seawater then flows through the heater (the squiggly line through the cloud, which represents steam) where it receives the  necessary heat for the process.

At the outlet of the heater, when entering the bottom of the left-most chamber (the first stage), the seawater is overheated compared to the temperature and pressure of that stage. It will immediately release heat (known as “flashing“), and thus vapor, to reach equilibrium with the conditions in that chamber. The vapor is then condensed into freshwater on the tubes at the top of the chamber. The process takes place again in the next stage, and so on until the last and coldest stage (the chamber on the right end). The freshwater builds up and is extracted from the coldest stage (the blue-colored distillate flow). Seawater slightly concentrates from stage to stage and builds up the brine flow at the bottom, which is also extracted from the last stage.

The state of desalination technology today: comparisons and areas for improvements
No single method of desalination is the “best” choice. Globally, both thermal and membrane technologies are used widely for seawater desalination. Both processes require energy for the separation of salts, and various energy sources can be used. Brackish water is typically desalinated using membrane processes (such as RO, NF, or ED).

The combined energy requirements of thermal technologies are greater than those of membrane technologies, but it is not so simple to compare the total energy use of these very different processes. Thermal processing such as MSF and MED are capable of using waste, or low-grade, heat (such as in cogeneration facilities mentioned above), which can significantly improve the economics of thermal desalination. For example, many of the largest modern cruise ships use the MED desalination process to make freshwater at sea; MED requires 20 to 33 percent of the energy required for RO and the ships’ propulsion engines can provide the required heat.

The major desalination technologies in use today are generally efficient and reliable, but the cost and energy requirements are still high. Ongoing research efforts are aimed at either reducing cost (by powering plants with less-expensive energy sources, such as low-grade heat) or overcoming operational limits of a process (by increasing energy efficiency).

Improvements will be incremental since the current technologies are relatively mature. Ultimately, no desalination process can overcome the thermodynamic limit of desalination, and we’re pretty close to approaching that limit.

Desalination, part I: The challenges of applying ethics in water scarcity

One of the most iconic movie of the 1990’s that foreshadows what the harsh environments of a resource-scarce future may look like is Waterworld. The movie opens with a voice-over narrator explaining that the polar ice caps have melted and the planet is covered by water. The camera pans from an image of Earth into a lone trimaran sailing in a vast, endless sea.

The harsh environmental future of Waterworld. (Video courtesy of YouTube)

Within a few shots, the opening scene has not only established a vibrant image of an extreme and dire future, but has illustrated the conspicuous lack of basic resources that most of us in developed countries take for granted — things such as potable water; land for growing food and raising animals; and means of electricity generation. The male protagonist Mariner, in his post-apocalyptic warrior dress, pees into a small container. He then pours the urine into a rudimentary, homemade filter of funnels and gizmos, and drinks what comes out the other side — a process called desalination.

Drinking one’s own (albeit filtered) urine signals a certain direness under conditions of extreme survival. But desalination — the process by which unpotable water, such as seawater, brackish water, and wastewater, is purified into freshwater for human consumption and use — is not some far-fetched technology we will eventually need in a distant future.

Desalination’s recent global development
Desalination technology has been used for centuries, if not longer, largely as a means to convert seawater to drinking water aboard ships and carriers. Advances in the technology’s development in the last 40 years has allowed desalination to provide water at large scale.

From a global perspective, desalination technology is applied for several purposes: providing freshwater for industrial sectors; supplying drinkable water for the domestic and public sectors; and acquiring water for emergency situations, such as army and refugee operations.

Desalination plays a particularly crucial role in sustaining life and economy in the Persian Gulf. According to Corrado Sommaria, the president of the International Desalination Association (IDA): “Some countries in the Gulf rely on desalination to produce 90 percent or more of their drinking water, and the overall capacity installed in this region amounts to about 40% of the world’s desalinated water capacity.” Much of this is in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Bahrain.

Global desalination capacity by country and total capacity. (Image courtesy of Desalination: A National Perspective)

The remaining global capacity is mainly in North America, Europe, Asia (which each have about 15 percent), and North Africa (which has six percent). (A facility’s rated capacity is the full output it is technically capable of, though in reality, it usually produces under that rated value.)  Australia‘s capacity is also increasing substantially. Global desalination capacity has been increasing dramatically since 1960 to its 2008 value of 42 million cubic meters of water daily (m3/day). Of this cumulative capacity, approximately 37 million m3/day is in use. From the above graph, we can see that worldwide desalination capacity more than doubled between 1993 and 2003, and continues to grow steadily today.

Proponents and critics of desalination
Estimates indicate that, by 2025, 1.8 billion people will be living in regions with absolute water scarcity, and two-thirds of the world population could be under stress conditions. Desalinated water is possibly one of the only water resources that does not depend on climate patterns. Desalination appears especially promising and suitable for dry regions.

In one of the country’s biggest infrastructure projects in its history, Australia’s five largest cities are spending $13.2 billion on desalination plants. In two years, when the last plant is scheduled to be up and running, these cities will draw up to one-third of their water from the sea.

Proponents of desalination, like IDA, argue that it sustains population growth, creates jobs, and even supports the development of  energy industries (such as the oil and gas industries in the Middle East). Desalination stops dependence on long-distance water sources and prevents local traditional water sources from being over-exploited. Furthermore, research and development has made great strides in making desalination plants increasingly energy efficient and cost-effective.

However, there are a number of desalination plants worldwide that have been described as uneconomical and unproductive.  Many environmentalists and economists oppose any further expansion of desalination because of its price and effects on the environment. Energy is the most expensive component of running a desalination plant; it is often responsible for one-third to more than half of the cost. Therefore, the cost of desalinated freshwater is more vulnerable to the fluctuation of energy prices than any other water source.

A desalination intake pipeline near Nuweiba, Egypt. (Image courtesy of prilfish)

Environmentally, desalination plants emits large amounts of greenhouse gas emissions because they are so energy-intense. Furthermore, they degrade marine environments through both the intake and discharge processes. Marine organisms such as invertebrates, fish, and even mammals are killed on the intake screen and smaller organisms, such as eggs, larvae, and smaller fish, that are able to pass through the screen are killed during processing stages. After separating the impurities from the water, the plant discharges the waste, also known as brine, back into the sea. Because brine contains much higher concentrations of salt, it causes harm to the surrounding marine habitat.

In Australia, the mega infrastructure project is drawing fierce criticism and civic protests. Many citizens are angry about rising water bills and environmentalists are wary of the plants’ effect on the climate. Australia relies heavily on coal to generate most of its electricity and is already a major emitter of greenhouse gases — the principle cause of climate change. Ironically, one of the main reasons the country is in need of freshwater is because it’s still recovering from a decade-long drought that the government says was deepened by climate change. Therefore, desalination, which initially appears as an answer for providing freshwater, may in the long run exacerbate the intertwined energy- and water-scarcity cycle.

As scarcity increasingly becomes reality, an appeal to ethics will be challenging
The sentiments of the anti-desalination campaigner in the video below echoes this irony: “It is by a mile the most environmentally-unsound way toward security.” He and other critics say that more environmentally-friendly methods should be exhausted before resorting to desalination. These include mandating more efficient appliances, using less water, or recycling used water.

Australia’s desalination plant provides controversial solution to one of the world’s driest countries. (Video courtesy of Al Jazeera English)

When a society is accustomed to a certain level of access to a resource, it’s hard to ask its citizens to lower their consumption or reuse water based on the argument that it is an ethical choice. In many instances, we observe individual behaviors change in response to policy mandates or market costs. But when can we say that we’ve exhausted all other ways that are less environmentally-damaging? How much should consumption be reduced? How do we decide which water needs are necessary (e.g., water for drinking, agriculture, electricity generation) and which ones aren’t (e.g., water for golf courses) for a certain quality of life?

Waterworld highlights the harsh decisions people face in a scarce-resource future because of the heightened awareness for survival. Pirates raid small pockets of human settlements for resources, they have no qualms about kidnapping a child for the map tattooed on her back, and paranoid atoll residents are willing to kill the Mariner out of distrust. Violence pervades and there is little sense of civility or ethical codes of conduct.

Though the movie is suggested to take place in 2500, it is not hard to imagine that tensions and battling interests over resources will intensify in the not-so-distant future. Making ethical decisions about fair and equal distribution of resources is a challenge today, and will become increasingly more difficult as those resources diminish — even with the most sophisticated of technological developments.

What is the government doing about this?

Inaction at the federal level
In 2005, Congress mandated a federal water and energy roadmap. The Department of Energy partially responded to the call in December 2006 with a report on the interdependency of energy and water called  “Energy Demands on Water Resources.” Yet, to date, there is still no national research program directly aimed at understanding the intimate and complex relationship between water and energy in a comprehensive way.

Growing energy demands in the arid U.S. West

The greatest increases in population growth will happen in some of the U.S.’s most water-scarce areas. (Image courtesy of National Renewable Energy Laboratory)

There is growing concern whether an appropriately-routed and affordable supply of water will exist to support the U.S.’s growing electricity demands, in particular around matching geographical water availability to energy need. For example, in the 1990’s, the largest regional population growth of 25% occurred west of the Rocky Mountains, one of the most water deficient regions in the U.S. Water consumption in the western U.S. is much higher than other regions because of farming demands. It is estimated that over one million gallons of water is needed each year to irrigate one acre of farmland in arid conditions. This means that in 2000, the majority of freshwater withdrawals (86 percent) and irrigated acres (75 percent) were in the western states.

Managing water and energy together at the state level
State lawmakers and natural resource managers have traditionally addressed water and energy as two separate issues. However, water and energy are deeply connected, so the sustainability of one requires consideration of the other. Thus, resource managers and lawmakers in many places are beginning to take a more holistic approach to the management of water and energy.

At least nine states (Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Nevada, South Dakota, Washington, West Virgina, and Wisconsin) have statutes that recognize the nexus between water and energy. A statute is legislative law. Three states in the more arid West (Arizona, California, and Nevada) have statutes that specifically refer to the use of water for electricity power generation.

Arizona’s well-known cactus-dotted landscape is an indicator of its arid climate. (Image courtesy of eHow)

In Arizona, Statute § 45-156 requires electricity facilities to request legislative authorization in order to divert water to generate over 25,000 horsepower (18,642 Megawatt-hour) of electric energy. Statute § 45-166 says that an electricity generating plant (most of which are coal-operated) can use up 34,100 acre-feet of water each year, including water used for mining, coal transportation, and ash disposal.

In California, Code § 5001 exempts individuals who extract groundwater or surface water for generating electricity from submitting a “Notice of Extraction and Diversion of Water”. In Nevada, Statute § 533.372 says the State Engineer can approve or disapprove any application of water from beneficial use to a use that generates energy that will be exported out of Nevada.

What does this mean?
In California, generating electricity is one of the few reasons that exempts individuals from notifying the state that they are diverting water and how much they’re diverting. In contrast, in Arizona and Nevada, legislation is trying to apply some limits to the amount of water that can be used for electricity generation, or at least toward electricity that leaves the state.

I suspect one of the main reasons for the contrast is resource priorities. Arizona and Nevada are two of the most arid states in the U.S.: Nevada ranks number one and Arizona fourth for the least amount of annual precipitation. Nevada’s Division of Water Resources says its mission is “to conserve, protect, manage, and enhance the state’s water resources … through the appropriation and allocation of the public waters.” Arizona’s Department of Water Resources is stronger with their intention and directly say that the state places a high priority on managing its limited water.

A San Diego convenience store without electricity during the 2011 Southwest blackout. (Image courtesy of Associated Press)

California, in contrast, does not even make the top 10 most arid states based on annual precipitation. With the California electricity crisis of 2000 and 2001 and the one more recently in 2011 fresh in memory, California officials are much more worried about managing electricity demands and do whatever is necessary to avoid perennial summer blackouts. Understandably so — the early 2000’s electricity crisis costed the state $40 to $45 billion.

Taking a much harder look
Though they exhibit a step in addressing water and energy issues together, these state-level legislation have weak influence on the impacts that conventional electricity generation has on water supply and quality. “US policy makers continue to overlook the implications of increasing water scarcity when they evaluate the use of coal and nuclear power,” says a report, “The Hidden Costs of Electricity: Comparing the Hidden Costs of Power Generation Fuels,” released in September by the Civil Society Institute.

When it comes to water impacts, the report finds that renewable energy sources have the least water impact. However, coal, nuclear, and natural gas resources have the highest hidden costs. This is worrisome since these are also the three most dominant means of producing electricity in the U.S. today.

Fracking uses large amounts of water and has contaminated ground water in many documented cases. (Image courtesy of the film Gasland)

Coal and nuclear plants use (and lose) 300-1,000 gallons of water per Megawatt-hour (MWh). However, these plants withdraw a lot more water than that for its steam heating and cooling process — anywhere from 500 to 60,000 gallons per MWh depending on the cooling system. The water that is returned to the environment is wastewater which degrades river water quality. Furthermore, the mining processes for the energy resources in these plants (coal and uranium) contaminate groundwater. For natural gas, the major water costs come from extraction processes, such as fracking and coalbed methane recovery, which require large volumes of water and contaminate ground and surface water.

Arizona is beginning to regulate how much water can be used for electricity generation. But, the water-energy nexus issue is far more complex:

• How can we ensure the quality of water that returns to the environment after it’s used by power plants?
• How can power plants be more water efficient so there aren’t such vast differences in the amount of water required for cooling?
• How much water should be used for extraction and mining?
• How can these processes be better regulated to minimize contamination effects?
• How do we include water impacts to strengthen transitions to renewable energy sources?

All these are questions that have yet to be addressed by legislation and government management in an integrated way both at the state and national levels.

The need for a change in understanding

Last year, Texas experienced the worst single-year drought in recorded history. Ken Saathoff, an official with the state electric grid operator, said “we will be very concerned” if  it does not rain by spring. This seems odd at first. Why would someone who works in the electricity sector care so much about rainfall and drought?

Examples of interdependency between the water and carbon cycles. (Image courtesy of National Conference of State Legislatures)

Saathoff’s concern highlights the important relationship between two resources that has been gaining much attention (and concern) in recent years. Water and energy were once thought of and treated as separate issues. Growing population demands and resource shortages, however, underscores how much these two resources are interlinked.

Energy means a lot of things. We usually say we need to eat so we have the energy to do work. And that is what energy is fundamentally: the ability to do work. In this particular post, we’ll be talking about a specific kind of energy: electric energy. Electric energy plays an important role in almost every aspect of our lives: it lights stores, makes factories work, keeps the refrigerator cold, and powers our electronic devices.

What may not be as apparent is that electric energy also helps bring the water we use. The intersection of water and energy issues is known as the “water-energy nexus.” It points to how much energy is needed to pump, process, transfer, store, and dispose water. It also shows how much water is used to extract, generate, and transmit energy.

An overview of the process of extracting, generating, and transmitting electrical energy, and some of water’s role in the process. (Video courtesy of Energy Now!)

Most sources (including Sandia National Laboratories, National Conference of State Legislatures, and Circle of Blue) say that about 4% of national electricity use goes to moving and treating water. In some regions, this percentage is much higher. For example, the California Energy Commission reports water-related energy use constitute 19% of the state’s electricity and 32% of its natural gas. A large part of the issue is that where water is needed is not always where it is most abundant, requiring large amounts of energy to move water over distances.

Large, long-distance water aqueducts transport water to Southern California, requiring much energy along the way. (Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.)

Generating and distributing energy also require large amounts of water. The Network for Energy Choices says that U.S. power plants use more fresh water than irrigation while Sandia National Laboratories says that agricultural water use is still the highest. Despite arguments in ranking, most organizations (including Network for Energy Choices, Sandia National Laboratories, and National Renewable Energy Lab) agree that U.S. power production requires 140 to 200 billion gallons of water daily. That’s 200,000,000,000 gallons! This accounts for almost 50% of all national freshwater withdrawals.

This means that in times of drought, when rivers or reservoirs dry up, power plants in hard-hit areas may not have enough water to operate. Water is also crucial for other parts of energy production, including energy extraction, refining and processing, and transportation. For extraction, drawing oil and natural gas from the ground with hydraulic fracturing techniques requires copious amounts of water. For refining and processing, water is needed for refining oil and gas, as well as for growing and refining biofuels. For transportation, water is needed for hydrostatic testing of energy pipelines.

Given water’s tremendous role in energy production, it is no wonder that Saathoff was closely watching the Texas skies for rainfall last September. If drought conditions continued into spring, it would have major impacts on the state electric grid.

Director of the Stockholm International Water Institute Jakob Granit says that given the scarcity of water resources, stronger regional cooperation will be important in making sure power plants are located in the best places. The implication is that power plants should be located near abundant water sources so that 1) they are not as susceptible to climate change, and 2) less energy will be used to transport water over long distances.

Granit’s sentiments also point to an increasing trend of local and regional planners who realize the importance of examining water and energy issues together. The next blog post will look at what efforts are happening at the regional, state, and federal levels to address this critical and dynamic relationship. Stay tuned!