Tag Archives: water supply

water recycling in the (U.S.) west

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Wired has an article on water recycling, also known as “toilet to tap”. A stat I didn’t know is that about 10% of California’s wastewater is currently recycled. As they point out, getting new membrane plants up and running requires a lot of lead time, so if we want them up and running in a decade now is the time to start.

Singapore has invested heavily in membranes, although the water scarcity situation there has an added geopolitical dimension that makes it somewhat of a no-brainer. Their recycled water is pure enough to be used for industrial purposes such as semi-conductor plants. For drinking water, they just divert the recycled water back into a reservoir, suck it out again and put it through the normal treatment process, which somewhat ironically makes it a bit dirtier. But as this article points out, you don’t really want to drink nothing but distilled water.

Thinking about the west though, agricultural is a big issue, and for agriculture you don’t need membranes. Plain old wastewater treatment will work just fine.

Chemicals are a concern for me. The membranes won’t necessarily remove all those cleaning chemicals, personal care chemicals, lawn and garden chemicals, pesticides and pharmaceuticals we use on a daily basis. Nor will regular old water and wastewater treatment. If we are serious about doing something about those, we need to tackle them at the source and find safe, effective substitutes.

February 2021 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: For people who just don’t care that much about plants and animals, the elevator pitch on climate change is it is coming for our houses and it is coming for our food and water.

Most hopeful story: It is possible that mRNA technology could cure or prevent herpes, malaria, flu, sickle cell anemia, cancer HIV, Zika and Ebola (and obviously coronavirus). With flu and coronavirus, it may become possible to design a single shot that would protect against thousands of strains. It could also be used for nefarious purposes, and to protect against that are ideas about what a biological threat surveillance system could look like.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: At least one serious scientist is arguing that Oumuamua was only the tip of an iceberg of extraterrestrial objects we should expect to see going forward.

considering local government policy in water risk

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This paper is about incorporating local government and utility policies/actions in measures of water risk, which in the past have tended to focus on physical measurements. This makes sense because there are some very water scarce places that have managed their limited resources well, and there are some moderately water scarce places where political and bureaucratic mismanagement of resources have led to crises. This probably makes some sense because when the lack of water is starkly obvious (if your country is a desert for example), it is impossible to ignore whereas when the problem is only going to crop up under extreme conditions, local politicians and less competent bureaucrats can ignore it the vast majority of time and nobody will raise the alarm. Better data might help make these crises more predictable and preventable, rather than seeming to sneak up out of nowhere.

Mapping Public Water Management by Harmonizing and Sharing Corporate Water Risk Information

by Colin Strong, Paul Reig, Julian Köbel and Cindy Noe – March 2018

In response to water crises across the globe, data on biophysical conditions associated with water risk have increasingly been collected and understood. However, a complete assessment of water risk also requires an understanding of public water management. Currently there is a lack of global comparable data on public water management, leading to incomplete assessments of risk and suboptimal risk mitigation activities. To fill in that gap in data, this Technical Note proposes the creation of a global comparable geodatabase of public water management indicators to spur tangible improvements in water management. The geodatabase will be populated by crowdsourcing data through the risk assessments of multinational companies that are incentivized to share anonymized public water management as an innovative risk reduction practice.

Phoenix’s water supply

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Phoenix wasn’t on the recent list I posted about the cities most likely to experience a serious water crisis, but maybe it should have been. According to The Guardian:

Phoenix gets less than eight inches of rainfall each year; most of the water supply for central and southern Arizona is pumped from Lake Mead, fed by the Colorado river over 300 miles away…

That river is drying up. This winter, snow in the Rocky Mountains, which feeds the Colorado, was 70% lower than average. Last month, the US government calculated that two thirds of Arizona is currently facing severe to extreme drought…

The Phoenix area draws from groundwater, from small rivers to the east, and from the mighty Colorado. The Hoover Dam holds much of the Colorado’s flow in the vast Lake Mead reservoir, but the river itself is sorely depleted. That water has now dropped to within a few feet of levels that California, Nevada and Arizona, which all rely on it, count as official shortages. Lake Powell, the reservoir at the other end of the Grand Canyon, similarly averages half its historic levels.

Let’s review – snowmelt, rainfall, and groundwater all disappearing, and the city continues to grow.

11 cities most likely to run out of drinking water

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BBC has a list of the 11 cities most likely to run out of drinking water. Cape Town, South Africa is not on the list, because it is out of drinking water. Here’s the list:

  1. Sao Paulo
  2. Bangalore
  3. Beijing
  4. Cairo
  5. Jakarta
  6. Moscow
  7. Istanbul
  8. Mexico City
  9. London
  10. Tokyo
  11. Miami

London and Tokyo surprised me, while some of the high-growth developing capitals didn’t surprise me but are nonetheless extremely concerning. There are plenty of cities that probably would be on the list but aren’t because they have invested massively in desalination. many of the coastal cities on this list may ultimately have to follow suit, or else convince their national governments to invest in major pipeline projects. And this is just drinking water, of course. Food has to be grown elsewhere and brought in to all the world’s cities, and industry also has water needs. Ecosystems also need water, but does anyone expect them to be anywhere other than last on this list?

High and Dry

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Nature has a review of a new book on worldwide groundwater depletion. Remember, we are losing glaciers and snowpack in important food-growing regions at the same time it appears we are seeing more extreme and long-lasting droughts. Groundwater overpumping seems to be a wound we are inflicting on ourselves at the same time we are dealing with these external threats.

Some 95% of unfrozen fresh water resides unsung and underground, dimly visible at the bottom of a well or gushing from a pump. Big cities such as Buenos Aires and entire countries, including Germany, depend hugely on groundwater. About 70% of it goes into irrigation, accounting for more than half of irrigated agriculture — which in turn provides nearly half of the global food basket. In large parts of India, groundwater is egregiously overdrawn. And everywhere, aquifers are poorly measured and managed. As a result, no scientific consensus exists on the details of this vast and vital source of fresh water — although there is consensus on the fact that we face a worldwide problem.

In High and Dry, hydrologist William Alley and science writer Rosemary Alley encapsulate the crisis in a description of the US High Plains Aquifer, which spans eight states from South Dakota to Texas. “This virtual ocean of groundwater, which accumulated over thousands of years, is being used up in decades,” they write. In three ways, the book provides a deep and broad understanding of groundwater use and abuse, mostly in the United States but with some international scope…

The well could empty for millions more. The United Nations Development Programme notes that, in 2011, more than 40 countries experienced water stress; of those, 10 have nearly depleted their renewable freshwater supply. By 2050, one in four people globally may be hit by periodic shortages. The near future could see refugee numbers swell, to include more people without water.

the path to water innovation

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Brookings has a new paper called The Path to Water Innovation. Here’s an excerpt:

The primary barriers to innovation are related to the way that the many layers of governmental agencies and water entities manage the nation’s water sector. Among the main management and policy barriers are (1) unrealistically low water pricing rates; (2) unnecessary regulatory restrictions; (3) the absence of regulatory incentives; (4) lack of access to capital and funding; (5) concerns about public health and possible risks associated with adopting new technologies with limited records; (6) the geographical and functional fragmentation of the industry; and (7) the long life expectancy, size, and complexity of most water systems. Although the last three factors are inherent to the water sector and hard to change, substantial policy reforms are feasible that could alter pricing, regulation, and finance in the water sector—all in ways that would encourage innovation.

We focus on several recommendations: (1) pricing policies that would both better align with the full economic cost of supplying water and decouple revenues from the volume of water supplied; (2) regulatory frameworks to create an open and flexible governance environment that is innovation friendly and encourages valuable new technologies; and (3) financing and funding mechanisms, such as a public benefit charge on water, that can help raise sufficient funds to implement innovative solutions. As has been demonstrated in the clean energy sector, implementation of these policy reforms would facilitate greater innovation in the water sector. In addition, we recommend the creation of a state-level water innovation vision that would identify state-specific innovation opportunities and policies, along with state innovation offices to help implement the vision across the many varied agencies and firms relevant to the sector. While we expect these state water innovation offices would become common, a small group of states with the greatest water challenges—such as California, Florida, and Texas, or a consortium of like-challenged states in a region such as the West—would begin the process. Based on the lessons learned, other states could follow.