The Water Food Energy Climate Nexus (Pt. 1)
by Eamon Keane
“Before the world’s fossil
fuels are finally exhausted, it is likely
that their extraction will require an
Gérard
Velter, general
manager of Veolia Water for Africa, Middle East and India
“When
measured
in calories, the
energy market is twenty times the food market. So if governments would
replace
only 10% of global energy consumption with first-generation biofuels,
they in
the same stroke would double agricultural water withdrawals”
Peter
Braebeck-Letmathe,
Chairman, Nestle Group
“The share of biofuels in total use of coarse grains
is projected to increase until 2015, reaching 13%”
UN FAO Agricultural Outlook 2010-2019
“The area currently under cultivation is 1.5 billion
hectares, so if all that extra land could be used it would represent an
increase of one-third. In fact a lot of it either should be left alone
for
environmental reasons or would be too expensive to farm.”
The Economist special report on
feeding the world
Given
the
above quotes, it is a
wonder that most energy outlooks pay only cursory attention to the
interrelationship between water, food, energy and climate.
Signs of stress in the water-food-energy
complex are visible in the record high food prices, dropping water
tables and the
need for cooling in power plants is on vivid display in northern Japan.
Do you know
how/if it will affect your investments? Maplecroft's water
security index shows nearly the entire Middle East and North
Africa,
the origin of much of the world's oil, as under extreme risk of water
scarcity. There’s
a nice graphic in the World
Economic Forum’s Global Risks 2011 which highlights some of the
water-food-energy interactions in
Figure 1. I’ll try to concisely address them in this series.
Energy-Water Nexus
Figure 2
shows the water required to extract and refine energy, while Figure 3
shows the energy required to make different forms of electricity. The
water
needed in primary extraction of oil, gas and coal is not that
significant,
however it depends on local availability. For instance in China’s
Shaanxi
Province, the coal reserves cannot be tapped due to lack of water. The plan is to
desalinate sea water and pump it uphill for 600 km: “We
need water, and the sea can provide it”.
The
oil industry uses some 220
mb/d of water for enhanced oil
recovery, for an
average of about 3 mb/d water per mb/d
oil. This is about 0.3% of global water use (4,500
bn m3/year or 77,500 mb/d). In some cases this will be the
reinjection of the
water cut, however where steam injection is used, the quality is
required to be
higher. For fossil fuel extraction, the issue is not the absolute
volume of
water but the environmental pollution that inadequate environmental
care can
cause. An estimated 12,000
miles of waterways are adversely affected by abandoned coal mines in
the US.
Shale gas uses relatively low volumes of water, but a few cowboy fraccers could lead to the contamination
of rivers or groundwater and so close regulation is required.
The
elephant in the energy-water
nexus is biofuels, with irrigated corn requiring up to 100,000 litres
per GJ.
Converted to oil, this is an impressive waste of 3687 mb/d water
per mb/d of oil equivalent, or 4.8% of the
world’s
water consumption. This is the number one reason why first generation
biofuels are doa
once governments recognise
water constraints.
Power
generation
uses significant quantities of water. Due to the massive
volumes of
water used in open loop cooling in old designs of nuclear and some
fossil fuel
power plants, in 2005 41%
of American water abstraction (withdrawal
from a water
Part
2 will look at the food-water
nexus.
The Water Food Energy Climate Nexus (Pt. 1) was posted on AltEnergyStocks.com.
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