Water/energy Nexus Becoming a Vortex of Tension
By Kate Bachman | October 22, 2014
Category:
EDITORIAL_Coalitions, grass-roots community groups, and political caucuses are emerging to fight for water in what is becoming a new age of conflicts—some in the most unlikely regions.
In Texas of all places—wellspring of the U.S. oil and gas industry and geographic headquarters of the country’s petroleum refineries—a grass roots group of cowboy-hat wearing, snakeskin-boots-kickin’ Texans in Denton, outside of Dallas, are readying to vote on Nov. 4 on a hydraulic fracturing ban referendum over concerns about their water quality.
On Oct. 15 in Salt Lake City, a coalition of groups from the western states of drought-stricken California, Nevada, and Arizona banned together as Colorado River Connected to try to protect the headwaters of the Colorado River. They want to prevent what they call “devastating water projects that will further drain and pollute the Colorado Basin.” The projects they are referring to are plans to divert water from the Colorado River in Utah for hydropower projects there.
The Aral Sea in Central Asia began disappearing in the 1960s because of the diversion of its two feeder rivers for agriculture. This series of images illustrates consequences of poor water management. From left to right, the images were produced in 1977, 1998 and 2010. (Credit: U.S. Geological Survey EROS Data Center)
There’s still time to attend the Water 2.0 Event, supported by GE and Our Water Counts, on Nov. 3rd at GE Aviation Center in Cincinnati, Ohio. Contact Vince Caprio [email protected], www.waterinnovations.org
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Their concerns are not unfounded. The shrinking Aral Sea basin—once the fourth-largest lake in the world—is the poster child for overactive, irresponsible water diversion and its abysmal results (see lead image).
The water–energy nexus—the relationship between how much water is consumed and polluted to generate and transmit energy, and how much energy it takes to collect, clean, distribute, transport and store water—is whipping up into a conflict vortex as water sources are showing distress and growing populations and their growing thirst for energy increases.
![Figure 1: [Water-energy infographic] Infographic courtesy of the U.S. Department of Energy. Click image to view full sized.](https://www.fmanet.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/DOE_WaterEnergyinfographic.jpg)
Figure 1: [Water-energy infographic] Infographic courtesy of the U.S. Department of Energy. Click image to view full sized.
For example, “When severe drought affected more than a third of the U.S. in 2012, limited water availability constrained the operation of some power plants and other energy production activities, according to the report. Hurricane Sandy demonstrated the compounding ramifications of vital water infrastructure losing power.”
The DOE says that the recent boom in domestic unconventional oil and gas development—hydraulic fracturing, or fracking—has added complexity to the national dialogue on the relationship between energy and water resources. Indeed.
The Fret Over Fracking
Anti-fracking activists vehemently oppose the practice, citing its voracious consumption of water, estimated at between 1 to 8 million gallons of water per frack and contamination of that water with the use of 80 to 300 tons of poisonous chemicals such as arsenic, benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene as well as the release of methane (the raw gas of natural gas). A well may be fracked as many as 18 times.
Currently, fracturing is unregulated. The energy bill passed in 2005 under the Bush-Cheney administration exempted natural gas drilling from the Safe Drinking Water Act. It exempts companies from disclosing the chemicals used during hydraulic fracturing. It now is commonly referred to as the Halliburton Loophole.
The FRAC Act (Fracturing Responsibility and Awareness to Chemical Act) is a House bill intended to repeal the Halliburton Loophole and to require the natural gas industry to disclose the chemicals they use.
In the anti-fracking documentary, “Gasland,” director Josh Fox demonstrates evidence of fracking’s water contamination in a man’s home in proximity to a fracking site. As the man lights a match and turns on his faucet, a large flame erupts as the tap water—and its accompanying methane—flows.
In Favor of Fracking
Fracking supporters cite its facility as a domestic energy source, that natural gas extracted from the wells is comparatively clean-burning with low emissions, and—the trump card—the benefits it bestows as a “cheap source of energy.”
It is on that last point that I must disagree.
Total Costs of Dirty Energy
An energy source’s pricetag doesn’t end at its extraction point, or at its refining point. Its total lifecycle costs must be part of the equation, including the costs to public health and the environment. Once the health damage and environmental costs of fracking are computed, it’s likely it will no longer be considered cheap.
I hear a good deal about the costs of the Ebola virus breakout to be already estimated in the billions of dollars. How much does it cost to heal people made sick from contaminated water? How much will it cost to filter and clean that contaminated water? It is estimated that 50 to 70 percent of the water used in fracking is unreturned. Only 2-1/2 percent of Earth’s water is freshwater. How much will water cost after we have contaminated so much of it?
As one woman pointed out in the documentary, “If you think energy is expensive, wait until you see the price of water.”
Got thoughts? I’d love to hear from you. [email protected].
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