The Complex Relationship and Looming Crisis Between Our Thirst For Water and Our Hunger for Energy
August 15th, 2012
Via Business Insider, a look at a new Greenpeace report on China’s water-coal relationship:
As China continues to grow, so too do its energy demands. A report by Greenpeace released this month titled “Thirsty Coal: A Water Crisis Exacerbated By China’s New Mega Coal Power Bases”, reveals some of the more disheartening effects of the Chinese economic phenomena.
Currently, China depends on coal for about 70% of its energy needs. As a result, 16 large coal power plants are planned to be built under China’s 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015), in hopes of contributing 2.2 billion tons of coal output for 2015 (56% of China’s total annual output).
Coal power production being a water intensive operation, this will create a need for an estimated 9.975 billion cubic meters of water in 2015. For comparison, that’s about one-sixth of the total volume of water within China’s Yellow River each year.
In daily amounts, the average water demand from this industry will be 27.33 million cubic meters, nine times the amount of Beijing’s 2012 daily water supply and one-fifth of China’s 2009 daily national consumption. The plants, most being built in the Western region of China, will exceed the current industrial capacity for water in the region. To give you an idea of the lack of water for this type of expansionary project, Inner Mongolia, which possesses 26% of China’s coal reserves, has only 1.6% of China’s water. Thus, water will have to be taken form other sources, leading to battles over the resource.
The water supplies of farmers, urban residential areas, and other sources liker groundwater beneath wetlands, will likely be tapped into (which destroys wetlands, degrades the soil, reduces crop yields, and ultimately, turns the land into a desert). So too will the Yellow River.
Statistics in the Greenpeace report explain that from 2001 to 2005, coal mines used almost 800 million cubic meters of water more than their quota allowed, a 25% “overconsumption.” Besides depleting water sources, coal plants also pollute them. Five coal power bases located in the upper and middle Yellow River area empty more than 80 million tons of waste into the environment, and eventually into the Yellow River, each year.
For years, academics and scientists have been warning of the globe’s rapidly decreasing water supplies. While most people are already quite familiar with the other environmental effects of coal, the water issue doesn’t seem to get much play. Maybe it should.
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Educated at Yale University (Bachelor of Arts - History) and Harvard (Master in Public Policy - International Development), Monty Simus has held a lifelong interest in environmental and conservation issues, primarily as they relate to freshwater scarcity, renewable energy, and national park policy. Working from a water-scarce base in Las Vegas with his wife and son, he is the founder of Water Politics, an organization dedicated to the identification and analysis of geopolitical water issues arising from the world’s growing and vast water deficits, and is also a co-founder of SmartMarkets, an eco-preneurial venture that applies web 2.0 technology and online social networking innovations to motivate energy & water conservation. He previously worked for an independent power producer in Central Asia; co-authored an article appearing in the Summer 2010 issue of the Tulane Environmental Law Journal, titled: “The Water Ethic: The Inexorable Birth Of A Certain Alienable Right”; and authored an article appearing in the inaugural issue of Johns Hopkins University's Global Water Magazine in July 2010 titled: “H2Own: The Water Ethic and an Equitable Market for the Exchange of Individual Water Efficiency Credits.”