Modeshift

The centerpiece of Doha’s Education City is a plaza that reveres water, a vital resource in short supply across Qatar. Photo/Keith Schneider

DOHA, Qatar — Seventy-five years ago all of Qatar, a nation of sand and Arabian (Persian) Gulf shoreline roughly the size of Connecticut, was home to 25,000 residents. Fishing was an economic mainstay. So was spending weeks at sea diving for pearls. Doha, the capital city, was a seaside village.

Qatar today is a nation of nearly 2 million people and Doha, its capital and a city swelled by hydrocarbon wealth and Arab ambition, is where almost 80 percent of them live. In 1940, oil was discovered in the country’s north. In 1971, the world’s largest natural gas field was found offshore.

The sizable fuel reserves makes Qatar a significant player in the global economy and international security. Qatar, the world’s fifth largest producer of natural gas and 19th largest oil producer, exports most of its gas and oil. The revenue, over $100 billion annually, built an impressive skyline, constructed miles of highways, and coaxed five American universities to dispatch faculty and staff to an impressive collection of architecturally distinguished university buildings here known as Education City.

Still, underlying the dust and traffic and frenzy of new construction is a distinctive compact between the desert ecology and the high octane economy. In almost every way conceivable Qatar and its largest city are testing the durability of a resource-limited civilization that has plenty of fossil fuel and wealth, a storehouse of ingenuity, ample sun and sand, but not much else.

At the top of the list of resources that don’t exist in Qatar, or are in short supply, is fresh water. Average annual rainfall measures around 74 millimeters. That’s less than three inches. There are no lakes, no streams, no rivers in the entire country. What little shallow groundwater is available was exhausted decades ago in many regions, and is close to doing so in the rest. The deeper groundwater, so called “fossil” groundwater, is being depleted at a rate four to five times higher than  available rainfall can recharge the aquifers.

Qatar’s fresh water is supplied by desalination plants, which require a significant share — one fifth according to the latest analysis — of the country’s electrical generating capacity. And demand for water, which is supplied free to the country’s native-born Qataris and at significantly subsidized low cost to everybody else, is rising. A number of recent studies of water use here found that Qatar’s per capita water consumption is among the world’s highest.

Other resources in short supply in Qatar are good soil, minerals, timber, and people. With the exception of its storehouse of oil and natural gas, Qatar imports almost all of the basic materials of its growing civilization. Ninety percent of its food comes from outside Qatar’s borders. All of the country’s transportation network was built with imported materials or moves on imported equipment.

There are 300,000 native Qataris, a community that has gained the distinction of having the highest per capita incomes in the world. There are 1.6 million emigre laborers, office workers, drivers, tradesmen, professional staffers, researchers, scientists, and technical specialists imported from every corner of the world. They work here under fixed contracts that typically call for two years of service.

Qatar is clearly satisfied with the arrangement. Citizenship is reserved for native Qataris. In effect, Qatar is building its modern desert civilization with itinerant laborers and talent who churn through the country without laying down roots.

Carl Ganter and I are traveling in Qatar this week to learn more about this nation rich in oil and gas, but poor in water and other resources. In the global confrontation between rising demand for energy and food, and diminishing freshwater reserves, Qatar’s challenge is more apparent than almost anywhere else, and profoundly significant.

– Keith Schneider

Since June 2010, Circle of Blue has pursued a comprehensive and ground breaking reporting project – Choke Point: U.S. — to understand the confrontation between energy production and fresh water supply. Circle of Blue, where I serve as senior editor, is a non-partisan, non-profit, online news organization covering the global freshwater crisis from our six-person newsroom in Traverse City, Michigan. You’ll see from the Web site that when it comes to serious original reporting on water, energy, food, law, and policy, we’re punching way above our weight.

Simply put, rising energy demand and diminishing fresh water reserves are two trends in dramatic collision across the country. Moreover, the speed and force of the collisions – what we call choke points — are occurring in the places where growth is highest and water resources are under the most stress: California, the Southwest, the Rocky Mountain West and the Southeast.

These regional energy-water choke points are getting tighter because the defacto national energy strategy is devoted to more production, particularly for unconventional sources of deep shale oil and shale gas, which use three to four times more water to produce a gallon of fuel or 1,000 cubic feet of natural gas than from conventional petroleum and natural gas reserves.

Moreover, not nearly enough attention is paid by federal and state governments or the energy industry to addressing water supply and distribution, the primary impediments. We found, in fact, that a far-reaching federal program of research and analysis, funded by Congress and designed to help the nation anticipate and temper the mounting conflict between rising energy demand and diminishing supplies of fresh water, has been brought to a standstill by the DOE.

The research program, known as the National Energy-Water Roadmap and ordered up by Congress as part of the 2005 Energy Security Act, was meant to provide lawmakers and the executive branch two studies of the impending conflict between energy and water. The program also explains what to do about the collision. The first, completed by a team of federal scientists in December 2006 and made public a month later, described the serious consequences the nation is already encountering, as the United States encourages more energy production, which is the second largest water-using sector, but gives scant consideration to water supplies, which are in retreat in most regions of the country.

Meanwhile, the second and final report that Congress commissioned-a comprehensive research agenda to better understand the nation’s energy-water choke points and begin developing real world solutions – has been held out of public view for more than four years. The DOE declined repeated requests for interviews about the reasons for keeping the report from publication.

Technical Basics
Scientists define water consumption by two basic measurements. One is how much water is withdrawn from America’s rivers, lakes and aquifers for domestic, farm, business and industrial use, most of which is returned to those same sources. The second is how much water is actually consumed in products, by livestock, plants and people, or evaporates in industrial processes.

In both measurements of withdrawal and consumption, energy is at the top of the charts. The United States withdraws 410 billion gallons of water a day from its rivers, lakes, aquifers and the sea. About half is used to cool thermoelectric power plants, and most of that is used to cool coal-powered plants, according to the most recent assessment by the United States Geological Survey (USGS).

Similarly, the country consumes about 100 billion gallons of water a day. Nearly 85 percent is used for crop and livestock production. Of the 16.1 billion gallons that remain, half is devoted to producing energy. That balance is tilting to more water consumption for energy production:

Findings
Among other details, Circle of Blue found:

• The region that is confronting the energy water choke point first and most dramatically is the Southwest, as climate change steadily diminishes snowmelt in the Rocky Mountains. The Colorado River transports less water than it did a decade ago. In 2010, when we did our reporting, Lake Mead, which stores water from the Colorado River and is one of the largest reservoirs in the country, was 41 percent full. The lake’s water level had fallen 135 feet since it was last full in 1999. Declining water levels prompted federal managers to reduce the Hoover Dam’s hydroelectric generating capacity 33 percent. Last winter, heavy Rocky Mountain snows put more water in the reservoir, but generating capacity is still reduced.
• The next era of hydrocarbon development is well underway in the United States as energy companies tap the “unconventional” oil sands of Canada, the oil shales of the northern Great Plains, and the gas shales of the Northeast, Texas, Oklahoma and the Upper Midwest. But tapping each of these carbon-rich reserves is producing more damage to the land, generating more carbon emissions, and using three to four times as much water than the conventional oil and gas reserves they are replacing. Essentially, the energy industry is becoming a mining industry, turning carbon-rich sands into fuel and using water shot into the ground under super high pressure to shatter deep shales to release oil and gas. The scale of the industrial enterprise is immense and moving with amazing speed. In tar sands production alone, oil companies and pipeline developers are spending $15 billion to develop the tar sands; $30 billion to build a new network of pipelines from Canada to U.S. refineries (including one that has produced a dispute between state and the EPA), $20 billion to modernize refineries in the Great Lakes, Illinois, Oklahoma and the Texas Gulf.
• The political influence of the energy industry has few equals in the U.S. In Kern County, Calif., where the agriculture industry and the oil industry compete for diminished supplies of water for irrigation and energy production, the big winner is the oil industry. While a severe drought wracked the state, and agricultural and environmental groups wrangled over sharply reduced water shipments to irrigate the arid San Joaquin Valley, the oil industry received 8.4 billion gallons a year-as much water as it needed-from the web of aqueducts and canals that carry water from rivers and reservoirs high in the Sierra Nevada.
• Carbon capture and storage technology, which is the favored tool to reduce carbon emissions from fossil-fueled electric generating plants, is undergoing a handful of tests, including at a new electric-generating plant just permitted and partially financed by the DOE in arid Kern County. But the technology also increases water consumption at coal-fired utilities 40 percent to 90 percent, according to the Department of Energy.
• Unless the United States plans more carefully, generating energy from clean alternatives is almost certain to consume much more water than the fossil fuels they are meant to replace. Generating one gallon of fuel from irrigated corn, for instance, takes 650 gallons of water. Generating one gallon of gas from oil takes one gallon. Solar thermal power that is conventionally cooled consumes more water than a coal-fired and nuclear-powered plant. Of all the available green energy technologies, only wind and solar photovoltaics consume less water than fossil-fueled energy. Geothermal can save water or consume more depending on the technology used and the location.

Stories

• Contest between energy and water could cause huge electricity price rise in Arizona
  When it was completed in 1974, the 2,250-megawatt Navajo Generating Station (NGS) near Page, Arizona, provided the power to draw 1.42 billion gallons of water a day out of Lake Havasu, fed by the Colorado River and along the border with California, and pump it 336 miles and nearly 3,000 feet uphill in the Central Arizona Project (CAP) canal all the way to Tucson. The power plant and the canal reflected the hubris of a rich nation at the height of its wealth, and determined to build in one of the driest regions on the continent energy-hungry and thirsty cities that defied the laws of nature. Nearly four decades later, in an era marked by the warming climate, the increasing financial and environmental costs of generating power with coal, and declining reserves of fresh water in the West, the historically tenuous cords of legal agreement and civic support that have always defined the CAP are threatening to come unraveled. At the core of the problem is the price of water, which is closely tied to the cost of operating the plant. Both could rise substantially if the Obama administration and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency issue new rules to limit emissions of carbon dioxide and other haze-producing gases. There is also a drought that has persisted for more than a decade on the Colorado Plateau, raising a serious question about how much Colorado River water will be available to both cool the giant power plant, and also supply the CAP’s farm and business customers, and 80 percent of Arizona’s residents.

• Very big new hydro dam in Alaska
  At a press conference in Anchorage on July 25, Alaska Governor Sean Parnell signed a ceremonial copy of a bill to authorize a 200-meter (700-feet) rockfill dam on the currently dam-free Susitna River. Parnell signed the official bill on July 13, after it had passed the state legislature in June, the Anchorage Daily News reports. Senate Bill 42 gives the Alaska Energy Authority (AEA), a public corporation owned by the state, the power to issue bonds and enter into contracts to build the dam, which is scheduled to be completed by 2023 and is estimated to cost $US 4.5 billion – a figure that does not include some of the new transmission lines that would be built, according to Karsten Rodvik, AEA’s external affairs manager. The Susitna Dam, planned for a site halfway between Anchorage and Fairbanks, will create a storage reservoir 63 kilometers (39 miles) long and three kilometers (two miles) wide at its broadest. If completed, the dam would be the tallest built in the U.S. since the 218-kilometer (717-feet) Dworshak Dam in Idaho, which began construction in 1966 during the height of the American dam-building era.
• Scarce Water in Texas prompts power plant cooling design change
  Earlier this month, the Lower Colorado River Authority in Texas rejected a permit application from the White Stallion power plant to use billions of gallons of water for its proposed coal plant in Matagorda County. The authority’s decision, the first of its kind in Texas, was prompted by the historic drough, which forced White Stallion to change the design of its cooling system from once-through wet cooling to dry cooling towers, which are more expensive and reduce generating efficiency. Local residents and farmers have been actively opposing the new plant because of concerns for water supply in the Lower Colorado River basin.

• Water supply limiting factor in oil shale boom
  In North Dakota, now the fourth largest oil-producing state and quickly heading to number two behind Texas, energy companies and state officials are racing to head off an oil production disruption caused by shortages of water. State figures project oil developers will need 5 billion to 6 billion gallons of water annually to frack the more than 1,000 wells drilled each year in North Dakota. For the time being, say state officials, there is enough supply. The problem is that oil developers are concerned about access. Private companies are building their own water supply systems, using pumps and miles of pipes; the state last year authorized a $150 million water distribution system, the largest in North Dakota.

  Similar issues emerged in the last few years with the development of the Eagle Ford Shale formation in Texas, which requires more water per well than in other locations. A single well in the Eagle Ford Shale can require 7 million to 13 million gallons. To obtain this amount during the drought, companies have offered farmers 70 cents per barrel of water.

– Keith Schneider

In an era of economic turmoil that has produced massive unemployment, accelerated industrial decline, and sowed fear and doubt across much of North America and Europe, China last week offered a much different lesson on growth and development.

In the latest draft of its new 12^th Five-Year Plan to manage the world’s fastest growing industrial economy, China’s leadership called for restraining the runaway growth that is raising the incomes of more than 400 million people, but is also drawing China ever closer to a potentially calamitous confrontation over energy, water, and the quality of the nation’s environment. You can read more about the 12th Five-Year Plan and other developments in China over at Circle of Blue, where we’ve been rolling out weekly chapters of our Choke Point: China series.

Take a look at the series. It provides a first-of-its-kind journalistic window on the big steps China is taking to close a critical resource shortage affecting its modernization — the diminishing supplies of fresh water needed to process and cool the coal-fired energy sector. The series also invites readers from western democracies, particularly those in the United States, to peek into a centralized governing system that operates on a much different set of principles and values.

At this point, the U.S. system is almost entirely geared to shutting down, turning off, saying “No!” to big ideas. The result is a nation in stasis at a time of swift transition. China, meanwhile, has no veto power in its system and it attacks and executes big ideas — clean energy, rail transport, urban development, water transport, high-tech manufacturing, infrastructure construction — at a speed and scale never before experienced in human history. (That’s high-rise residential construction in Xian, a city of 8 million, in pix above.)

The new Five-Year Plan, which serves as China’s master development strategy, reflects the ambition of a huge nation intent on supplanting the U.S. as the most prosperous and powerful on Earth. Given the arduous path America has set for itself in the 21st century — fearful, suspicious, and reluctant to seize the new opportunities of the 21st century — it’s easy to see how close China is to reaching its goal.

The 12^th Five-Year Plan, submitted for review on March 5 at the start of China’s annual plenary session in Beijing and signed on March 10, sets a new limit on energy consumption in order to spur efficiency and conservation measures. But it also envisions record high levels of water use, which is expected to rise to 620 billion cubic meters (163 trillion gallons) by 2015-up from 599 billion cubic meters (158 trillion gallons) in 2010-and as much as 670 billion cubic meters (177 trillion gallons) by the end of the decade. The restraints on coal production, which supplies 70 percent of the nation’s energy and is the largest industrial consumer of fresh water, will serve to keep water use from climbing even higher.

In public statements and in interviews with Chinese media, the nation’s top leaders said the central focus of the new Five-Year Plan is to curb inflation and provide investments and guidance that improves the quality of life by ensuring the continuing development of manufacturing, transportation infrastructure, domestic production, the energy sector, research, science, health care, and education. But the leaders asserted that the 12^th Five-Year Plan, the master economic blueprint that will chart China’s development through 2015, also is meant to reckon with the damage that the nation’s modernization is causing to air, land, and water, a steadily diminishing resource.

From 2000 to 2009, total water reserves in China dropped 13 percent, and water scarcity is especially evident in the northern and western provinces, where China’s major coal reserves lie. By calling for limits on energy production, China’s leaders are apparently mindful of the dangerous choke point developing between the nation’s surging economy and its demand for opening new coal reserves in the dry provinces that cannot currently be tapped because of water shortages.

“The 12th Five-Year Plan period is crucial for building a moderately prosperous society in all respects and for deepening reform and opening up and speeding up the transformation of the pattern of economic development,” said Premier Wen Jiabao in a statement.

Largest and Fastest-Is Restraint Possible?

But it is not at all clear that China’s provincial and industrial leaders-never mind the hundreds of millions of workers benefiting from modernization-will be eager to comply with the goals of the new development strategy.

During extensive reporting in December for the Choke Point: China series, Circle of Blue found a nation that grumbles about pollution, inflation, and corruption, but also is tremendously enthusiastic about modernization and the economic opportunities it has provided.

The restraints on economic growth described in the 12^th Five-Year Plan come in the midst of a massive and politically popular economic transition that is rapidly converting China’s economy from its previous focus on export-related revenue to one devoted to building domestic markets.

Just to name a few, China now has either the fastest-growing or the largest-markets in the world for:

• Cars
• Steel
• Cement
• Glass
• Residential housing
• Rail construction
• Fossil fuel energy
• Highway development
• Power plant construction
• Grain production

Over the next five years, China will continue to build one of the world’s largest water transport projects, the world’s largest highway and high-speed rail networks, and the world’s largest network of hydropower dams. China also will continue to construct the world’s largest industrial manufacturing installations, or “bases,” to produce the components and plants that generate energy from coal, wind, solar, and nuclear power.

Read more here.

– Keith Schneider

Michigan and Ohio have emerged as important centers of solar energy manufacturing. Here’s my latest piece in the New York Times. Big question for the two states and the rest of the American clean energy industry: Will the November election snuff out recent advances? Many of the conservative lawmakers elected to state Legislatures, governors’ offices, and Congress campaigned aggressively against climate science and public incentives for renewable energy.

– Keith Schneider

Photo © Brent Stirton / Reportage by Getty Images for Circle of Blue

The All-American Canal, the main water conduit from the Colorado River into the Imperial Dam, flows through the Imperial Valley, Calif. The U.S. consumes about 100 billion gallons of water a day. Nearly 85 percent is used for crop and livestock production. Of the 16.1 billion gallons that remain, half is devoted to producing energy.

In November 2009, in pursuit of a cleaner energy development strategy that also reduced carbon and other climate changing gases, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced that his agency had identified 23 million acres of public lands in six southwestern states as prime locations for new solar electrical generating plants. Salazar also said that the Bureau of Land Management, an Interior Department unit that owns and oversees much of the western public domain, was encouraging new solar plant construction with a “fast track” permitting process. The process would make some plants eligible for federal grants and loans under the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which included nearly $100 billion for clean energy investment.
The dual announcement was anticipated by executives in the solar generating industry, who responded with an avalanche of applications to federal and state agencies to build more than 180 new solar plants in California, Nevada and Arizona. But senior leaders of other Interior Department units, most notably the U.S. National Park Service, also responded to the agency’s promotion of solar energy with unusually sharp critiques of the potential consequences to the Southwest’s natural resources, especially the region’s scarce water supplies.

More From The Series

Natural Gas
Deep Frack Dilemma

Coal Production
Coal Sucks Water

Tar Sands
Tar Sands’ Soiled Oil

Thermal Power
Thermopower Shift

Oil
Oil’s Spoils

Solar generating plants that use conventional cooling technology use two to three times as much   water as coal-fired power plants, according to the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Newer technology that relies on air for cooling uses much less water, but also is less efficient in generating power, thus requiring more land. The Congressional Research Service recently estimated that solar power plants cooled with water could generate 53,000 megawatts of electricity in the Southwest, equal to more than 50 large coal-fired utilities, but also would require 164 billion gallons of water annually, an enormous amount in the driest region in the country.

In February 2009, Jon Jarvis, then the head of the Park Service’s Pacific West Region, and now the Park Service director, took the unusual step of warning his Interior Department colleagues that a solar construction boom in the desert, which results in dozens of conventional wet-cooled solar plants, could tilt the already fierce competition for water in the Southwest the wrong way.

“In arid settings, the increased water demand from concentrating solar energy systems employing water-cooled technology could strain limited water resources already under development pressure from urbanization, irrigation expansion, commercial interests and mining,” Jarvis wrote in the internal memorandum.

Confrontation Unlike Any Other

In almost every way imaginable, Jarvis’ warning is emblematic of the critical choke points emerging in the United States as rising demand for new sources of energy confronts the nation’s diminishing supplies of fresh water. Four months ago, in Choke Point: U.S., Circle of Blue set out to better understand what was happening around the country as communities, businesses, and residents confronted the increasingly intense competition between water and energy. Our reporting from the coal fields of southern Virginia, the high plains of the Dakotas, California’s Central Valley, the Midwest’s farm fields, Northern Alberta, Canada, and elsewhere identified urgent contests between energy development and water supply that can be resolved. But taming the conflict between energy and water also poses extraordinarily difficult challenges to regional economies, governing practices, technological development and the quality of natural resources.

Most importantly, though, Choke Point: U.S. raises significant concerns about the values and principles that form the basic foundation of national energy policy in the era of rapid population growth, rising energy demand and climate change. The DOE has prepared a number of studies, accepted largely without question, that predict that as the nation’s population reaches more than 440 million in 2050, energy demand will increase by 40 percent. Federal authorities, along with technical specialists in private industry and academia, insist that such demand can be met by producing more energy sources from fossil fuels and nuclear power, and by developing cleaner energy sources such as wind, solar, geothermal, biofuels and wave energy, which also have the benefit of reducing emissions of carbon dioxide that are warming the climate.

Photo © J. Carl Ganter / Circle of Blue

ROCHELLE, ILLINOIS, AUGUST 2010: The Illinois River Energy biofuels plant in Rochelle releases plumes of steam at sunrise. The ethanol plant processes over 40 million bushels of corn into 115 million gallons of fuel grade ethanol annually. The plant is one of hundreds around the country transforming corn into ethanol. It takes nearly 1,000 gallons of water to produce a gallon of ethanol from irrigated corn: four gallons from unirrigated corn.

Underlying the nation’s strategy is the principle that the nation can meet its rising energy demands by applying technology and characteristic American innovation to the job of generating more energy.

But in Choke Point: U.S., Circle of Blue found that without significant changes in approach, meeting the demand for 40 percent more energy by mid-century –if it’s even possible – will come at an extraordinary price to the nation’s air, water, land and quality of life. Rising energy demand and diminishing fresh water reserves are two trends in dramatic collision across the country. Moreover, the speed and force of the collision is occurring in the places where growth is highest and water resources are under the most stress: California, the Southwest, the Rocky Mountain West and the Southeast.

“What’s missing in our national energy discussion is efficiency and conservation,” said Sandra Postel, an author and director of the Global Water Policy Project. “You save energy and you save water. We need a coherent policy and practices to emerge, and they haven’t yet, that drives water conservation and energy conservation. Every gallon of gas you don’t putin a car saves 13 gallons of water. But we aren’t talking about that nearly enough right now.”

Water Supply Confronts Energy Demand
Indeed, Choke Point: U.S. found that while federal energy experts, and their colleagues in academia and industry pursue an energy development strategy strongly devoted to more production, they are not paying sufficient attention to addressing the water supply, the primary impediment.

Scientists define water consumption by two basic measurements. One is how much water is withdrawn from America’s rivers, lakes and aquifers for domestic, farm, business and industrial use, most of which is returned to those same sources. The second is how much water is actually consumed in products, by livestock, plants and people, or evaporates in industrial processes.

In both measurements of withdrawal and consumption, energy is at the top of the charts. The United States withdraws 410 billion gallons of water a day from its rivers, lakes, aquifers and the sea. About half is used to cool thermoelectric power plants, and most of that is used to cool coal-powered plants, according to the most recent assessment by the United States Geological Survey (USGS).

Similarly, the country consumes about 100 billion gallons of water a day. Nearly 85 percent is used for crop and livestock production. Of the 16.1 billion gallons that remain, half is devoted to producing energy.

In one of the most startling findings of Choke Point: U.S., Circle of Blue reporters discovered that a far-reaching federal program of research and analysis, funded by Congress and designed to help the nation anticipate and temper the mounting conflict between rising energy demand and diminishing supplies of fresh water, has been brought to a standstill by the DOE.

The research program, known as the National Energy-Water Roadmap and ordered up by Congress as part of the 2005 Energy Security Act, was meant to provide lawmakers and the executive branch two studies of the impending conflict between energy and water. The program also explains what to do about the collision. The first, completed by a team of federal scientists in December 2006 and made public a month later, described the serious consequences the nation is already encountering, as the United States encourages more energy production, which is the second largest water-using sector, but gives scant consideration to water supplies, which are in retreat in most regions of the country.

Meanwhile, the second and final report that Congress commissioned—a comprehensive research agenda to better understand the nation’s energy—water choke points and begin developing real world solutions – has been held out of public view for more than four years. The DOE declined repeated requests for interviews about the reasons for keeping the report from publication.

Photo © Greg Latza / Hess Corporation

STANLEY, NORTH DAKOTA, SEPTEMBER 2009: An oil drilling rig on the Bakken Shale formation at sunset.

Other Major Findings
Choke Point: U.S. also found:

• Unless the United States plans more carefully, generating energy from clean alternatives is almost certain to consume much more water than the fossil fuels they are meant to replace. Generating one gallon of fuel from irrigated corn, for instance, takes 650 gallons of water. Generating one gallon of gas from oil takes one gallon. Solar thermal power that is conventionally cooled consumes more water than a coal-fired and nuclear-powered plant. Of all the available green energy technologies, only wind and solar photovoltaics consume less water than fossil-fueled energy. Geothermal can save water or consume more depending on the technology used and the location.
• The region that is confronting the energy water choke point first and most dramatically is the Southwest, as climate change steadily diminishes snowmelt in the Rocky Mountains. The Colorado River transports less water than it did a decade ago. Lake Mead, which stores water from the Colorado River and is one of the largest reservoirs in the country, is 41 percent full. The lake’s water level has fallen 135 feet since it was last full in 1999. Declining water levels have prompted federal managers to reduce the Hoover Dam’s hydroelectric generating capacity 33 percent. Federal authorities say if the lake falls 25 more feet, it will not have enough water to power the dam’s generators, shutting down one of the largest power plants in the West.
• The next era of hydrocarbon development is well underway in the United States as energy companies tap the “unconventional” oil sands of Canada, the oil shales of the northern Great Plains, and the gas shales of the Northeast, Texas, Oklahoma and the Upper Midwest. But tapping each of these carbon-rich reserves is producing more damage to the land, generating more carbon emissions, and using three to four times as much water than the conventional oil and gas reserves they are replacing. Essentially, the energy industry is becoming a mining industry, turning carbon-rich sands into fuel and using water shot into the ground under super high pressure to shatter deep shales to release oil and gas. The scale of the industrial enterprise is immense and moving with amazing speed. In tar sands production alone, oil companies and pipeline developers are spending $15 billion to develop the tar sands; $30 billion to build a new network of pipelines from Canada to U.S. refineries (including one that has produced a dispute between state and the EPA), $20 billion to modernize refineries in the Great Lakes, Illinois, Oklahoma and the Texas Gulf. Earlier this year, Exxon Mobil paid $41 billion for XTO Energy, which has big reserves in tar sands, deep gas shale and oil shales in the United States.
• Developers in North Dakota are spending roughly $7 billion annually to drill 1,000 wells a year now into the Bakken Shale formation and are reaping a bonanza—100 million barrels of oil and 100 billion cubic feet of gas this year. The state is the nation’s fourth largest producer of oil now, behind Texas, Alaska and California. Three years ago, it was barely in the top ten. And the industry also is using billions of gallons of North Dakota’s scarce groundwater to fracture the shale, and generating a civic pushback from farmers and rural residents concerned about the supply of groundwater.
• The source of more than half of the natural gas produced in the United States is deep shale reserves underlying the Northeast, Gulf Coast states, the West and Midwest. But each of the thousands of wells drilled each year into the unconventional gas shales requires three million to six million gallons of water injected under high pressure to fracture the rock and enable gas to flow out of the rock. Accidents involving so called “fracking” have caused contamination and interruptions in water supply in Wyoming, Pennsylvania, Colorado and other states. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is studying the safety of the practice.
• The political influence of the energy industry has no equal in the U.S. In Kern County, Calif., where the agriculture industry and the oil industry compete for diminished supplies of water for irrigation and energy production, the big winner is the oil industry. While a severe drought wracked the state, and agricultural and environmental groups wrangled over sharply reduced water shipments to irrigate the arid San Joaquin Valley, the oil industry received 8.4 billion gallons a year—as much water as it needed—from the web of aqueducts and canals that carry water from rivers and reservoirs high in the Sierra Nevada.
• The energy vector in the United States points strongly to more fossil fuel consumption, not less. That means much more climate changing emissions and tighter fresh water reserves. For instance, the utility industry has opened or begun construction on 32 new coal-fired plants since 2008, according to the DOE. Those plants represent 17.9 gigawatts of new energy and 125 million more tons of carbon dioxide each year. They also represent the sharpest increase in coal-fired power in a generation and will consume billions of gallons of water a year. Unconventional tar sands and shale oil reserves in the country (North Dakota, Montana, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado) contain two trillion barrels of oil—enough to supply America at the current level of demand (7 billion barrels a year) for hundreds of years. The deep gas-bearing shales contain millions of trillions of cubic feet of gas—also enough to supply the country for centuries.
• Carbon capture and storage technology, which is the favored tool to reduce carbon emissions from fossil-fueled electric generating plants, is undergoing a handful of tests, including at a new electric-generating plant just permitted and partially financed by the DOE in arid Kern County. But the technology also increases water consumption at coal-fired utilities 40 percent to 90 percent, according to the DOE.

These findings represent a new way to look at the economically essential and ecologically damaging accord between energy and water. Choke Point: U.S. is among the first comprehensive assessments that bring that conflict into sharp national focus.

It is not just that energy production could not occur without using vast amounts of water. It’s also that it’s occurring in the era of climate change, population growth and steadily increasing demand for energy. The result is that the competition for water at every stage of the mining, processing, production, shipping and use of energy is growing more fierce, more complex and much more difficult to resolve.

National Laboratories in New Mexico and one of the nation’s top experts on the water-energy choke point. “The issues are interdependent. But not enough people are willing to connect the dots. And there are real issues at play. Will water scarcity limit natural gas production from the gas-bearing shales, for instance? Will water limit construction of new power plants? Will energy production be limited by the water supply?”

“Politicians don’t like to look at the big picture,” Hightower added. “They want to focus on one thing. And right now that is meeting the energy demand, and to some extent reducing greenhouse gases. But it has to be managed differently so we don’t damage our water resources.”

– Keith Schneider

Bob Giles, a son of the Midwest, former Pulitzer Prize winning editor at the Akron Beacon Journal, and then again as editor and publisher of The Detroit News, has been the curator since 2000 of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. A working newspaper journalist and editor since 1958, Giles knows a thing or two about reporting. He just published a piece in Daedalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, on the future of online journalism. The article cites Circle of Blue, the Traverse City-based online multi-media news organization, as a prime example of the “news-gathering experiments that are changing the face of journalism.”

“As journalism quickens the pace of its move to the Web, Circle of Blue is filling a niche by providing specialized content that is considered essential by an audience of shared interests but that can’t be found in such detail anywhere else,” Giles writes. “In many ways, it is reflective of a shift in how we define journalism, or at the very least, in how we go about producing and sharing it.”

“Some of these new ventures will fail, some will succeed. But the vitality of the start-up culture suggests that if the twilight of newspaper journalism is upon us, a fresh capacity to sustain journalism is charging forward. Circle of Blue is among several non-profit news organizations testing one of the industry’s most-discussed ideas: that serious journalism can be supported with funding from a variety of sources behind carefully constructed firerewalls built on traditional standards of journalistic ethics. It is a prototype of a business model that supports specialized coverage, but it in fact embraces characteristics common among other start-ups and experiments that hold promise as a new way of paying for serious journalism.”

Giles’ article, thoroughly reported and stylishly structured, aptly captures the resolve and excitement gathering around serious independent online journalism. Stephen Engelberg, a friend and former colleague at the New York Times,  who helped win a number of Pulitzers in New York, just won another with his colleagues at Pro Publica, the first online Pulitzer ever awarded.

Giles is right on target in citing Circle of Blue as an especially effective model of what is possible in the new online reporting space. Next week J. Carl Ganter, Circle of Blue’s director and co-founder (with his wife Eileen) convenes a strategic planning and design session in San Francisco with a group of creative people he’s met from around the nation and world. The two-day session, facilitated by The Value Web, is intended to take Circle of Blue’s multi-media news desk to a new level of engagement, innovation, and effectiveness.

And that’s saying something. Since its founding in 2002 as an online newsroom covering the global freshwater crisis, Circle of Blue has dispatched multi-media news teams to cover some of the world’s most important water stories on five continents. It’s gathered journalists, scientists, and designers to produce probing reports that have made it the single most important source of breaking news about freshwater issues in the world. It’s done so with the highest standards of reporting, writing, design, photography, videography, and motion graphics.

Still, the real miracle of Circle of Blue, an aspect that wasn’t reported in Daedalus, is that Circle of Blue has produced its work, established new dimensions in multi-media environmental journalism, and influenced important global organizations like the World Economic Forum, on an annual budget that has never exceeded $250,000. Funders span the horizon, from a small New York family foundation to MolsonCoors.

For three years I’ve served as senior editor, writer, and producer at Circle of Blue, working a few hours a week under an agreement with Carl and Eileen. My roles also include fundraising, strategic advisor, outreach staffer, and occasional trip planner. I’ve joined Carl on Circle of Blue reporting  and development trips to Sydney, Stockholm, San Francisco, New York, Washington, Denver, and Aspen. (That’s Carl (l) and me (r) in the pix up top with Bill Clinton at the Clinton Global Initiative in 2007.)

Every month that passes Circle of Blue draws closer to gaining that major foundation grant that scales up the news desk and enables Carl to finally build, in Traverse City, what he calls “the newsroom of the future.” Bob Giles’ piece in Daedulus is the latest sign that the moment is drawing ever closer.

Since the day back in 1981, when Inquiry Magazine dispatched me to the mountains of Cherokee County to find out why a popular defoliant was causing so much trouble in the forests and small towns of western North Carolina, I’ve been an environmental reporter.

Today, Circle of Blue, where I serve as a senior editor and producer, posted “Reign of Sand,” an online multi-media report on the transition from grass to dust that is occurring in Inner Mongolia. Take a look.

“Reign of Sand” represents the leading edge of global environmental journalism. It’s not only that the package joins traditional narrative reporting with superb multi-media story telling. It’s also that this ambitious journalism was produced by an independent news organization based in Traverse City, Michigan.

As environmental reporting and most other important journalism is gradually pushed out of the newspapers and television reports of America’s mainstream news business, it is flourishing in independent news organizations, among them Circle of Blue.

“Reign of Sand” achieves the highest standards of probing original reporting and exceptional multi-media presentation. Frankly the reporting is as solid as anything produced by the New York Times, the pictures achieve the same striking quality as National Geographic, and the interactive map and video are simply superb.

For this old salt, the posting of “Reign of Sand” is an exciting moment in a long and productive career in writing about the competition between man and nature. Over the years I’ve reported and published in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Baltimore Sun, Philadelphia Inquirer, Sacramento Bee, International Herald Tribune, 60 Minutes, NPR, Esquire, and Outside. And I’ve reported for those out of the mainstream — In These Times, Sierra, Amicus Journal, E Magazine, Mother Jones, Oceans, Grist.

During all that time I made it a practice to keep my feet firmly set in both camps, and to keep pace with new technology and dissemination practices. In the late 1970s and early 1980s I wore out a Smith Corona electric typewriter just in time to buy one of the first IBM PCs in 1983, a system with a Volkswriter word processing program and a Xerox daisy wheel printer that set me back $6,000. I borrowed two-thirds of it from my Dad.

At that time I founded and edited two independent news services — SC Featured in Charleston, S.C., and NewsWest in Sacramento. I syndicated articles in national publications, along with black and white pictures. I sent my work in big yellow envelopes through the mail. When I wrote for the Times as a stringer, I read the copy into a recording machine in New York.

When I joined the Times in 1985 we used Radio Shack TRS 80 computers that showed three lines of type in a narrow window. The machine came with two black rubber cups, which you had to squeeze onto either end of a telephone receiver. Sending a file involved finding a pay phone with a good signal, dialing up New York’s computer, waiting for the high-pitched computer squeal, punching a key or two on the Trash 80, and hoping the connection would hold long enough to send the whole file. Often it didn’t. But it was easier than reading into a recording machine.

By the time the Web made its presence felt in the mid-1990s I’d jumped out of the mainstream and into the new media of the Michigan Land Use Institute, managing a team of journalists who broke stories and framed the environmental story in this state not as a litany of toxic assaults but as a story of opportunity and economic competitiveness. The Institute gradually discarded much of its expensive print reporting and posted most of its work on our own online news services, email alerts programs, and a Web site that eventually attracted nearly 200,000 visitors a month.

Circle of Blue advances and improves that model, applying great reporting and multi-media story telling to global environmental issues, and doing it in a way that is both fresh and absorbing. The reporting was undertaken by a writer based in South Korea, a photographer from Malaysia, and a videographer and editor from Traverse City.

The story the Circle of Blue team brought back from Inner Mongolia has global significance. The tools the organization used to produce and disseminate it sets a new standard for environmental reporting. For a writer who once earned his keep with an electric typewriter and postage stamps it’s both amazing and a ton of fun.

The era of global climate change has produced such rainy and warm conditions in northern Michigan that a winter’s worth of snow and ice melted completely here over the last two days. Meanwhile it’s dry, desperately so, in several huge and significant regions of the country.

The striking contrasts are putting strains on the culture and economy in ways we’re only starting to understand. Yesterday I stood in a driving January rain talking to Jim MacInnes, the chief executive of Crystal Mountain, our local ski resort. He was interested in new economic data he’d read online. I was watching the deep gullies forming at the bottom of Buck, the resort’s steepest slope.

The signs of changing climate and an economy that has been slow to respond, are everywhere.

Judging by the thickening white sashes of salt lining Lake Mead and Lake Powell (see pix), the largest reservoirs in the United States, the drought on the Colorado Plateau is not only deepening, it is pushing water supply conditions for roughly 25 million people from serious toward dire. The moment of reckoning over water supplies, anticipated since the 1960s, appears to have arrived.

Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and southern California form the fastest growing region in the country. All are served by the Colorado River, which provides drinking water to Las Vegas, San Diego, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and hundreds of smaller communities. Lake Powell, north of the Grand Canyon, and Lake Mead, which lies just south, are less than half full and dropping steadily. Both are 105 feet lower than their full pools, and dropping about eight to ten feet a year.

The ring around the reservoirs is beginning to be seen as a noose around the neck of the region. Not surprisingly it’s become politically palatable to consider changes in water management and use once deemed impractical. Conservation measures were put into effect in Phoenix, and in Las Vegas the water district is paying homeowners $1 a square foot to tear up their lawns and install desert plantings.

The Colorado Plateau states and California last month finished an agreement that provides both more flexibility and certainty in who has the right to what’s left in both reservoirs, and sets triggers for declaring emergencies that dramatically cut use. The Metropolitan Water District, southern California’s major water provider, announced in November that they will buy 65 billion gallons of water annually from Central Valley farmers north of Sacramento.

Orange County is preparing to turn on a new waste treatment plant that will pump “highly treated wastewater from their new purification plant to percolation ponds in Anaheim. Eventually, the recycled water will be delivered to about 2.3 million people.” And all the desert states are more intensely eyeing the Great Lakes.

Hot Atlanta
The other region of the United States where water demand is outrunning supply is the Southeast. There’s been more rain there this week; Nevertheless, for the first time in the lives of most of the 10-county Atlanta region’s 4 million residents, turning on the tap is an invitation to consider the limits of growth. The U.S. drought map continues to show that precipitation, soil moisture, and lake and river levels are in “extreme” dry condition.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution published a nice piece on the region’s inability to plan and invest in water supply infrastructure. And Atlanta Water Shortage keeps a near-daily update of conditions.

Texas Too
Water authorities in the Texas Panhandle late last month said they were cutting the water supply from Lake Meredith to 11 cities, including Amarillo, Plainview, Lubbock, and Brownfield. The reason, according to the Houston Chronicle: “brutal drought conditions in two of the past three years.”

My new MacBook has a video camera and communications features (okay, don’t laugh all you Apple freaks) that enables me to dial up sources on Skype and also see who I’m talking to on my screen. On Friday morning I used these tools to interview John D. Liu, an American-born videographer, soil scientist, and founder of the Environmental Education Media Project for China, a 10-year-old environmental organization based in Beijing. My questions concerned the growing frequency and strength of sand storms that start in Mongolia and Inner Mongolia and sweep across east Asia, closing airports, and filling the air of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese cities with stinging clouds of sand, and choking dust.

Inner Mongolia, the largest contiguous grasslands on earth, is rapidly turning to sand. Mr. Liu described the source of the dust storms as increasing “dessication from devegetation,” the causes of which are “water management disruptions.” In other words a steady progression of bad policy decisions, increasing industrialization, and much larger numbers of subsidence farmers and herders are changing how available moisture is absorbed, making it much harder for dry and sensitive land to generate grass.

Northern China is not only the new global Dustbowl of the 21st century, it also is an indicator of how the massive economic development that has improved the lives of 400 million Chinese is producing conditions that could lead to a biological collapse unlike anything ever seen in human history.

Mr. Liu (see pix) was born in Nashville, raised in Bloomington, Indiana, and has lived in China since 1979, when he helped to open the CBS News bureau in Beijing. He left after 10 years to turn his video skills loose to help solve some of the global problems he encountered in an international reporting career that has taken him to over 50 countries. He’s since become a doctoral candidate in soil science at the University of Reading in England, and a well-known film maker, reporting on environmental issues for a number of European television stations.

Given my own history of deploying reporting and communications skills in pursuit of public interest goals I felt an immediate kinship. On Friday morning, in a personally compelling display of applied technology, our paths intersected. Mr. Liu sat at the desk in his Beijing study near midnight. I was my Traverse City office at the start of the day. Thirteen hours lay between us, yet we were linked by video cameras, computer screens, online servers and a common interest in trying to make complex issues easier to understand. Two veteran journalists using advances in environmental science and communications know-how to do what we do: learn from each other and tell stories.

“I think the hardest thing is to deal with the depressing information,” he said. “Right now there is little to gain from pulling punches.  We need to see exactly what has happened ecologically and deal with it.  It can be done but only if we face it quickly and accurately.  Putting off rebalancing the human relationship with the earth makes everything much worse.”

Somewhere in our micro human interaction, made so easy and so inexpensive by deft use of computers and software, lies the germplasm of knowledge and sharing that can be replicated. It was a 21st century experience, one that gives me hope.

In 2005, when Jim Kunstler published “The Long Emergency,”  an unsettling synthesis of major market trends (peak oil), environmental conditions (global warming, water scarcity, disease), and what he called the other “converging castastrophes of the 21st century,” I was among the skeptics who was convinced that Kunstler’s analysis was uncharacteristically hyperbolic. Nearly two years later the shine on my bubble of optimism has dulled a bit. 

Essentially, Kunstler predicted that soaring oil prices would generate enormous economic, political, and cultural instability, including rising joblessness, homelessness, currency devaluations, and social disruption. He said that climate change would add another level of complexity and that the United States and other industrialized nations faced “a dark time.” Lastly, he said the coming cataclysm was approaching much faster than business leaders, social theorists, or elected officials either believed or acknowledged. Suburban America, said Kunstler, would be particularly hard hit. Urban America, with its transit systems, walkability, more compact development patterns would fare better. 

My reporting of new market trends, explored in this blog, reached a similar conclusion about the changes we are seeing in suburban and urban communities. Generally I’m optimistic. But as I’ve toured the country in the last couple of months, I’m continually reminded of Kunstler’s more emphatic forecasts.

High energy prices  have contributed to the weakening of the dollar overseas, and dramatically slowed suburban housing markets. Both trends are accelerating the decline of the U.S. auto industry, which continues to produce uncompetitive fuel-guzzling vehicles, and is leading the Midwest deeper into an aggravating recession. That, in turn, has contributed to the highest jobless rates in the nation, and some of the highest rates of home foreclosures and largest housing price declines. 

The strength of the national housing market kept the economy afloat after 9/11. Its slowdown here and in other regions is leading the nation into a recession that some economists say will be long and severe.

Michigan residents already are very familiar with what’s in store for the rest of the country. It’s not pretty. We already have the highest unemployment rate, the largest state budget deficits, and the largest decline since 2000 (12 percent) in median family income in the country. We also have a governor and a Legislature wholly incapable of finding a political consensus that will lead to a new development strategy, part of the grave electoral dysfunction that Kunstler predicted.

Indeed, the most visible and ominous result of this economic dysfunction is the wave of home foreclosures now inundating the nation. Foreclosures are mounting in almost every major American market. Even in San Diego, where million dollar homes burned in fierce forest fires in November and a traditional outpost of wealth and higher expectations, parts of the city are “approaching a point where nearly 10 percent of all homes are in some stage of foreclosure,” according to VoiceofSanDeigo.org.

More than one million new foreclosures are anticipated across the country in 2008. The mess is of sufficient economic concern that even President George Bush reached an agreement today with lenders to help some stressed homeowners, but left millions of others without protection.

And then comes the warming, the magnitude of which is increasing by every measure. New Orleans drowned in 2005. Atlanta, the Colorado Plateau (see Lake Powell in pix), southern California, and even the Great Lakes are drying up in 2007.

In the “Long Emergency”,  Kunstler explained that he didn’t welcome a national “crack-up,” but it was “a plausible outcome that we ought to be prepared to face.” I still think he’s wrong. But I’m also willing to briefly consider that enough unwelcome trends are falling into place that he could be just a little bit right.