Water-Energy Choke Point | ModeShift

In China’s Coal Belt, A Refinery Drains Water and Life

by Keith SchneiderAugust 10, 2013August 14, 20130

Qingwei Sun, former Greenpeace campaigner, and lead author of Thirsty Coal, a two-part report on the rising water demands of China’s largest energy sector. Photo/Keith Schneider BEIJING — Qingwei Sun, who investigated and wrote two revealing reports for Greenpeace in the last two years on how China’s giant coal sector uses, and in some cases abuses the nation’s water reserves, is a 36-year-old geographer from Lanzhou, the capital and largest city in Gansu Province. At …

Dust, Development, Determination in Mongolia

by Keith SchneiderAugust 9, 2013September 23, 20131

The levee road, one lane of dirt and stones, is the fastest way from the airport to downtown in traffic-snarled Ulan Bator, Mongolia’s furiously developing capital. Photo/Keith Schneider ULAN BATOR — A hard rock and coal mining boom that really got rolling about a decade ago is literally leaving Mongolia’s capital in the dust. It’s also yielded 1) an aged Communist-era airport that is too small for the rapid rise in passenger traffic, and 2) …

In China, Responding to Water-Energy Choke Point Now a Government Priority

by Keith SchneiderAugust 6, 2013August 9, 20132

Jennifer Turner (in red), director of the Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum, introduces the Water and Energy Team to policy experts at China’s Development Research Center of the State Council, the government research group that provides policy recommendations to China’s highest executive agency. Photo/Keith Schneider BEIJING — Almost three years ago a team of reporters and photographers from Circle of Blue, assisted by Jennifer Turner and her staff at the Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum, …

Consequence of Free Energy, Free Water in India is Huge Waste

by Keith SchneiderJuly 2, 2013January 21, 20142

NAWANSHAR, Punjab, India â€“ On the way to Mandeep Sekhonâ€™s wheat and rice farm, a 8-hectare (20-acre) expanse of irrigated paddies, the road swings past continuous fields of winter wheat, the first shoots of green peeking from the stubble of last summerâ€™s rice. Early on a December afternoon, 32-year-old Sekhon displays the principal source of Indiaâ€™s farm plenty and its illogic â€“ two streams of pure water that pour from the mouths of his farmâ€™s …

India’s Economy Slowed, Environment Wrecked By Energy-Water-Food Choke Point

by Keith SchneiderJune 11, 2013July 2, 20130

For a month at the end of 2012, I joined J. Carl Ganter, the director of Circle of Blue and a top American photojournalist, and Aubrey Parker, Circle of Blue’s young and exacting news editor, on an absorbing fact-gathering trip to India.Â Our work focused on understanding the consequences of the contest between rising demand for energy and grain, and diminishing supplies of fresh water in a nation of 1.2 billion people. The first of …

TIQ: This is Qatar

by Keith SchneiderMay 5, 2013January 4, 20144

DOHA, Qatar –Mohamed Ali Darwish, a principal investigator at the Qatar Environment and Energy Research Institute, and one of the Gulf region’s leading experts on desalination, is a mechanical engineer assigned to help this dry nation of nearly two million residents develop a more efficient and ecologically safer means for securing its freshwater supply. Since 1959, when a Scottish engineer developed what is called “multi-stage flash evaporation,” or MSFE, Gulf coast nations have ardently pursued …

Qatar Challenges The Way of the Desert

by Keith SchneiderApril 28, 2013April 29, 20130

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 …

Hope For China’s Deep Shale Gas Development Impeded by Technical Reality

by Keith SchneiderJanuary 10, 2013January 10, 20130

Wei-201H3, the first deep shale, horizontally-drilled, hydrofracked natural gas well in China. Photo/Keith Schneider Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide are climbing, in large measure because of China’s production and combustion of more than 3 billion metric tons of coal annually, or nearly four times as much coal as the United States produces and burns. One of the solutions — though it is attracting rigorous opposition in the U.S. — is replacing coal with cleaner-burning natural …

Circle of Blue — At the Frontline of the Global Contest Over Energy, Food, and Water

by Keith SchneiderJanuary 8, 2013January 8, 20132

Pressed by growing demand to cool a proliferation of new coal-fired power plants in Chhattisgarh, India, workers expand and modernize a big water transport canal. Photo/Keith Schneider TRAVERSE CITY, MI — As we’ve known for years now, the diminishment of the mainstream American media is opening fresh opportunities for more nimble and skilled newsrooms to produce first-rate reporting. Nowhere is that more true than at Circle of Blue, where I serve as senior editor, reporting …

Outside Shenyang Lessons in Rice, Water, and Farming

by Keith SchneiderJune 8, 2012June 20, 20120

SHENYANG, China — The rice paddies start immediately beyond the borders of Liaoning’s provincial capital, a growing city of 8.1 million residents. Like a whirling turbine, the city flings 10-lane boulevards and 30-story apartment towers ever farther into the countryside. I’m out tracking down new irrigation systems, part of my research on Chinese grain production for Circle of Blue. Finding the rice and evidence of China’s new investment in modern irrigation infrastructure is a 50-minute …