About 4% of all electricity used in the U.S. is used to move and treat water and wastewater.
—the EPA
Water and power are so closely intertwined that it is virtually impossible to manage one resource without taking the other into account. After agriculture, power generation is the greatest user of water in the world. In the United States, some 190,000 million gallons of water is used every day to produce electricity. Water is used in the production of oil, natural-gas, coal, ethanol, solar, wind, and hydroelectric power, and, especially, to cool power plants. According to the federal Sandia National Laboratories, the production of each kilowatt-hour of electricity using coal—the cheapest, most common, and one of the dirtiest fossil fuels—requires 25 gallons of water.
Americans use as much water indirectly, by turning on lights and heating their homes, as they do directly, by brushing their teeth or spraying their lawns. The simple act of running a faucet uses energy; heating tap water is responsible for 9 percent of residential electrical consumption; water treatment and distribution use about 4 percent of the nation’s annual electrical output, and in some regions that number can be much higher.
As the population grows and shifts from the cool Northeast to the hot Southwest, the demand for power is surging and setting off disagreements over how much water to devote to energy. In the East, competition among the power industry, developers, and environmentalists has led to showdowns over Maine rivers, the New York watershed, and the coastal waters of Florida. In the Midwest, competition among irrigation farmers, oil-shale developers, biofuel entrepreneurs, and growing urban populations is helping to drain ancient stores of groundwater. In the Sunbelt, dozens of planned solar power plants—large, high-tech projects in the vanguard of the renewable-energy boom—will require billions of gallons of water to produce steam to run their turbines, for cooling, and to maintain solar mirrors. But in 2009 growing restrictions on water use in Nevada, Texas, and California slowed many of these solar projects. Similar confrontations over resources are rippling throughout the global economy.
The water industry itself uses a lot of energy. The collection, transportation, treatment, and distribution of water by the nation’s sixty thousand water systems and fifteen thousand wastewater treatment plants account for about 4 percent of America’s total electrical use, according to the Sandia National Laboratories. In a 2007 study by state agencies, California found that “water-related energy use”—i.e., moving the state’s water supply across great distances, through the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta and over mountain ranges—consumes about 19 percent of the state’s electricity, 32 percent of its natural gas, and 88 billion gallons of diesel fuel a year. Energy was required for each step of the value chain, from storage to conveyance, treatment, distribution, and wastewater collection. As more long-distance aqueducts and pipelines are planned, regulators will have to factor in the power needed to build and operate them and the water costs associated with that power.
Climate change is affecting power supplies because sudden shifts in temperature lead to surges in power use, and because generators are vulnerable to drought or flood. As Lake Mead’s water levels sank in the early 2000s, managers worried that the hydroelectric turbines in Hoover Dam would stop spinning. Farther down the Colorado River, a debate brewed over San Antonio’s wish for billions of gallons of water to alleviate the drought in Texas, while Austin requested water to supply new power plants for its expanding suburbs. There isn’t enough blue gold to satisfy both demands.
Roughly half of the freshwater drawn from sources in the United States is used by industrial cooling towers. Many older power plants use inefficient “once-through” cooling (OTC) systems, in which large amounts of water are drawn from a waterway, circulated through the system, then discharged. Of the water used to cool power plants, 2 to 3 percent is lost to evaporation, which works out to a loss of 1.6 trillion gallons a year of water that would otherwise be used by the ecosystem. As they suck water into plants, OTC systems kill fish and other aquatic organisms; when the heated water is pumped back out of the plant, it causes further damage.
During the heat wave of 2008, for instance, Texas used approximately 157,000 million gallons of water a year—enough to supply drinking water to 3 million people—just for cooling the state’s power plants.
As we approach the limits of how much water can be extracted from the environment, growth may be held in check. By 2050, the US population is expected to reach 440 million, and energy demand will increase by 40 percent, according to the Department of Energy. This will require adding at least sixteen hundred new power plants. But these plants use tons of water, which may not be available unless other users are sacrificed. Most of the new growth is projected for the water-stressed West, and regulators in Idaho and Arizona have denied permits for new power plants because of concerns about water use.
Academics and politicians have grouped the two resources under a single rubric: the water-energy nexus. The term makes sense in theory, but in practice, the federal government has split the management of water and power among different agencies, which has led to confusion. When not handled carefully, the water-energy nexus turns into a vicious cycle of rising energy demand, dropping water supplies, and environmental degradation—known as the water-energy collision.
Environmental groups have seized on water as a powerful weapon to challenge the permitting of power plants. In 2004, Riverkeeper and six states sued the EPA for permitting once-through cooling in about five hundred older power plants across the country, charging that the inefficient process violates the Clean Water Act by harming aquatic life and failing to utilize the best technology available. The case, which could significantly affect the energy industry, was sent to the US Supreme Court in 2009.
In the spring of 2010, New York State refused to renew the permit for the Indian Point nuclear plant, which sits on the Hudson River, because its cooling towers used so much water, 2.5 billion gallons a day, and released it back into the river at such high temperatures that it was decimating aquatic life. Company officials said it would cost $1 billion to install a less harmful cooling system (environmentalists say it would cost far less) and would force them to raise electrical rates. But the state’s refusal to renew Indian Point’s permit was hardly a surprise. The EPA had first told the company in 1975 that it would have to replace its cooling system, and the plant’s Clean Water Act permits expired in the 1990s. Politicians were loath to take on the power industry, and so, apparently, were regulators. For years, a series of interim agreements, licensing delays, and other obfuscations allowed Indian Point, and other power plants, to keep operating with outdated equipment.
In the meantime, new, far more efficient “closed loop” cooling technology is available. Instead of using huge amounts of water once and dumping it into waterways, the new system uses smaller amounts of water and recirculates it through cooling towers or ponds several times, which reduces evaporation and the discharge of heated water. In 2008, Pacific Gas & Electric opened the first closed-loop power plant in Antioch, California, and it cut water intake from 40,000 gallons a minute to 1.6 gallons a minute.
As our need, or desire, for energy mounts this century, new methods of extracting natural gas and oil promise to unlock previously unattainable resources and could prove a huge boon that will power the nation into the twenty-second century. But these techniques require vast quantities of water, are dirty, and come with numerous costs.
Extraction methods such as hydrofracking and retorting represent the next phase of the water-energy nexus and collision. They will force us to make difficult choices about how we allocate water. Before we do so, it behooves us to understand what is involved and what is at stake—information that energy companies are not happy to share.
A society increasingly confronted with water decision-making should at least understand the ingredients of the problem.
—Abel Wolman,
Johns Hopkins University, 1966
T. Boone Pickens has profited handsomely from his investments in natural gas. He has promoted the Pickens Plan on TV and in print ads, urging people to replace “foreign oil”—which he says “America is addicted to” and helps fund terrorists—with “cheap and significantly cleaner” natural gas. Natural gas burns 30 percent cleaner than diesel fuel and is abundant, with an estimated 4,000 trillion cubic feet of reserves in the continental United States. Running the nation’s 8 million freight trucks on natural gas would cut down on air pollution and cost about a fourth of petroleum diesel, Pickens says. He and many others, including the Obama White House, have aggressively promoted natural gas as a fuel for this century, one that helps reduce global warming, creates jobs, and provides healthy tax revenues to recession-hurt states.
Yet Pickens and his colleagues don’t mention one critical fact: over 90 percent of natural gas wells today use hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, a controversial method of accessing pockets of natural gas trapped in underground shale formations.
To frack a well is to inject a slurry of water, sand, and a mixture of chemicals at high pressure into subterranean shale, cracking open fissures, which release the natural gas; the gas then flows into a borehole to the surface. But each fracked gas well uses 3 to 8 million gallons of water, and the process has been blamed for contaminating groundwater and impacting people’s health.
Although hydrofracking has been used for decades in the West, usually on a small scale, demand for natural gas is rising, and by 2008 hydrofracking had emerged as a major extraction method. Over the next two years, reports of health problems and environmental pollution associated with fracking led to scrutiny by the press, a provocative documentary film called GasLand, a growing sense of alarm in the public, and demands for regulatory oversight. But natural gas companies were handing out jobs and lucrative deals for the right to frack on private land. In a time of global recession, politicians found these enticements difficult to resist.
Streaming into a high school auditorium in downtown Manhattan one evening in November 2009, at least a thousand people arrived for a raucous public meeting as state regulators deliberated plans to frack in the New York City watershed, the vast and heavily protected source that supplies water to over 9 million people a day.
The mountains, fields, and forests of many upstate counties overly the vast Marcellus Shale deposit, which stretches across New York, Pennsylvania, western Maryland, West Virginia, and eastern Ohio. Estimates on the deposit’s size vary, but it may contain as much as 500 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. (New York State uses about 1.1 trillion cubic feet per year.)
The stakes are enormous, with gas companies and landowners in a frenzy to capitalize on it. As gas prospectors offered increasingly lucrative leases to landowners, many rural residents lined up to offer their property in what amounted to a natural gas bonanza. Leases to frack property over the Marcellus Shale skyrocketed from $25 an acre plus royalties of 12.5 percent in 2007, to $6,000 an acre plus royalties of up to 20 percent in 2009.
Gas company representatives went door-to-door in New York State, and some people signed leases for a pittance. One poor resident of Delaware County, for instance, leased her 110 acres for $2,750 in 2007, in order to pay her taxes; two years later, she could have leased the same land for over half a million dollars. Others, such as residents of Broome County, leased their property in 2009 and were grateful for the income—over a million dollars per parcel—which helped them weather the recession.
But in the high school auditorium that November evening, city residents said they considered the potential for gas to pollute the city’s drinking supply “a nightmare.” Armed with stories about poisoned fish, deformed livestock, tap water that smells of gas or ignites when lit with a match, and neurological and gastrointestinal problems, the crowd at the high school—some dressed as fish or mountains—held placards saying KILL THE DRILL and hurled questions at state regulators. Politicians eyed TV cameras and whipped the crowd into a frenzy, saying things like “Why aren’t the gas companies required to adhere to the Clean Water Act?” and “There is no plan on how to deal with the fracking wastewater—which is highly problematic!”
If fracking liquids, some of which are toxic, seep into the city’s water supply, New York would be forced by EPA regulations to build a filtration plant, which could cost $10 billion. After a century of carefully buying property to nurture and protect its watershed, the city’s Department of Environmental Protection was caught in a political bind. While Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that fracking “is not a risk that I think we should run,” Governor David Paterson was intrigued by the jobs and income fracking promised.
“New York State has one of the largest deposits of natural gas in the United States,” thundered one red-faced legislator that November night. “But the revenues from the gas won’t even come close to equalizing the cost of a new treatment plant. Think about it!” The crowd whooped and whistled.
Similarly charged meetings have been held in the upstate towns that would be affected by fracking, as well as in Pennsylvania, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Texas. Hydrofracking has split communities and even families.
Fracking is water intensive and dirty. A single hydrofracked well requires from 3 to 8 million gallons of water per day, the rough equivalent of a day’s supply for forty thousand people (based on average US use of eighty to a hundred gallons of water per day). In 2009, the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation made a disturbing discovery. In analyzing samples of wastewater brought to the surface by hydrofracking, scientists found it to be radioactive. The water contained radium 226, a naturally occurring uranium derivative, at levels 267 times the limit safe for discharge into the environment and thousands of times the limit safe for drinking water. Tests suggest the amount of radioactivity in the water was far higher in New York than in many other places. While the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation found that “well … wastes do not constitute a health risk” the federal EPA notes “potential risks.”
West of New York City, the Delaware River runs 410 miles long and is considered one of the cleanest rivers in the East, famous for some of the best fly-fishing in the country. About 17 million people—including residents of Manhattan and Philadelphia—rely on its pristine watershed as a drinking supply. But in June 2010, the advocacy group American Rivers named the Delaware “the most endangered river in the country” because of the threat of fracking. Fears of pollution caused regulators to put a temporary moratorium on gas exploration in the Delaware basin until the matter could be studied.
Yet the temptations of natural gas are huge. An industry study released in 2010 suggested that as much as $6 billion in government revenue and 280,000 jobs could be at stake in the Marcellus Shale region alone.
In 2008, hydrofracked gas wells began to pop up all over the Appalachian town of Dimock, Pennsylvania (population 1,400). People’s drinking water turned brown and occasionally exploded; pets and farm animals suddenly began to shed hair; dangerous levels of methane, iron, and aluminum were found in wells; kids grew sores on their legs; and their parents suffered frequent headaches. In 2009, the state imposed a moratorium on drilling new wells in Dimock, though existing ones can continue to be used, and fined Cabot Oil and Gas, a Houston-based energy company, $120,000. Residents fear that fracking has made their properties worthless and have banded together to sue Cabot for compensation.
In other places, such as Silt, Colorado, fracking for gas has led to even more serious health problems for people, such as Laura Amos, who developed an adrenal-gland tumor after her water was tainted by hydrofracking for gas.* Colorado gas-field workers believe that the fluids used in fracking have caused cancer, though it is difficult to prove.
Understanding the full extent of the problem has been made difficult by the secretive nature of the gas industry, and its ability to convince people such as Amos to sign nondisclosure agreements, as she did with Encana, the large Canadian gas company that drilled a well less than a thousand feet from her home.
Gas companies counter that such horror stories are simply not true or are not their fault. “In sixty years of hydraulic fracturing across the country, more than a million wells have been fracked, including fourteen thousand in New York,” maintained Jim Smith, spokesman for the Independent Oil and Gas Association of New York. The process “has never harmed a drop of drinking water.”
BP, the largest producer of natural gas in the United States, with over fifteen thousand natural gas wells, has been expanding through acquisitions, and predicts “a revolution in the gas fields of North America.” But just as the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico—which revealed shortcuts to save time and money, aided by regulators’ lack of oversight—brought new scrutiny of deepwater oil exploration, so have a series of accidents in natural gas fields brought attention to the tremendous potential, and risks, of hydrofracking—including a blowout at a Pennsylvania gas well in June 2010 that sprayed gas and wastewater for sixteen hours.
According to Pennsylvania regulators, in Dimock, Cabot Oil and Gas failed to properly cement well casings, which can allow methane and other chemicals to seep out. When gas gets trapped in the headspaces of wells, it can explode. Several wells in Dimock have exploded or been tainted by gas; a house near Cleveland, Ohio, exploded in 2007 when gas infiltrated its water well; and dozens of wells in Colorado were contaminated by methane in 2008. Gas industry representatives point out that methane can be naturally occurring and doesn’t always originate from gas wells. With over 450,000 gas wells in the United States, the industry says, incidents of contamination are statistically meaningless. But, as scientists study hydrofracking more closely, and Congress and states weigh tougher environmental oversight of gas drilling, the industry’s arguments are being challenged.
• • •
Natural gas accounts for about a quarter of all energy used in the United States, a percentage that has steadily grown. From 1996 to 2006, shale-gas production grew from less than 2 percent to 6 percent of all domestic natural gas production. Some analysts predict that by 2020, shale gas will represent half of total domestic gas production.
Now the boom is attracting global attention. In April 2010, Reliance Industries, a petrochemical company based in India, paid $1.7 billion for a 40 percent interest in Atlas Energy’s gas fields in Pennsylvania. The United States has agreed to help China develop gas shale exploration, while fracking has ignited a debate over water contamination in Queensland, Australia. Energy companies have targeted Sweden, Poland, and Germany for the next gas bonanza.
Originally developed by Halliburton, the oil-field-services company once run by Dick Cheney, hydrofracking was introduced in 1949. But it has never been subject to federal regulation, and state regulations have been spotty. In the Energy Policy Act of 2005—the contested energy bill crafted by Vice President Cheney in closed-door meetings with oil and gas executives—fracking was granted an explicit exemption from the Clean Water Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, and the Clean Air Act. This is known as the Halliburton Loophole. The act exempts drilling companies from having to disclose what chemicals are added to the frack water, millions of gallons of which can be pumped into the ground near aquifers during drilling.
At the national level, the EPA has undertaken an investigation of fracking, due to be finished by late 2012, as has the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
One concern is that fracking creates terrible air pollution, which is generated by drill rigs and by the trucks used to move fluids, waste rock, and supplies. According to a preliminary 2010 study of the emissions generated in fracking by Professor Robert Howarth, a Cornell ecologist, hydro-fracking is dirtier than drilling for oil and possibly dirtier than mining for coal (usually considered the “dirtiest” hydrocarbon). Although his work is incomplete, due to a lack of public data about fracking, Howarth told Vanity Fair, “Society should be wary of claims that natural gas is a desirable fuel in terms of the consequences on global warming.”
A more insidious concern is the makeup of fracking fluid, and the slurry of wastewater and chemicals that flows in and out of fracked wells. Much like the poultry integrators who refuse to reveal the recipes for the chicken feed that is polluting the Chesapeake Bay, drilling companies claim the makeup of their fracking fluids is proprietary and refuse to divulge their contents. According experts such as Dr. Theo Colborn, an environmental health analyst known for her work on endocrine disruptors, at least half of the chemicals in fracking fluids are toxic, such as benzene, toluene, boric acid, formaldehyde, and xylene. But many other chemicals used in fracking remain secret.
Shale is hard and requires intensive blasting, which can create unpredictable cracks in the rock, potentially allowing gas and toxic water to be released into aquifers. In 2010, James Northrup, a former ARCO planning manager, wrote a memo to the Otsego County (NY) Board saying that existing New York State regulations “are grossly inadequate … they are a prescription for disaster.” He compared hydrofracking to a hydrobaric underground bomb, “a very powerful dirty bomb,” in which pressures approach fifteen thousand pounds per square inch—equivalent to thirty times that of an air bomb, or to water pressure six miles deep. When shale is exploded by hydrofracking, powerful jets of fracking fluid break up rock indiscriminately for a considerable distance underground. This can allow the release of natural gas—which is made up of methane, butane, propane, and benzene—into drinking supplies, along with toxins in the fracking fluid itself. “The fracking fluid contains chemicals that would be illegal to use under the Geneva Convention banning chemical weapons,” Northrup wrote. Once those toxic chemicals have entered a drinking supply, there is no way to claw them back.
If these suspicions about hydrofracking are borne out by further disclosures, then the main premise on which natural gas is being sold by Pickens, BP, and even the White House—that it is a cleaner, greener fuel—is badly flawed.
Water is used to produce oil, and oil is used to produce water, but spilled oil can pollute water and harm the ecosystem. In coming decades, the two resources will become even more tightly bound, and at odds, as demand for energy increases.
To prepare for the extraction of shale oil, a new type of fuel not yet on the market, oil companies have developed long-term strategies in which water is a key component. Firms such as ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell have bought up tens of thousands of acres of ranchland, farms, and open space—because of their water rights—in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and North Dakota.
Shale rock tends to be rich in kerogens, a mixture of organic chemical compounds, the soluble form of which is a heavy hydrocarbon known as bitumen. Bitumen can be processed into a petroleum product known as synthetic crude. To mine oil from shale, the rock is brought to the surface and subjected to high heat, which melts the oil out of the rock. This process, called retorting, is energy- and water-intensive: one barrel of synthetic crude retorted requires five barrels of water. According to Western Resource Advocates (WRA), an environmental group, the retorting of oil shale in Colorado will require an estimated two hundred thousand to three hundred thousand acre-feet of water annually—equivalent to the yearly water consumption of 25 million people.
The federal Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the agency responsible for managing public lands, estimates that the shale formation under Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah could yield as much as 1.8 trillion barrels of oil, an amount three times the size of Saudi Arabia’s proven reserves. At peak production, oil companies could retort 1.55 million barrels of shale oil per day in Colorado, the BLM said, which would require 378,000 acre-feet of water (Denver uses 300,000 acre-feet of water annually).
But western Colorado is naturally arid, its population is growing, and water is in high demand. The nearest significant supply of water is the already stressed Colorado River. So oil companies have done what Los Angeles did in the Owens Valley and what Pat Mulroy did in central Nevada: quietly purchase property with significant water rights, in this case to prepare for the day when it is economical and technically feasible to extract synthetic crude from shale. In 2007 and 2008, Shell went on a buying spree in Colorado, shrewdly focusing on properties with “senior” water rights, those that predate the water rights of businesses, such as farms and ski resorts, and thus have legal precedence under Western water law. Shell acquired a large ranch with water rights dating to the 1860s, as well as a piece of land near Mack with a thirty-thousand-acre-foot reservoir and rights to Colorado River water. It also swapped properties with the state for land along Piceance Creek. By 2009, Shell had thirty-one conditional rights and ownership in five irrigation ditches in the Colorado and White River Basins. Shell also filed for substantial water rights on the Yampa River and began snapping up properties near Grand Junction. ExxonMobil owned forty-nine conditional claims and forty-eight irrigation ditches, mostly in the White River Basin.
Although major oil-shale production is not likely to begin until 2020, and oil companies are working to improve the water-to-oil ratio, ranchers and environmentalists worry that the industry—which has acquired 7.5 million acre-feet of water rights—will suck Colorado dry. If too much water is used to mine shale oil, they fear, the state might be liable—either because it cannot meet its water delivery obligations under the Colorado River Compact or will not meet limits set by the Endangered Species Act. Ranchers have a different worry.
“A shift of water to oil shale will dramatically change the landscape,” WRA executive director Karin Sheldon warned. “It could mean an end to agriculture and to the historic economic base of these rural communities.”
A few hundred miles north of the Colorado oil shale fields, tension between oil and water has been growing since the discovery of vast deposits of tar sands, another source of synthetic crude oil, in Ontario and Alberta, Canada. Tar sand consists of quartzite, clay, water, and the “tar,” which is the heavy hydrocarbon bitumen (similar to what is found in shale oil).
The first commercial operation to exploit it to produce oil was established in Alberta, in 1930. Today, Fort McMurray, a small town set among rippling hills on the Athabasca River, in northern Alberta, is a tar sands boomtown. Since the mid-1990s, residents have taken to calling it Fort McMoney because companies such as Royal Dutch Shell, Conoco-Phillips, Chevron, Imperial Oil (mostly owned by ExxonMobil), British Petroleum, Total, StatoilHydro of Norway, and Suncor have poured $150 billion into processing oil from the tar sands in a fifty-seven-thousand-square-mile area—a region almost the size of Florida. These companies plan to invest an additional $75 billion in the region by 2012.
The extraction of oil from Alberta’s tar sands is the world’s largest energy project and is expected to contribute nearly $1 trillion to Canada’s gross domestic product by 2020. The tar sands contain more oil than the fields of Kuwait, Norway, and Russia combined. If only 10 percent of Alberta’s deposits are actually tapped, they still represent the world’s second-largest oil reserve, after Saudi Arabia’s. By 2007, output from Alberta’s fields was topping a million barrels a day, making Canada the United States’s number one source of imported oil. By 2015, oil recovery from the tar sands is predicted to triple. It has been estimated that the three major bitumen deposits in Alberta will eventually yield as much as 1.7 trillion barrels of synthetic crude.
But extracting bitumen from tar sands requires tremendous amounts of energy and water, and the Achilles’ heel of “Canada’s greatest economic project,” that there might not be enough water to sustain it, is largely overlooked.
Alberta is one of the driest parts of Canada, containing only 2.2 percent of the nation’s freshwater. The province lies in the rain shadow of the Rocky Mountains, where many glaciers have lost a third of their mass and snowpack has been shrinking due to a temperature rise of two to four degrees since the 1970s. Tree-ring studies show that over the millennia the region has suffered extreme droughts that have lasted up to twenty years.
Tar sand mining uses an average of three to four barrels of freshwater to produce one barrel of bitumen, with the water usually being heated to help separate hydrocarbons from the sand and clay. Although some companies recycle their water as many as eighteen times, the industry still takes great volumes from the Athabasca River and nearby aquifers. Even in a drought, the government will allow the tar sand industry to withdraw enough water to fill fifty bathtubs per second. In 2008, tar sand processing accounted for 76 percent of the water taken from the Athabasca, Alberta’s longest undammed waterway. Existing licenses allow oil companies to take 3.3 billion barrels of freshwater a year, which is enough to supply two cities the size of Calgary. Planned expansions to tar sands mining could bring the total up to 4.2 billion barrels a year. But, cautioned Natural Resources Canada, this volume “would not be sustainable because the Athabasca River does not have sufficient flows.”
Mining bitumen also requires vast amounts of energy and pollutes the air, ground, and water. This has already had health and social impacts on local people. Although the oil companies employ many Athabasca Chipewyan and Mikisew Cree Indians, the tribes have protested the development of their ancestral land. They worry about high rates of unusual cancers that have suddenly cropped up in their villages and wonder if toxins leaking from the mines have flowed downstream from Fort McMurray to Lake Athabasca, where Indian villagers fish.
After a scathing 2007 report by Doug Radke, Canada’s former deputy minister of the environment, on Alberta’s “inadequate” enforcement of “outdated and incomplete” environmental regulations for tar sands mining, the provincial government produced an interim plan to guide water withdrawals from the Athabasca River. But Alberta prides itself on a freewheeling Wild West ethos, and the development of new tar sand mine sites hasn’t slowed a bit.
• • •
As US states try to cut their carbon footprints and search for alternatives to hydrocarbons, the Obama administration has considered building new nuclear power plants for the first time in decades. But nuclear power uses more water—for steam generation and cooling—than any other kind of power plant, which will have to be taken into account.
In 2007–8, a heat wave forced a power plant in Georgia to reduce its output because discharge water could not be cooled enough to stay within the environmental limit. A nuclear plant in Alabama had to shut down for a day to avoid endangering wildlife with heated discharge water. According to the Associated Press, water shortages threaten to curtail the output of up to a quarter of the nation’s 104 nuclear reactors.
The debate over disposal of nuclear fuel has also been influenced by concerns about water. A federal plan to store spent nuclear fuel at a repository deep inside Yucca Mountain, about eighty miles northwest of Las Vegas, was suspended by Energy Secretary Steven Chu in 2009 because of a long-running disagreement over whether the radioactive waste would seep into groundwater there and contaminate the area.
To avoid a disastrous water-energy collision and promote a true water-energy nexus, federal and state officials will have to start managing the two resources together, as a holistic system. If they are going to keep ahead of the mineral and energy industries, which are already planning how to use water in the next century, government agencies will have to become less reactive and learn to think the way business does: long term.