Deaf
Water
by Jack Flobeck
Emphasis on the price and future of oil, and on global economic and political competition, has obscured presentation of a problem that will soon rival and in the end dwarf these others. It’s the Water Story, and the World is deaf! To learn that there is only a finite amount of water in the world puts a new perspective on the scattered but pervasive radio, TV, and magazine coverage of all the illness, plague, disease, and starvation that results from water pollution and from water scarcity.
To those in the water field, the statistics are old and stale while the metaphors are shopworn; but to a new audience the statistics are always a staggering revelation. Consider:
® Almost 1/3 of the world’s 6 billion people lack safe drinking water.
® As the world’s population soars to 9 billion in the next 50 years, where will the water come from?
® Between 6,000 and 20,000 people, mostly children under 5 years old, die from water related illnesses, EVERY DAY.
How much water is there? There are 326 million cubic miles of water in the world, with only 2.5 million cubic miles of it fit to drink. That’s only 0.76 %, not even 1 per cent. There is no more. We simply don’t have enough water for the World’s burgeoning population.
There are three paths open to us. First, better Conserve what water we do have. Second, improve Desalinization, by perfecting more efficient and lower cost technology to convert seawater to potable and irrigation grade water. Third, learn how to Reuse, some of the precious water we have access to.
Conservation must be a state of the mind before it will be a state of the world. In the United States, approximately 40% of water is consumed in power production; an additional 40% is consumed in agriculture. Roughly 14% of water is consumed by industry; the remaining 6% is consumed by residential users. More than half of residential consumption is for watering lawns; half of the remaining half is for flushing wastes.
Although noble in thought and worthy in spirit, the effort to put bricks into toilets and install thousands of more efficient showerheads won’t make a significant dent in global water use.
Examining these alternatives, conservation of water by scientific control of irrigation has the most potential. Farmers must stop careless spraying of the roads bordering their farms, and at the same time stop watering already drenched fields. Aqua Prima promotes initiatives in ‘wireless’ irrigation for farmers, where satellite pictures identify both wet and dry farm sections, and computers tell sophisticated piping configurations to irrigate only the dry spots, while ignoring the saturated ones. We believe that there is great long-term return in perfection and widespread installation of these systems, and that farmers should be rewarded when they conserve.
At present, the world’s record for low cost desalinization is $ 0.53/cubic meter1. This could lead us into the analytical trap that DESAL is the ultimate answer. But the natural ‘NEXUS’ between water and amount of energy it takes to accomplish desalinization certainly points to an unfortunate dilemma where the cost to produce the water includes huge expenditures of other valuable resources such as fossil fuels. Thus far, solar, wind, and photovoltaic alternates don’t produce the required horsepower to accomplish DESAL, at significantly lower energy outlays. We must continue to improve DESAL efficiencies, but must look to alternatives for our salvation.
As far as REUSE is concerned, Global Intelligence
magazine from Oxford, U.K., sees it this way, "Over
the next decade half the world's major industrial companies and one quarter of
its major cities will consider reuse. The
combination of increased water scarcity, tougher environmental regulation, and
falling costs will create the conditions for explosive growth."
The largest underground water reserve in the World, the Ogallala Aquifer, in the middle of America, is shrinking by more than 1,000,000 acre feet a year, primarily from use by center pivot farm irrigation. In India 20,000 new water wells are drilled each year, now powered with robust diesel pumps, and Indians see the water table drop hundreds of feet every year. In Africa and China, people are drinking the water from rivers where their neighbors, just miles up stream, are washing clothes or squatting to use the river as a toilet. In Mexico, the Capital City is sinking, and the sewers are caving in, to create one of the most hazardous drinking water situations imaginable. Europe is in the middle of a great drought, and across the world we see massive sewage spills causing disease and death. It is not a pretty Global Picture.
Acknowledging that armed, political, economic and now religious conflict – often predicated on oil as a base for competition and social well-being - have a primacy that drives media coverage, we are “WATER DEAF.” It is only a matter of time, before an American turns on his faucet and nothing happens. That will be the ‘deaf’ drop heard round the World.
Copyright - April 26, 2006 by Jack Flobeck, CEO and Founder of Aqua Prima Center Inc., a non-profit 501 (c ) 3 "‘think tank" for water research and water conservation. www.aquaprima.org
