Ground water depletion

[Dimentio]

Only 3% of the water on the planet is drinkable fresh-water. I have a sense that the ground water aquifiers are being dehydrated , while the water going through all the industrial plants for recycling is pumping out in the lakes and going to the ocean. The needs for the European industry to use fresh-water in their factories consumes huge amounts of water, and do you think we are depleting our fresh-water reserve, creating a situation where we are reaching "Peak water"?

[Lynx]

I have read predictions of 'water wars' in certain regions. But water is a renewable resource. There could be a "plateau", but only for as long as desalination remains impractical.

[Cult of Reason]

Actually, Lynx, what could happen is an overexploitation of groundwater that results in an approximation to a Hubbert bell curve, as reserves are extracted at a higher rate than they can be replaced (in fact, oil is actually renewable as well, it just takes so much longer (thousands of years?) to form the same amount of petroleum as might be pumped out by one well in one day that assuming non-renewability is a good approximation). IIRC, northern China is currently in this situation, and its water table is falling by a metre each year due to overpumping.

Serpent: I think that water will be more of a problem for the global "South" than for Europe (as a whole, at least). I base this view partly on this map:

http://whyfiles.org/131fresh_water/images/world_water.gif


This webpage is interesting: http://whyfiles.org/131fresh_water/index.html

[Sendo]

well, that's the worst that happens? We have to desalinize ocean water?

Seriously, though, does anyone have the stats on that, though? Desalinization is supposed to require some insane amount of energy to do. That'd create some really massive energy problems and A LOT of economic scarcity of water.

[ÑóẊîöʼn]

Desalination plants powered by renewables would seem to be the best solution, at least until we get significant population decreases.

[butterfly]

I agree with NoXion, however some of this would need to be pumped back into our riversystems to maintain arable land for growing crops and sustaining the ecosystem.

[Dean]

Only 3% of the water on the planet is drinkable fresh-water. I have a sense that the ground water aquifiers are being dehydrated , while the water going through all the industrial plants for recycling is pumping out in the lakes and going to the ocean. The needs for the European industry to use fresh-water in their factories consumes huge amounts of water, and do you think we are depleting our fresh-water reserve, creating a situation where we are reaching "Peak water"?

Environmentalism? Bah! Take it away!

[Sendo]

Fucking rich assholes playing elitist crap like golf. In the USA, there are enough golf courses to fill something like two Rhode Islands and a Delaware. Some of them are in Arizona, and all need to pumped full of drinking water.

Libertarians piss me off with their whole "the water goes to those most willing to pay for it" and "supply and demand". Nope! "Most willing" means "most moneyed", and "supply and demand" is code for "I'll make more money if people go without".

[jake williams]

Fucking rich assholes playing elitist crap like golf. In the USA, there are enough golf courses to fill something like two Rhode Islands and a Delaware. Some of them are in Arizona, and all need to pumped full of drinking water.
Well I forget the stats exactly, but while a lot of water is used for lawn-watering, especially in certain corners of the world, most of it is used for industry and agriculture, which translates to it being almost impossible to reduce substantively without very severe, albeit eventually probably necessary assuming we'd like industry and agriculture, changes. While we need to reduce as much as possible, it's not like reducing doesn't help, we need larger-scale solutions in the long run. We need major reductions in use, and we need to find ways to use water such that it's more renewable. If you have a balanced ecosystem where there's a limited amount of shit and toxins, it's no problem, an elephant or a tree "using" water doesn't really take it out of the biosphere. The trouble is that humans who use water for, say, aluminum production, or even agriculture to make the food we eat, or even who drink it, they turn it into something toxic that can't easily be returned to the environment. So essentially we need to resolve that.

Short term? Caution and conservation. Desalinization unfortunately. Better water treatment. Eventually more sensible agriculture and industry, but that's tricky to do.


Libertarians piss me off with their whole "the water goes to those most willing to pay for it" and "supply and demand". Nope! "Most willing" means "most moneyed", and "supply and demand" is code for "I'll make more money if people go without".
I would like to try to ignore those people here.

[Cult of Reason]

In coastal desert areas, desalinated drinking water can be gained essentially for free:


6. Seawater desalination in cogeneration
In solar thermal power plants only 35% of the collected solar energy is converted into electricity. If combined with sea water another 50% of the collected energy, normally
released as cooling heat, can be used for thermal desalination. This way up to 85% of the collected solar energy can be used, and with each TWh of power 40 Million m³ water can be desalinated in cogeneration.

http://www.desertec.org/downloads/deserts_en.pdf

If you read that document and the site it can be seen that it is technically possible for concentrating solar thermal power to provide for all our primary energy needs and for a lot of our water*.

*I do not know how much water we consume, so I cannot be more precise.