there are some significant differences between petroleum and water. For oil, using it involves a chemical transformation that won't be reversed except on geological time scales. Using water often leaves it in its native state, with a cycle that returns it to the environment in a geologic blink of an eye. Still, the authors make a compelling argument that, not only can there be a peak water, but the US passed this point around 1970, apparently without anyone noticing.
Indeed, but since (as mentioned) water is nothing like oil, the concept of Peak Water hardly matters. I hear the US also passed Peak Rubik's Cube in about 1983 and nobody noticed that either.
It hardly matters until we pump all the aquifers dry. At that point a majority of US crops will be reliant upon rain water, which won't be enough to sustain the farms in the west. Much of Oklahoma, Kansas, California will revert back into the Great American Desert (as it was known before).
Most of California's agriculture is the Central Valley. Surely that was never desert? It's got rain all winter and runoff from the mountains all summer.
From Wikipedia[1]: "The northern Central Valley has a hot Mediterranean climate (Koppen climate classification Csa); the more southerly parts in rainshadow zones are dry enough to be Mediterranean steppe (BShs, as around Fresno) or even low-latitude desert (BWh, as in areas southeast of Bakersfield)."
Central Valley farms and the coastal cities are mostly fed by water from the Sierra's, via either rivers or one of California's many aquifers (e.g. Hetch Hetchy, Los Angeles, Colorado, California).
It doesn't really, the peak water argument was a busted flush when people realised there's constant water trade going on at rock bottom prices all around the world.
A few years ago it was fashionable to predict water wars. And then they didn't happen and people realised that when you buy any food from any other country, you import water. D'oh.
Given that the US is apparently a net exporter of food, seems to me they have plenty of water. All it might mean is that if water becomes scarcer in America, water intensive crops will become more expensive, thus their exports will drop.
On a side note, there are already many countries that are way past their own sustainable water use, but they buy food from countries which have excess water, so no ill ever comes of it.
Realistically, for the majority of human civilization desalination is a prime (and also becoming a much less-expensive) alternative.
Considering Israel and Singapore have already deployed desalinated water at lower costs than regular water in many parts of western countries, it really is a moot point.
Again, considering technological advances the prices will drop and once it hits a tipping point, every coastal city in the world will be able to switch as increased usage of the technology will not only mean lower construction costs of existing designs, but also lead to huge increases in research budgets. Since countries are already deploying it, it's really just a matter of time.
As mattmanser is pointing out, a lot of our water is exported through food. With desalination saving river water, there's a potential to greatly increase our exportation of water-intensive crops without damaging our waterways.
Desalination of water costs energy. If the energy costs are more than just pumping it out of an aquifer (or other fresh water source), then you're increasing your reliance on energy to get the amount of water that you need. This then increases the amount of reliance that we have on energy sources like oil just to get a basic necessity like water.
> With desalination saving river water, there's a potential to greatly increase our exportation of water-intensive crops without damaging our waterways.
Well, we still need waste treatment to keep those waterways clean. Let's just hope that someone doesn't come with the 'bright' idea that since we no longer rely on the waterways for drinking water, that we don't need to care about waste treatment.
I was wondering if someone had a great way to suck up the oil and separate it from the water, would you have to give the oil back to BP or could you keep it?
is that what this dispersant they're using does? I think I heard its keeping from surfacing, which I think is what happens when oil and water don't mix.
I would imagine a key difference here is that with water, the root sources will never be eradicated. Evaporate it and it enters the atmosphere. Dump it on the ground and it drains to the water table. Flush it down the drain and it enters a treatment system which dumps it into a river where it enters the ocean in due time.
The tech required to recycle the water is already available (and is commonplace), however, costs associated with this practice lead to government subsidies.
That's why nobody noticed. Oil runs out. Water sticks around (though it may need some cleaning).
> That's why nobody noticed. Oil runs out. Water sticks around (though it may need some cleaning).
Except it doesn't run out. Sure at some point you can't pump it out of wells any more (just like with water) and the tar sands will run out, but there's a zillion other options that are just not-quite-profitable right now. Water has sewage treatment plants and desalination, oil has various forms of biological-based sources and I'm pretty sure some straight chemical options.
The difference is that with water, if the aquifers run out you can increase the output of your desalination and sewage treatment plants, or build more of them, or whatever--all it takes is more energy inputs. Oil is energy inputs; if the EROEI drops too low we can't replace it until we find more than the energy we're currently getting from it from non-petroleum-based sources. It's unfortunately quite difficult to build thousands of nuke plants overnight without using petroleum inputs.
Fortunately, a lot of oil use is recreational. Look at the USA, which uses 10 times the oil per capita as heavily industrialized China.
When oil does start running short, there will be huge price shocks. Either market driven, or war-style command economies will curtail most shipping; while manufacturers pump out electrical vehicles and wind generators as fast as they can (wind generators can be built in factories and set up fairly quickly; nuclear plants require a long lead time due to site construction, planning, etc). Energy production is a relatively small part of the economy, so cutting back on the rest of the economy can pay for alternative energy supplies.
Planes can run on bio-fuel (which costs a fortune, but nobody needs to fly), cars can run on stationary energy (if you convert them to use electric motors). I don't know what container ships can use, perhaps rail will replace them in many cases (though this will be a big disruption).
It won't be pretty. There may be severe shortages. But at least the technology is being developed now.
The amount of processing it takes to turn oil into gasoline already takes a lot of energy from sources other than oil. Gasoline energy cost about 15x what wind energy does today, changing that to 16-20x is not a huge issue.
This isn't really an overnight sort of problem though, it's not like all the existing sources will suddenly run dry over the course of a year and leave us with nothing to bootstrap new sources.
Yes as the article pointed out, water does not face the same constraints as coal,oil, and other resources that follow the 'peak' distribution. It is, for the most part, not fundamentally transformed when we consume it. The "water cycle" we all learned about in school is much quicker than waiting for dead plants and animals to decompose into hydrocarbons. It seems like this research has more to do with branding & marketing than actual scientific discovery.
I start to understand more and more why cheap clean power is so important the future where population and industrialization is going to be off the charts.
Desalination can solve the water problem, if power is cheap enough, right now it's $2-3 per 1000 gallons.
Depends on how it's used. Fundamentally, peak $resource refers to the peak in production of $resource, which under laws of physics as we understand them will necessarily happen eventually. Barring changes in demand, $resource whose production has peaked will become more expensive; peak $resource implies peak cheap $resource in this case.
Unfortunately, peak $resource has been used, reused, and abused in so many different ways that stating one way is the definitive is bound to be incorrect.
This graph tells us that peak oil production in Alaska was in 1987. The annual production in Alaska will never again reach 1987 levels. That's the production peak.
In the exact same way, 10 or 20 or 30 years from now we'll be able to look back on the world oil production graph and point to the peak - the year in which we've produced the most oil ever. And we'll be able to say with high degree of confidence that we'll never reach those levels again. That's peak oil
After the peak occurs the prices will go up never to return to pre-peak prices. The quote you mangled is in fact this:
'End of $resource' is not the right phrasing.
'End of CHEAP $resource' is.
This sort of thing is why I don't take the peak oil panic-mongers seriously. It starts getting harder to find, the price goes up a bit, and people find ways to use less (for water this is largely better irrigation and various kinds of recycling, for oil I guess it would largely be switching more to electric power with nuclear/renewable generation)... and a few years later some analyst drives their used electric car to work, looks over the numbers for a report they're working on, and sees that the peak went by unannounced.
You're begging the question of how large the gulf is between our current standard of living and what's sustainable as well as the time needed to mature the alternatives.
The peak itself was never billed as a dramatic moment of change. It's simply a leading indicator of an impending, rapid, potentially disastrous, reconciliation of past and future standards of living.
In the case of oil, if you don't pay attention to it, you'll never be able to bring up alternatives or nuclear nearly fast enough to avoid serious economic shocks.
Water's easier, at least in America, because so much of it is literally wasted on American lawns. You can avoid quite a bit of economic shock with an order to shut off sprinklers.
But that's what the peak is all about: the canary in the coal mine. You're still alive and well when the bird pitches over. But you should probably take the hint, because you might not have enough time if you wait until it starts to notably impact you.
No, I'm saying there's really no reason to expect a "rapid" change after peak. It's not like all the world's oil is coming from one upended bottle that'll just suddenly run dry, there are many different fields with different amounts left and different costs of extraction. Right now it looks like some of the larger fields (particularly the alberta tar sands) are becoming economical, and also various alternatives (wind, solar) are becoming economical.
I'm using "rapid" as on a time scale of development and rollout of infrastructure technology. If the price of oil triples in 2 years, that's pretty darn rapid, because people will need to adjust their lifestyles for years before the alternatives and technological improvements can possibly be produced, delivered and installed.
I'm not suggesting the oil will all one day run out. But the sum production will drop. And the world's appetite will no longer be met and the bidding on the remaining oil production will skyrocket.
We saw this when the price of oil shot from 30/barrel to 100 over 3 years. Life changed and alternatives, though now-viable are still a decade away. And that was due a fairly small increase in total demand, due growth in Asia.
If you ignore the peak and wait until that first press conference from OPEC, when the world economy starts to regain its footing but they're still cutting production; your electric cars are a decade away from mass production. your solar panels are a decade away from mass production. your nuclear plants are a generation away from being built.
My sister-in-law is a hydrologist and gave me this great book called Cadillac Desert. All about the "The American West and Its Disappearing Water". It tells the story about how many awful projects were funded by Congress as a means of sending pork home.
Many made no economic sense at all, even after the ridiculous stretching of the facts used to justify them. There's even a river in OK or TX whose course has been continually changed, with all the work being done by a company in which the local Congressman had a financial interest.
Yep, a lot of that $13 trillion has simply been flushed down the river with no real benefit.
The book also talks about how Jimmy Carter tried get the states to pick up a tiny percentage of the cost. Suddenly, interest in water projects plummeted, at least until that silly idea was repealed.
Water usage will become a big issue. Especially if the planet keeps warming up, which could see many glacial fed rivers drying up. Impacting millions of people’s across the globe.
There’s several things that needs to be worked out very soon:
- Sustainable water desalination in arid countries that doesn’t consume hydrocarbons (Solar-Thermal desalination? Nuclear desalination?).
- Better reuse of human waste for the growing of food. Currently most food is grown with artificial fertilisers, which aren’t sustainable in the long run. We need to make better reuse of our waste so that the amount of phosphorus (Another resource soon to peak), potassium, and nitrogen from artificial or mined sources can be reduced.
- Better waste water and grey water management systems to recover domestic waste water for use in industries and farming.
In Vienna, we flush our toilets with alpine spring water. One of the many benefits of settling in a defensible, well-situated spot and implementing urban planning for the future. The city was built for 4 million, and is inhabited by about 2 million.
