Don't forget you drink the same water you bathe with. At scale it's producing a lot of water.
PS: Now a lot of water is lost after filtration by leaks/breaks in water pipes. But, that's mostly an economic choice as water is really cheap replacing pipes is expensive.
To get anywhere close to similar levels from the article you replacing there entire system every 20 years would need to take 20 * 60m * 340 = 408 Trillion gallons of water.
Just giving one number out of your hat is a dishonest persuasive move (unless everybody already knows the numbers for all the previous questions), precisely because the author knows very well that most people cannot put that number into perspective. This is not a very scientific attitude for something published in a 'scientific' journal.
At the municipal level 1 cent ~= 1,000+ gallons of water but this can vary greatly by location. As a customer in many ways you are paying for pipes not water.
PS: California farmers often pay ~70$ on average per acre foot or 325,851 gallons. But, they also get a lot of water for far less than that it's the rare edge cases that are really expensive. http://westernfarmpress.com/water-70-24-million-acre-foot
But then you could argue that people don't need to drink purified water, tap water is good enough, lead levels, chlorine levels (etc) are low enough. But this is another question from the previous one, that should also be discussed taking the whole picture into account.
Distilled water will also osmotically drain you, although not at any level you should be worried about. But it's not at all clear that it's "better for you" than water with stuff in it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_water mentions that Christchurch, NZ has a sufficient supply of pure enough water that no treatment is required. So you could probably build a passive filtration system for a one time cost. It just may not be fast enough to treat enough water if your population is too big.
My guess is it varies greatly to due the source of the water. At the extreme, I would guess that desalination of saltwater to make it usable for drinking water would likely consume huge amount of water per drink unit of water.
Given that it's a pretty obvious question, find it interesting that it is not addressed; reason likely is most reporters do not do investigative journalism, but many will publish as is a story forwarded to them.
Lastly, it's very likely some water used was not drinkable to start, reused, etc. - which is to say, it's a complex topic and without a clear question and an understanding of why it is being ask, you'll always get an answer that appears to answer something.
Normal saltwater has a salt concentration of 3.5% and to be drinkable that must be reduced to 1000 ppm (parts per million); which is to say, say for 100 liters of saltwater, you'll lose at least 3.5 liters just to reclaim the freshwater itself.
Beyond that it'll depend on the system how much additional volume is lost in the desalination process; quick Google finds some systems that lose 20% of the volume per unit processed.
Lastly, your reference to energy consumption brings up an example of additional sources of water lose. Water used to cool systems, water used to clean systems, leaks/waste, etc.
Only a small fraction of it is actually drawn for drinking, but rest still has to be there. So does that rest count or not?
http://www.switchurbanwater.eu/outputs/pdfs/W1-1_1-2_GEN_PAP...
My system is relatively new, but this thread has my thinking of ways I can better use that 4 gallons of waste.
In the vegan world its standard to count every drop of rain that hit the livestock pasture as being used, therefore its fair to count the rain that ran off the factory roof where the pump was manufactured as used.
Wells don't dig themselves and although that doesn't happen often, it does take a lot of water to do it, and make the gear to do it, and get the diesel fuel out of the ground and onsite to run the drilling rig.
I drink every drop from a can/bottle, usually, but I am a bit wasteful in the kitchen sink and probably only half the tap water is swallowed. Not to mention my dishwasher uses 5 gallons or 10 gallons or whatever small number every time it cycles and washes my drinking cup (so my drinking cup's share is only maybe 1/2 cup of dishwasher cycle water, but, maybe I was only thirsty for 1/2 cup of water leading to 50% efficiency right there). And of course the dishwasher uses electricity (water) and detergent (water) and natgas to heat the water (contaminated fracking water).
I bet using the usual journalist sophistry techniques I could get your home sink up to 10:1 ratio pretty easy. Maybe not the hundreds to one ratio in the article, but close.
But I get your point about the entire construction of the well. And the drilling rig, say it drills 500 wells in its life span. Then you have to consider the water that went in to building the rig, divided by 500. And the water that goes in to disassembly and recycling. And the water that went in to building the drill rig factory. And that went into building the tools that were used to build the factory. Etc.
The world is insanely inefficient, and those inefficiencies are REAL even if we have been that inefficient since prehistoric time. All of the points you mention are actual opportunities for improvement, and a 1% reduction in any of them would amount to an enormous savings in water use, fuel use, increase in long term profit, etc.
For some of us, it's irritating of course: the program takes a long time due to the attempts to save water, and we have no shortage of clean water here whatsoever, so time is wasted to save water which could be wasted.
Do you have any sources for this? I have never heard a vegan claim this once.