The facility proposes to pump about half a millon gallons per day.
Tempest, meet teapot.
Overall there is a growing sense in the U.S. that public assets are being sold off at below market rates. That corporate interests trump public interests. There's a lack of trust in the system. The overreaction, as you put it, here seems to me to be a symptom of what I think is a growing lack of trust in the system.
I suspect the value of untreated groundwater in Michigan is very, very small.
> there doesn't appear that Nestlé would be providing a service in the interests of society at large.
What about jobs? What about the people who want to buy bottled water? Why don't the workers and consumers count as "society at large"?
Note: I personally think most people who buy bottled water are foolish (unless the local tap water is unsafe or unpalatable), but then people do a lot of things I think are foolish.
This is just a permit to draw water from a well, not a municipal drinking water supply. I suspect that (other than the permit fee) they aren't paying anything for the water. (I had a look at the permit & didn't see anything there about payments).
https://www.bridgemi.com/guest-commentary/opinion-nestle-wat...
The county they're in has high unemployment and they make the case that it's all about the jobs they're creating.
What do you imagine a fair price would be for untreated, pump-it-yourself groundwater?
http://www.detroitmi.gov/Portals/0/docs/DWSD/Water%20Rate%20...
No, most likely it does not. The watershed and the associated aquifer are where the river water comes from.
As to "what that assertion is based on", that would be "knowledge of how the hydrologic cycle works".
Yes, that's where it comes from, but it doesn't fill up instantly. Depending on the depth and type of aquifer the well is tapping, it could actually take a very long time for the aquifer to refill (or it could refill very quickly).
Are they widely used in places like Michigan, where there is plenty of precipitation? No.
Hint: nowhere.
Yeah, there are places where groundwater enters the aquifer from long distances away. Michigan is not one of those places. It gets plenty of precipitation.
We're talking about 1/2000 of the river's flow.
Hydro power for example uses 100% of the flow so removing that water directly reduces power output of downstream power plants.
"Not a huge amount of energy", indeed.
For reference, an olympic sized swimming pool holds 660,000 gallons of water. So even after this increase, they are still drawing less than one pool's worth of water.