Global groundwater extraction a “ticking time bomb”
cosmosmagazine.com
cosmosmagazine.com
In much of the US and elsewhere, that's an old English common law notion called the Rule of Capture. As interpreted in a Texas Supreme Court ruling, Houston & Texas Central Railroad Co. v. East (1904), which held for the right of individuals to draw as much as they wished from any underground reservoir, "Because the existence, origin, movement and course of such waters, and the causes which govern and direct their movements, are so secret, occult and concealed that an attempt to administer any set of legal rules in respect to them would be involved in hopeless uncertainty"
https://www.twdb.texas.gov/publications/reports/numbered_rep...
That's still governing law in Texas, and is frequently referenced in the oil and gas industry, as a Web search on "rule of capture" will show.
One hundred fifteen years later, the science has moved on. It's well past time for that exceptionally poor example of jurisprudence to be overturned.
I'm not saying it's impossible that it was true, but it is not a known fact like you represented it.
As noted, there are cases where they do, as with Iraq and Kuwait. Things can get heated.
Water is handled in the way you mentioned, though, which is pretty nuts.
The doctrine applies in numerous ways, some legal, some economic (see also Hotelling's Rule, which though distinct shares some aspects most notably, absolutely nil geological references in what's still considered the go-to economic model for extractive resource pricing, despite the fact that it bears no resemblance at all to actual pricing history), and most importantly, is still governing precedent in Texas, and other jurisdictions.
I've tracked down a few resources, but haven't actually managed to get my paws on most of them.
The Texas Supreme Court ruling being a prime case in point.
This refers to this study: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1594-4
Abstract:
> Groundwater is the world’s largest freshwater resource and is critically important for irrigation, and hence for global food security1,2,3. Already, unsustainable groundwater pumping exceeds recharge from precipitation and rivers4, leading to substantial drops in the levels of groundwater and losses of groundwater from its storage, especially in intensively irrigated regions5,6,7. When groundwater levels drop, discharges from groundwater to streams decline, reverse in direction or even stop completely, thereby decreasing streamflow, with potentially devastating effects on aquatic ecosystems. Here we link declines in the levels of groundwater that result from groundwater pumping to decreases in streamflow globally, and estimate where and when environmentally critical streamflows—which are required to maintain healthy ecosystems—will no longer be sustained. We estimate that, by 2050, environmental flow limits will be reached for approximately 42 to 79 per cent of the watersheds in which there is groundwater pumping worldwide, and that this will generally occur before substantial losses in groundwater storage are experienced. Only a small decline in groundwater level is needed to affect streamflow, making our estimates uncertain for streams near a transition to reversed groundwater discharge. However, for many areas, groundwater pumping rates are high and environmental flow limits are known to be severely exceeded. Compared to surface-water use, the effects of groundwater pumping are markedly delayed. Our results thus reveal the current and future environmental legacy of groundwater use.
Meanwhile, projections show that probably another couple billion people will be added in the next three decades. There's strong resistance against any proposals to cut back emissions, especially if it means giving up some of the luxury we're used to (flights, meat, cars, large houses, etcetera).
I might have a bleak perspective of the current state of affairs, but I'm really not seeing any feasible short term solutions, that can actually get people on board. Naming possible solutions is easy, but getting everyone to agree seems downright impossible for the foreseeable future. And I fear that we won't change a thing before it's too late.
And most of that ineffectiveness comes down to politics.
I think the earth is about to strike back and show us who is boss. Clean water, food monoculture, and antibiotics overuse are going to come home to roost and we'll quickly learn what a sustainable population is.
There are very few historical large wild mammal populations remotely close to this. And historical, because we've reduced wild terrestrial vertebrate biomass by about 90% over the past 100-1000 years.
There are about a half-million wild zebra, and maybe 12 million white-tail deer. The largest seal populations are estimated at about 8 million -- roughly the number of people in New York City. We're probably outnumbered by brown rates, roughly 11 billion.
Even of domesticated cattle and pigs, totals are on the order of about a billion.
The passenger pidgeon, two centuries ago, numbered 3-5 billion individuals. Today there are none.
For most large terrestrial mammals, populations are in the 5,000 - 50,000 range. That's the population of a small to mid-sized town. For an entire species.
Update: an Imgur photo gallery consisting of images with as many pixels per image as there are individuals in the population:
It's expensive on a like for like basis but not in an absolute sense.
I think my water costs me about £16 per month for 3 of us (me, partner and step-son), if that doubled I wouldn't even notice it set against our other outgoings, We are just very used to very cheap clean water in developed countries (and also very used to wasting vast amounts of it).
Israel doesn't just desalinate a lot of their water but they are masters are conserving it's use (they are so good at drip-agriculture that their experts are showing other countries experts how to scale it up) of course drip-agriculture has it's own issues.
For the same kind of household, our yearly bill went from €115 to €415 in less than 10 years; I guarantee you start feeling it.
It doubled in 3 years, tripled in 6 years. I have no idea why, we are in a place where water is normally abundant (and there is zero irrigation).
It is not like we could reduce our consumption: we use only a tiny bit more than 7 m³ per month, for a house with garden. That means just 2.3 m³ per month per person. It is really not an American type of water consumption! Probably only a 3rd or even a quarter of it...
Why I said I had no idea why, I meant "why the raise?"
There’s a company out in Arizona that had an article published in wired. Zero Mass Water. The article intrigued me. I lived close enough to the ocean, would it work?
I had a few panels installed on my roof. I can yield somewhere between 3-15 liters per day if the conditions are right. I can store 90 liters total. I use it as drinking water in my home. I no longer drink from municipal tap water as a result. Yes I shower with it, but I’m not really ingesting as much.
Point is I did the panels for the exact same reason this article is the mentioning water wars coming up. At some point we’ll have to be rationing water in cities and I don’t want that for myself or my family.
And, frankly, such laws are necessary in many more places than have them. I until recently lived on an island in the Pacific Northwest. Plenty of water, right? Except if you drew down the aquifers too far, the sea would leach in and there goes your fresh water supply. They're currently fighting it out about how much population increase they can support and still have water, how much of the island needs to be left as or put into wetland and forest that efficiently captures water into the aquifers...
And on the mainland on both sides of Puget Sound, the water supply is snow melt. If you didn't get enough snow in the winter, you're looking at shortages in the summer. This is going to get worse over the next few decades most likely, alongside an increasing population.
(not to mention fluoridation, but that's a separate can of worms I won't open)
Dehumidifying moisture from the air is effectively un-boiling water: you've got to remove the latent heat of vapourisation to convert a gas to a liquid. It's unbelievably energy consumptive, and there is no free lunch.
>SOURCE is a completely independent drinking water solution; it efficiently utilizes solar power to generate the right amount of electricity required to run its own system to produce water and charge the battery that ensures you can dispense water at night.
So yes, not free -- you have to pay for a solar electric system as part of the package. Manufacture of which itself consumed considerable energy and clean water, somewhere else on the planet.
Water is just moved from a useful (to humans) state to a less useful state. The bottom of which is seawater. Seawater is still useful, it just takes more energy to do it. There's an unlimited supply of less useful water.
All that to say that once we use the easy water, that cotton shirt is just going to cost a lot more.
However I do believe that the vast majority of water is probably returned to the water cycle in some form.
I think the big thing here to discuss should be power cost, not water use. How much power did it take to make that t-shirt, including the entire power cost of the water and other materials required. As you say, that power cost will increase dramatically when we're desalinating instead of pumping.
Yes there is an unlimited supply of seawater, and there are also a lot of places far away from seashore in regions with scarce water where people live, and once that scarce water is used it's not a very livable place anymore.
See also the history of the Aral Sea, nearly completely disappeared because of Soviet cotton industry.
Someone there made the very sobering observation that the solution to the problem was to price water the way we price oil. That way we would redouble our efforts not to waste it.
But then that only really ends up punishing the people least responsible for the crisis in the first place.
> This photo shows the approximate location of maximum subsidence in the United States, identified by research efforts of Dr. Joseph F. Poland (pictured). The site is in the San Joaquin Valley southwest of Mendota, California. Signs on pole show approximate altitude of land surface in 1925, 1955, and 1977.
> In this case, excessive groundwater pumping allowed the upper soil layers to dry out and compress and compact, which is by far the single largest cause of subsidence. Soil compaction results in a reduction of the pore sizes between soil particles, resulting in essentially a permanent condition—rewetting of the underground soil and rock does not cause the land to go back up in altitude. This results in a lessening of the total storage capacity of the aquifer system. Here, the term "groundwater mining" is really true.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPSYzLZ7xKU
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/crystalline-nets-har...
No. Really?