'Water Is the New Oil' as Texas Cities Square Off over Aquifers
insideclimatenews.org
insideclimatenews.org
This leads me to believe that if someone owns just enough land to access the aquifer, they would be entitled to pump with no limits until it’s depleted?
I mean, they say that's three times what Bryan uses now, but Bryan is only 83980 people, so the per-capita use there is actually slightly higher.
You can get water pretty cheaply if you have unlimited energy, and the rapidly dropping prices of solar panels have made that a reality.
The ocean is only 250km a way, and the Sorek desalination plant http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/israel-proves-the-... was already desalinating seawater for 58¢/kℓ in 02016 at 7.1MPa (≡7.1kJ/ℓ). At US$40/MWh (US$11/GJ) the energy would cost 7.9¢/kℓ, so designing the plant to be energy-efficient is an important priority. At US$15/MWh (US$4.20/GJ) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43468177 or less you can afford to use simpler, cheaper designs for the desal plant, at the cost of using more energy. But even at 58¢/kℓ, we're talking about a cost of US$260 per person per year.
This is not the new motherfucking oil. We're not "talking about our survival". It won't "basically stop[] all the economic development we have". Not unless you think rice farming is the path to economic development.
It's trickier for places that are further from the ocean. Condensing water out of thin air generally requires cooling the air to the dewpoint, removing its heat of vaporization (2.2564MJ/kg ≈ 2.3MJ/ℓ) and letting the air heat back up again. The cooling and reheating process doesn't inherently dissipate energy (you can do it in a countercurrent heat exchanger) and anyway involves much less energy than the condensation does. 2.3MJ/ℓ at US$4.20/GJ is 0.95¢ per liter. At 1250ℓ/day per person, that would be US$12/day per person, a much more alarming figure. Even dividing by the coefficient of performance of a typical vapor-compression heat pump (3 or so), giving us about 0.3¢/ℓ, we're talking about US$4/day per person.
But residential Los Angeles uses 70 gallons per person per day (3.1mℓ/s per person in modern units, or 260ℓ/day per person) https://xtown.la/2023/09/05/residential-water-use-in-los-ang..., though total potable water use is about twice that https://spectrumnews1.com/ca/southern-california/environment..., and at Burning Man we use 6ℓ/day per person (0.07mℓ/s) https://burningman.org/event/preparation/playa-living/water/. 6ℓ/day from a dehumidifier at 0.3¢/ℓ is 1.8¢ a day or US$6.60/year.
We need to find ways to make dehumidifiers cheaper, because at that point the energy cost is basically insignificant.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43501255
[2] https://www.utilitydive.com/news/us-lng-exports-raise-electr...
> The famously developer-friendly Lone Star State has struggled to add new gas power plants lately, even after offering up billions of taxpayer dollars for a dedicated loan program to private gas developers. Solar and battery additions since last March average about 1 gigawatt per month, based on ERCOT’s figures, Texas energy analyst Doug Lewin said. In 2024, Texas produced almost twice as much wind and solar electricity as California.
https://seia.org/research-resources/solar-market-insight-rep...
> Texas was the leading state for solar installations in the first half of the year [02024], with 5.5 GWdc online – nearly twice as much capacity as Florida, the second-ranked state, which had 2.9 GWdc.
I'm not sure to what extent desalination in particular can economically do demand response. My numbers above about the Sorek plant suggest that at least that plant design would be far more expensive to run intermittently, no matter how low it drove the cost of their energy. And 7.1MPa is too much pressure for a practical water tower to supply passively.
Of course, Texas could outlaw economic development (https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/clean-energy/will-texas...) as most of the world does and always has.