Water is needed to generate energy. Energy is needed to deliver water. Both resources are limiting the other-and both may be running short. Is there a way out?
In June the state of Florida made an unusual announcement: it would sue the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers over the corps's plan to reduce water flow from reservoirs in Georgia into the Apalachicola River, which runs through Florida from the Georgia-Alabama border. Florida was concerned that the restricted flow would threaten certain endangered species. Alabama also objected, worried about another species: nuclear power plants, which use enormous quantities of water, usually drawn from rivers and lakes, to cool their big reactors. The reduced flow raised the specter that the Farley Nuclear Plant near Dothan, Ala., would need to shut down.
I've been mindful of the amount of water I use when making a pot of coffee ever since learning that one-third of the tap water used for drinking in North America is actually used to brew our daily cups of joe-and that if each of us avoided wasting just one cupful of coffee a day, we could save enough water over the course of a year to provide two gallons to every one of the more than 1.1 billion people who don't have access to freshwater at all.
"This story is part of a special series that explores the global water crisis. For more clean water news, photos, and information, visit National Geographic's Freshwater Web site.
As climate change throws Earth's water cycle off-kilter, the world's energy infrastructure may end up in hot water, experts say.
From hydropower installations in the Himalaya to nuclear power plants in Western Europe, energy resources are already being impacted by flooding, heat waves, drought, and more. (Explore an interactive map of global warming effects.)
Traditionally power plants and energy facilities have been built for the long haul-the circa-1936 Hoover Dam in Nevada is still a major hydroelectric generator."
President Bush will establish three national monuments in the Pacific Ocean today in a move that will protect a vast marine ecosystem from mining, oil exploration, and commercial fishing. With the stroke of a pen this afternoon, Bush will have set aside more square miles of ocean for protection than any other political leader in history. The three new monuments, surrounding far-flung islands, reefs and atolls scattered across the Pacific, will add 195,000 square miles of protected waters to the nearly 140,000 square miles around the Northwest Hawaiian Islands that Bush protected in 2006 [Los Angeles Times]. The United States has authority over these waters because the tiny atolls and islands are U.S. territories.
The three areas are thronged with fish, sharks, coral reefs, and other forms of sea life, all of which will benefit from the new protections. Blue-water fish such as yellowfin, bigeye tuna, and marlin-all in decline-will be big winners because they breed in these waters. So will sharks, birds, turtles, and dolphins accidentally caught by the tuna long-line fleets [ScienceNOW Daily News]. One of the new national monuments also encompasses the deepest location of the earth's crust. The Marianas Trench, which reaches depths of more than 36,000 feet in some locations, contains undersea volcanoes and hydrothermal vents around which cluster tough organisms that can withstand high temperatures and harsh chemicals. These "extremophiles" are of interest to scientists who think they signal forms that extraterrestrial life could take.
Three environmental groups want the state to throw out a permit it just issued that would allow TVA to dump water tainted with mercury, selenium, arsenic, and other chemicals from the Kingston coal-fired power plant into the Clinch River.
The Clinch, which lies below the power plant, has already received ash moving down the Emory River from the massive ash spill last December.
Earthjustice, Environmental Integrity Project, and the Sierra Club on Thursday filed an appeal of a water discharge permit that the Tennessee Department of Environment & Conservation issued four weeks ago.
They say letting TVA pipe one million gallons of wastewater a day from a pond with gypsum into the river isn't wise. The material will be a byproduct of the plant's new air pollution system.
Three environmental groups want the state to throw out a permit it just issued that would allow TVA to dump water tainted with mercury, selenium, arsenic, and other chemicals from the Kingston coal-fired power plant into the Clinch River.
The Clinch, which lies below the power plant, has already received ash moving down the Emory River from the massive ash spill last December.
Earthjustice, Environmental Integrity Project, and the Sierra Club on Thursday filed an appeal of a water discharge permit that the Tennessee Department of Environment & Conservation issued four weeks ago.
They say letting TVA pipe one million gallons of wastewater a day from a pond with gypsum into the river isn't wise. The material will be a byproduct of the plant's new air pollution system.
The near-death of one of India's most distinguished scientists has halted work on a major hydroelectric dam in the Himalayas. Professor AD Agarwal, 77, former dean of the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi at Kanpur, has been on hunger strike for 38 days in protest against a project that would dam the waters of a Ganges tributary.
"The water ... is not ordinary water to a Hindu. It is a matter of the life and death of Hindu faith," Agarwal said, before beginning his fast in January.
This is his second fast in the past year, which he called off last week only after the Indian government agreed that it would look into electricity generation that would not impede the flow of the holy Ganges. The river must run free in order to maintain its sacred status.
U.S. federal oil and gas royalties are payments made by firms to the federal government in exchange for the opportunity to explore for oil and gas on government-owned land or water. Traditionally, most of the funds generated by these royalties have gone directly into the general U.S. Treasury. Some of the funds have been directed to the Historical Preservation Trust Fund and the Land and Water Conservation Fund. During most of the twentieth century, oil and gas companies generally paid between 12.5 and 16.7 percent in royalties for a lease to drill on public land or water. Over time, these royalty payments generated over $100 billion in revenues.
The Senate ground to a halt Wednesday in a display of what an individual senator can do to protest his treatment by some of Capitol Hill's most powerful barons.
Instead of passing a $33.5 billion measure funding energy and water projects and then moving on to other business, the chamber slogged through a 30-hour protest by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., who halted further legislative business after one of his pet ideas was dropped from the bill.
At issue is one of Coburn's top issues - greater transparency in government - as well as his sworn enemy, the powerful Appropriations Committee. Coburn had added to the energy and water bill a provision requiring reports that agencies are required to send to the appropriations panels be made available to other lawmakers and to the public. It's part of his drive for greater transparency in government.
The Senate ground to a halt Wednesday in a display of what an individual senator can do to protest his treatment by some of Capitol Hill's most powerful barons.
Instead of passing a $33.5 billion measure funding energy and water projects and then moving on to other business, the chamber slogged through a 30-hour protest by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., who halted further legislative business after one of his pet ideas was dropped from the bill.
At issue is one of Coburn's top issues - greater transparency in government - as well as his sworn enemy, the powerful Appropriations Committee. Coburn had added to the energy and water bill a provision requiring reports that agencies are required to send to the appropriations panels be made available to other lawmakers and to the public. It's part of his drive for greater transparency in government.
One estimate has oil shale extraction needing 10 barrels of water per barrel of oil produced. And, with Colorado's proposed oil shale operations at full capacity, by mid-century, the industry could require as much as 14 times more power than currently generated by the state's largest power plant. These estimates are very imprecise, because the technology is unproven. You might wonder, "Why so much water and energy? And what do do about it?" See the illustration and answer below.
A recent Los Angeles Times article, "Energy dispute over Rockies riches," reported:
Shell has the most mature technology, which it has been experimenting with at its Mahogany test site, near Rifle, Colo. Tucked into a rolling landscape of empty range land, the company has sunk heaters half a mile into oil shale seams and subjected the rock to 700-degree temperatures. Over weeks or even months, a liquid known as kerogen is produced, which can be refined into diesel and jet fuel.
Norma Fiorentino's drinking water well was a time bomb. For weeks, workers in her small northeastern Pennsylvania town had been plumbing natural gas deposits from a drilling rig a few hundred yards away. They cracked the earth and pumped in fluids to force the gas out. Somehow, stray gas worked into tiny crevasses in the rock, leaking upward into the aquifer and slipping quietly into Fiorentino's well. Then, according to the state's working theory, a motorized pump turned on in her well house, flicked a spark and caused a New Year's morning blast that tossed aside a concrete slab weighing several thousand pounds.
15 states appear to have three or more Tennessee-like unlined "Surface Impoundment" sites For toxic coal-fired power plant waste.
(WASHINGTON, D.C.) - Could another major coal disaster happen at one of the many Tennessee-like power plant coal pollution dumping sites across the United States?
How much toxic arsenic, lead and other heavy metals that endanger drinking water are being dumped into those unlined "surface impoundment" sites each year?
How did federal regulation of coal pollution break down to allow these threats to exist … and what needs to happen if the public and environment are to be protected against future Tennessee-like disasters, as well as the "slow-motion" leaching of toxic metals into drinking water, rivers and streams?
Both the beauty and the fragility of the planet were on spectacular display Monday as TODAY reported on climate change and the power of water from the Ends of the Earth.
Hosts Matt Lauer, Meredith Vieira, Al Roker and Ann Curry signed in simultaneously from the Western Hemisphere's longest coral reef in Belize; drought-stricken Australia, the world's driest inhabited continent; Iceland, where fire meets ice; and 13,000 feet up the flank of Mount Kilimanjaro, the "Roof of Africa," whose famous snows and glaciers are on pace to disappear within the next dozen years.
Water covers 71 percent of the Earth's surface, but, as Lauer, Vieira, Roker and Curry reported, 1.1 billion people - a sixth of the planet's human population - do not have access to a clean supply of this most precious and essential resource.
The natural gas industry refuses to reveal what is in the mixture of chemicals used to drill for the fossil fuel
State regulators and Washington lawmakers though are increasingly impatient with voluntary measures and are seeking to toughen their oversight. In September U.S. Congresswoman Diana DeGette and Congressman John Salazar, from Colorado, and Congressman Maurice Hinchey, from New York, introduced a bill that would undo the exemptions in the 2005 Energy Policy Act. Wyoming, widely known for supporting energy development, has begun updating its regulations at a local level, as have parts of Texas.
New Mexico has placed a one year moratorium on drilling around Santa Fe, after a survey found hundreds of cases of water contamination from unlined pits where fracking fluids and other drilling wastes are stored. "Every rule that we have improved . . . industry has taken us to court on," said Joanna Prukop, New Mexico's cabinet secretary for Energy Minerals and Natural Resources. "It's industry that is fighting us on every front as we try to improve our government enforcement, protection, and compliance… We wear Kevlar these days."
* Opens federal waters beyond 50 miles from shore along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts to oil and gas drilling, ending drilling bans that have been in effect for 26 years. States would have to agree to drilling for areas between 50 and 100 miles from land.
* Rolls back $18 billion in tax breaks for the five largest oil companies and requires energy companies to pay billions of dollars in additional royalties from oil taken from the deep water areas of the Gulf of Mexico under questionable leases issued in the late 1990s.
* Requires the release of 70 million barrels of oil from the government's Strategic Petroleum Reserve to put more oil on the market and lower gasoline prices.
* Makes it a federal crime for oil companies holding federal leases to provide gifts to government employees, a response to a recent sex and drug scandal involving the federal office that oversees the offshore oil royalty program and energy company employees.
* Provides tax credits for wind and solar energy industries, the development of cellulosic ethanol and other biofuels, and purchase of plug-in gas-electric hybrid cars.
* Requires utilities to generate 15 percent of their electricity from solar, wind or other alternative energy source.
* Gives tax breaks for new energy efficiency and conservation programs including the use of improved building codes low-interest loans for energy efficient homes, and for companies that promote their employees use of bicycles for commuting.
In the world of renewables, most of the attention is on the wind and the sun. Geothermal power just hasn't gotten the same respect. That could be changing, as both the Obama Administration and Silicon Valley are considering the heat under the ground as a potentially huge source of clean, domestic U.S. energy, but recent setbacks are calling into question how much geothermal can contribute. Given the potential benefits, we should be doubling our efforts to make geothermal a viable power source for the U.S.
Some background: All thermal power plants use the same basic process. A heat source (burning coal or gas, uranium, concentrated solar energy) is used to turn water into steam, and the energy released turns a turbine that produces electricity. What sets geothermal apart is that the steam comes directly from the ground. Water percolates down through cracks in the ground and is heated to the boiling point by hot rocks underground (in some cases coming back up as a geyser - think Old Faithful), and the resulting steam is drawn up via a well to a turbine.
For years, residents of the tiny lakeside community near Kingston, Tennessee, watched as the local power plant mixed tons of leftover coal ash with water and pumped the heavy mud into a massive pond just up the road. "We never gave it a second thought," says resident Diane Anderson.
To read more of Kelly Hearn's reporting on the TVA spill, check out "Toxic Coal in Tennessee," "Tennessee's Dirty Data" and "The Dredge Report."
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But on December 22 the pond collapsed, triggering a billion-gallon mudslide that knocked houses off foundations and roiled into the Emory River. State officials and the Tennessee Valley Authority, the federally funded utility responsible for the spill, scrambled to allay fears, saying that the ash wasn't toxic and that the drinking water was safe. But residents also heard about the litany of harmful substances in the ash, like arsenic and lead, and about studies linking it to cancer.
Big Stone II's demise is not a bad sign for wind, it is the opposite. Now is the opportunity to move ahead to the next economy, not to worry about what we lost with a big polluter. Let's give this gift to our future generations - a better future.
Take a deep breath and let's take a look at what the next energy economy will look like.
We will move to an entirely non-fossil fuel economy based on solar and wind. We will have 89,000 solar photovoltaic and concentrated solar panels, 1.7 million rooftop PV systems to reduce combustion on most of our houses and perhaps solar water as well.
We will have 3.8 million wind turbines worldwide taking up a total area smaller than the size of Manhattan.
When the wind doesn't blow in South Dakota, it blows in North Dakota, or Nebraska, or the steppes of Russia. Distributed wind is where we should be headed. And hydro-power can "firm" intermittent wind - we have plenty of dams on the Missouri.
Big Stone II's demise is not a bad sign for wind, it is the opposite. Now is the opportunity to move ahead to the next economy, not to worry about what we lost with a big polluter. Let's give this gift to our future generations - a better future.
Take a deep breath and let's take a look at what the next energy economy will look like.
We will move to an entirely non-fossil fuel economy based on solar and wind. We will have 89,000 solar photovoltaic and concentrated solar panels, 1.7 million rooftop PV systems to reduce combustion on most of our houses and perhaps solar water as well.
We will have 3.8 million wind turbines worldwide taking up a total area smaller than the size of Manhattan.
When the wind doesn't blow in South Dakota, it blows in North Dakota, or Nebraska, or the steppes of Russia. Distributed wind is where we should be headed. And hydro-power can "firm" intermittent wind - we have plenty of dams on the Missouri.
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