It’s almost impossible in any discussion of fresh water resources not to run up against what by now should be an obvious fact; our Earth is a closed system, so the same water that was here millions of years ago is still here now, it just keeps getting recycled through the water cycle we all remember from grade school science class. The revelation Will Rogers famously had about land also holds true for water, “They ain’t making any more of the stuff.”
Water is known as a “flow resource” due to this ability for the same mineral to be recycled and used over and over again.
Flow resources are resources that are not permanently expendable under usual circumstances; they are resources which are replaced. They are commonly expressed in annual rates at which they are regenerated. Examples are fresh-water runoff and timber. Stock resources can be permanently expended and whose quantity is usually expressed in absolute amounts rather than in rates. Examples are coal and petroleum deposits. From Ecology Dictionary
This definition ceases to be true for water in unusual circumstances, say when it is used for commercial purposes and then injected deep within the Earth’s crust rather than getting cleaned up and put back in the system. Unusual use of this sort, which nature hasn’t had to deal with up until now, effectively takes our most precious, valuable-to-life, recyclable, flow resource and makes it a stock resource. This is a particularly troubling development because life on earth is possible only due to the happy accident that we have the right amount of liquid, available water in the system. Much more water and we’d all have fins. Much less and most of us wouldn’t be here at all.
With the explosion of the human population, global deforestation, global climate change, the industrialization of large, once third-world countries like China and India, and the associated increased demand we are making on our planet’s water we are headed toward a future where water will become so coveted and rare that we will go to war over it. (Call it blood water.) We simply cannot afford to squander water any longer.
As a brief historical aside, early in the development of oil and gas as energy sources it was common practice to “flare off” or burn the gas so you could get the oil out of the ground without getting blown-up. The practice is illegal in most areas today except during exploration, before a pipeline is completed to transport the gas, or at sea where no other way of dealing with it is available.* At the time they didn’t realize that they were squandering what would become a very valuable commodity and contributing to the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Today we think, “Morons.” *From The Dictionary of Petroleum Exploration by Norman J. Hyne.
Speaking of oil and gas production, it is fast becoming the biggest user of water as a stock resource through a process called Hydraulic Fracturing, Hydro Fracking, or just Fracking. Briefly, hydro fracking drills a hole down into the gas bearing rock, and then at right angles to the rock layers. Then millions of gallons of water mixed with a proprietary, toxic witch’s brew of chemicals and sand are pumped into the holes under enormous pressure to fracture the rock strata, releasing natural gas trapped in small pockets within the rock. (Oh, and sometimes the gas or fracking fluid gets into the local aquifer and poisons it.)
Here is a YouTube video that shows the process generically.
Once this is done the millions of gallons of badly polluted water are pumped out of the well and hauled away to be deep well injected, never to be used again for drinking, watering the garden or crops, as a home for fish, for outdoor recreation, rain, snow or fog. It is locked away forever deep within the earth because it can’t be treated with current water treatment facilities, and the oil and gas industry and our government(s) have determined that it just isn’t cost effective to make drillers develop the tech to treat the water so that it can be reused. (Remember when we used that excuse for municipal and industrial sewage until we killed one of the Great Lakes and our rivers were catching on fire? And as to the wisdom of burying toxic wastes to get rid of them, Google “Love Canal.” No, it isn’t porn, but it is disgusting.)
Economics has historically had a hard time putting a value on ecosystem services and flow resources because of the fact that commonly used market models don’t work so well for them. But economists are pretty good at valuing stock resources like oil and natural gas. I would like to propose that we start demanding that our governments do the work to figure out what the cost for an eternally wasted gallon of water is in terms of lost value to our ecosystems, and add that to the value it has to oil and gas drillers as a fracking fluid, and start charging oil and gas companies for our water that they are removing from the global ecosystem forever. And the cost needs to be a steep one, not a token, with the goal being to charge such a high price that treating water so that it is able to be safely released back into the environment becomes economically attractive, not to get in the water selling business. Just make the price of a barrel of water used for fracking the current price of a barrel of West Texas Intermediate crude oil. A better solution still would be to demand a complete ban on fracking until such time as the treatment facilities to deal with the insane volumes of water involved are in place.
Unfortunately, I don’t think that we have the public support to accomplish either of these solutions today. The discussion on fracking has been centered on the toxic soup fracking fluid becomes, not the scandalous misuse of the foundation of life on Earth. We can’t live without LOTS of clean, fresh water. We can’t make new water. Global warming scenarios predict that Great Lakes summers will be hotter and drier. And we are letting corporations permanently destroy our water to produce energy for their financial gain? Pardon the vernacular, but “WTF!?” In what universe does this make any kind of sense?
If T. Boone Pickens is willing to invest $100 million in fresh water to sell it later to water utilities in cities, and believes that water is going to be the new oil, I think we should listen-up and quit giving away the thing upon which all life depends. Right now oil and gas companies are buying up water rights in the west so that they can use the water at their discretion. On our side of the Mississippi we don’t have the same water laws, and so we are trying to limit water withdrawals by all industries with very scientific models, which are being challenged by some of our state legislatures and ignored by some in our governor’s mansions.
Even if the water withdrawal limits are adhered to (they won’t be), they don’t adequately take into account the cumulative effect of permanently removing hundreds of millions of gallons of water from the system forever, as fracking and a few other industries are doing. It is like the miracle of compounded interest, only we are paying it.
And the cost we are being asked to pay is too dear to to be allowed to continue another day.
What do you think? Tell us by leaving a comment below.
The Round River has been covering the fracking debate for a while. Search our archives for more articles on this subject.
