Is water the new oil?
Scientists pretty much agree that at some point, levels of oil production will hit their peak and then decline. Forever. Some oil and gas producers are eager to extract all they can in the interim. Others (countries where the only viable export is oil) seek to extend their production by controlling how much is produced.
There is huge disagreement as to the role that coal will play in the energy mix. Some say we should wait until all else is gone, hoping for “clean coal” technology to develop. Others want to extract all the coal possible now to feed existing and future coal-fired power plants.
A huge argument currently rages over taxing alternative energy production, at least to equal those levied on traditional sources.
What all these folks are missing is that there is another peak looming; exacerbated, most believe, by climate change. It’s the one thing we humans, and all of the animals and plants upon which we rely for our food supply, must have. Water.
As with oil, all the water that exists, or will ever exist, on this planet is already here. It can change its form, from liquid to solid to gas, but there won’t ever be any more of it. If we despoil any water resource, whether in the process of manufacturing, mining or transporting, well, that water essentially is gone.
Our history is peppered with legal battles over water rights, sometimes resolved by negotiation, other times by force. Power plays decide how much water may be extracted from a river to serve farmers versus cities. And how much water legally can be pumped through wells and how that affects the depletion of groundwater levels.
In the western states, where much of the land is basically desert, water rights are in jeopardy as drought draws down reservoirs and water tables. And the current battle over water allocation in California’s Central Valley is only one of many.
Farming began on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley in the late 1800s, blessed with rich soil but scant water resources. The invention of deep-well pumps allowed farmers to tap the groundwater but by the 1940s, the ground began sinking, 10 feet or more in places.
In 1952, several landowners organized the Westlands Water District, which became the largest irrigation district in the country. After extensive lobbying, Congress agreed in 1960 to finance construction of San Luis Reservoir and a canal to serve west side farmers as part of then Governor Pat Brown’s massive State Water Project, and the Central Valley Project, that would eventually carry water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to Los Angeles and San Diego.
Fast forward about 30 years and California environmentalists began to see significant declines in populations of the Delta’s some 120 fish species, including spawning Chinook salmon, which were added to the endangered species list in 1989 followed by the Delta smelt four years later.
Since then, hard-fought agreements between state and federal agencies produced the Central Valley Project Improvement Act and the Bay Delta Accords, and a joint effort called CALFED (which collapsed in 2006 partly from lack of funding). These efforts helped until last year when the salmons runs collapsed, shutting down the state’s commercial fishery.
Pumping restrictions have forced farmers to fallow thousands of acres of land that depend on Delta water for irrigation. The state Legislature, in special session, passed a package of bills regulating water flow but California voters will have to approve an $11 billion bond to fund the publicly financed portion of the $40 billion package. How that will play out against the state’s dire budget deficit is anyone’s guess.
Meanwhile, farmers in Washington’s Yakima Basin are seeing water tables drop dramatically from both pumping and drought. States around the West are wrestling with the effects of “permit-exempt” domestic groundwater wells, those drawing 5,000 gallons a day or less. Some developers use the exemption by placing 10 houses on several different wells. All western states, except Utah, have some version of this exemption, according to High Country News, which has reported extensively on water issues in the West. In an article titled “Death by a Thousand Wells,” Cally Carswell writes: “In Montana, nearly 30,000 exempt wells were drilled between 2000 and 2008, 70 percent of them in the state’s four fastest-growing counties.”
In response, Mark Schlosberg, western regional director of Food & Water Watch, suggests Congress should increase funding for the U.S. Geological Survey to conduct a comprehensive groundwater mapping study that would guide regulation of withdrawals.
One of the biggest fights may involve mining leases on public and private lands. Coal bed methane and oil shale extraction pollute huge quantities of water, which in turn kills trees and leaves the land barren. Ranchers in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin are still trying to deal with that.
And we all should pay attention to the purveyors of bottled water who are buying up rights to our springs. Aside from truck traffic and environmental damage, that intensive development can deplete our groundwater.
These issues may ultimately be decided in Congress or the courts or even by voters in California. But we all will pay.
When all the oil is gone and we’re recharging our car batteries with power from rooftop solar panels, we’ll still need fresh water. And we shouldn’t have to buy it in bottles.