Water We Talking About?

Ever lift a bucket of water? Heavy, right? 8.34 pounds (3.8 kilograms) per U.S. gallon. A bucket will hold three to five gallons, so you are looking at 25-40 lbs. Add weight to scarcity and purity and you have the basic three issues obtaining fresh water, the source of life and the fundamental life-generator for human consumption, sanitation and agriculture. If you’ve got lots of it, because it rains a lot and you have massive fresh water storage in lakes, aquifers, streams and reservoirs, lucky you… if you haven’t been flooded recently or slammed by a storm dropping massive frozen water on your head or swirling hurricane drifts around your home. If you just happen to live in an area where water is routinely scarce, you have two choices: move or move water to you.

As climate changes and as we use up some of the “I always assumed it would be here” water resources – like the massive and rapidly dwindling Ogallala Aquifer (from the Dakota to north Texas) that supplies much of the water that nourishes the American grain belt – the issues of availability and the cost of water become increasingly relevant. As financial resources are diverted and drained away, water efficiencies begin to matter even more. The California Aqueduct is a system where pumping water from north to south – needing electricity uphill and generating a bit less power downhill – results in a heavy government subsidy to those farms and people in the bottom half of the state.

If we go back to that very heavy bucket of water, you will surely know that moving water from place to place, where gravity is not a natural, has to consume a lot of energy to power its movement. Yabetchya! Lots. And if you happen to live by the sea and believe that desalinization is the way to go, you probably are aware that electrolysis and osmosis are the two most common techniques, but one way or the other, you have to be aware that such processes, aside from the very exceptionally high cost of building a facility in the first place, are also going to need a whole pile of additional electricity just to work.

We need water to cool nuclear reactors (ouch, sensitive subject these days, but saltwater can do the trick, aside from its corrosive impact on pipes), for thousands of industrial uses in addition to the more obvious “water the plants, slake my thirst and clean the dirt off of me and my stuff” basics. And some of the agricultural uses might actually surprise you. For example, it takes five gallons of water to wash away the dirt and natural lanolin stuck onto ranging sheep to turn 100 pounds of grease/dirt-laden wool into 55 lbs. of the stuff that sweaters are made of! Saltwater won’t work here, unfortunately.

Combine all of the above factors and one clear factor emerges: water in the future is going to cost the regions of the earth that don’t have lots of it immediately handy trillions of dollars more than it costs today. There will be more people using water resources, some of which are actually disappearing from overuse or climate change. And as these realities sink in, the corporate world sees new opportunities – to buy and sell water at unprecedented volume, trying to figure out how to cash in on a water-impaired world.

At first, companies were skeptical that there would even be a business here… but a quick application of appropriate metrics convinced the most savvy that the opportunity was rapidly approaching crisis proportions. The April 11^th FastCompany.comillustrates: “[Big companies that use water and have measured its cost] all have that same tickle of anxiety about water security. For business, water management is fast becoming a key strategic tool. Companies are starting to gather the kind of information that lets them measure not just their water use and their water costs but also their water efficiency, their water productivity, how much work they get from a gallon of water, how much revenue, how much profit.

“In the past decade, businesses have discovered water as both a startling vulnerability and an untapped opportunity. Monsanto is developing a new line of seeds and crops that require less water. Robert Fraley, Monsanto's CTO, says, ‘We believe that by 2030 we can double the yield for many crops, compared to the year 2000.’ In the hospitality industry, Celebrity Cruises has replaced ice with chilled river rock for cold food on the main buffet line at breakfast, lunch, and dinner on all nine of its megaships. That saves 2.7 million pounds of ice-making a year for each ship, ice that requires 330,000 gallons of water to be frozen, treated, and then pumped back overboard. In Las Vegas, the folks at MGM Resorts have worked with Delta faucets to prototype new water-saving showerheads. No less a sage than Warren Buffett has quietly realized h ow the water landscape is changing. In 2009, his company, Berkshire Hathaway, became the largest shareholder in Nalco, a water-services, treatment, and equipment company that has no public profile but 12,000 employees and nearly $4 billion in revenue.” Companies like General Electric and IBM as well.

Water and energy prices are locked at the hip; expect your local water bill to soar like an eagle over the next few years. Single family residential swimming pools may so go the way of the dodo, and botanists are going to be “reengineering” as many crops as they can to subsist on less water. Civil engineers will grapple with retaining rainwater runoff, but these potential efforts are just sitting in long queues of unfunded infrastructure projects… until we run out of water. So the next time you pull up to the gas pump to filler her up… ask if which you would be willing to give up if you had to make a choice: water or oil?

I’m Peter Dekom, and crises generally do not wait for convenient moments to appear; yet in a world where we no longer elect leaders but “poll-reacting legislators,” this is troubling.