Mixing water and oil as global resources dwindle

Oil and safe drinking water are on parallel courses to depletion - a scarcity that will lead to starvation, disease and warfare.

It sounds counter intuitive to compare the two, considering the global cycle of evaporation and precipitation. But the issue here is drinking water, which is fast becoming a geopolitical resource to rival oil - a flashpoint at various places around the globe. There are currently calls for international mediation over the flow of the Indus (India and Pakistan), Ganges (India and Bangladesh), Nile (Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia), Jordan (Syria, Israel and Jordan), Tigris-Euphrates (Turkey, Syria and Iraq) and the Mekong (Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam), and less aggressively stated diplomatic tensions between many other nations (Canada, US and Mexico) over shared access to drinking water. In addition, a July 2010 report states that the continental USA will face a water crisis by mid century.

With 80 countries and 40 per cent of the world's population currently facing chronic water problems, billions around the globe arguably regard the availability of water as more critical than that of oil. But can the two be compared in this way? The concept of peak oil, based on the work of M King Hubbert, is simple enough: a bell chart curve plotting the point at which half of the world’s oil will have been extracted; it marks the time of maximum production, which can only be followed by diminishing output. But peak water? At first, it sounds laughable. Three-quarters of the Earth’s surface is water.

But the issue is drinking water - 97.5 per cent of all the Earth’s water is not suitable for human use. Freshwater makes up the remaining 2.5 per cent, but the vast majority of this is inaccessible - 99 per cent of it is either frozen in the ice caps of Greenland and Antarctica, present as soil moisture, trapped deep underground or in the atmosphere. Only about 1 per cent of the world’s fresh water, less than 0.01 per cent of all of the world’s water, is available for human use. And it is not fairly distributed. A 2005 Wired magazine article on peak water observed:

Like oil, water is not equitably distributed or respectful of political boundaries; about 50 percent of the world's freshwater lies in a half-dozen lucky countries.

Freshwater is the ultimate renewable resource, but humanity is extracting and polluting it faster than it can be replenished. Rampant economic growth - more homes, more businesses, more water-intensive products and processes, a rising standard of living - has simply outstripped the ready supply, especially in historically dry regions. Compounding the problem, the hydrologic cycle is growing less predictable as climate change alters established temperature patterns around the globe.

And it’s happening right before our eyes. According to the United Nations Human Development Report 2006 (PDF 7.88MB):

Access to water for life is a basic human need and a fundamental human right. Yet in our increasingly prosperous world, more than 1 billion people are denied the right to clean water and 2.6 billion people lack access to adequate sanitation. These headline numbers capture only one dimension of the problem. Every year some 1.8 million children die as a result of diarrhoea and other diseases caused by unclean water and poor sanitation. At the start of the 21st century unclean water is the world’s second biggest killer of children …

At any given time close to half the people in the developing world are suffering from one or more of the main diseases associated with inadequate provision of water and sanitation such as diarrhoea, guinea worm, trachoma and schistosomiasis … These diseases fill half the hospital beds in developing countries.

Ismail Serageldin, a World Bank official, famously warned in 1995: “Many of the wars this century were about oil, but wars of the next century will be over water.”

A current flashpoint is the Indus, which flows some 2,900km from Tibet to the Arabian Sea through India and Pakistan. The source of the conflict dates back to colonial times, when British engineers constructed an irrigation network that turned the Punjab into the Subcontinent’s “breadbasket”. This fertile region was divided between India and the newly formed Pakistan in 1947, with both agreeing to maintain water supplies at pre-independence levels. The first water dispute arose as early as 1948. A treaty was signed in 1960, but things are becoming tense, with Pakistan accusing India of stealing its water and India accusing Pakistan of attempting to hide its own mismanagement behind angry rhetoric.

An item in the Globe & Mail newspaper of July 2010, "Pakistan’s drinkers of the dust", expands on the issue:

Water scarcity in the Indus basin may be the world’s most dangerous environmental phenomenon. If anything will cause a civil war in Pakistan, or a conflict with its nemesis, India, many analysts believe that it will be water.

Civilization in this region depends on snow melting from the Himalayas, feeding tributaries that join the Indus. These pour into the largest continuous irrigation system on the planet, transforming the desert into fields of rice and wheat.

But the system is breaking down. Dry conditions in the past few years have prompted bitter conflicts: Southern Pakistan accuses the north of grabbing more than its share of water; many in the northern regions, in turn, blame their upstream neighbours in India for stealing water. In the mountains that give birth to the rivers, struggles over hydroelectricity are spurring rebellion in Kashmir.

The current ongoing flooding in Pakistan, which the UN believes has affected 3 million people, is for now obscuring the long-running tensions over water supply in the area - but it hasn’t gone away.

Climate change means droughts are getting longer and floods more severe, throughout Asia. Snowmelt from the Himalaya feeds the areas major rivers - Indus, Brahmaputra, Ganges, Yangtze and Yellow rivers - which in turn supply drinking and irrigation water to 1.4 billion people. These glaciers are retreating due to global warming.

According to the latest thinking, cited in a June 2010 New Scientist report, suggestions that these glaciers will have vanished completely by 2035 are inaccurate - they will probably last a little longer than that. However, according to a recent study, “the five rivers will be able to water crops for almost 60 million fewer mouths by 2050”.

Food scarcity is already a major concern during an ongoing period of extreme weather; in August, the Russian government banned the export of wheat to protect home consumers, following drought.

In addition, China is reportedly “proceeding with plans for nearly 200 miles of canals to divert water from the Himalayan plateau to China’s thirsty central regions” and planning “the world's biggest hydro-electric project on the upper reaches of the Brahmaputra,” which will, of course, be diverting water away from India and Bangladesh. China is running out of water, too. The water table beneath Beijing has dropped by nearly 200 feet in the last two decades, and the city is predicted to completely run out of water in five to 10 years’ time.

Meanwhile, African nations are reportedly drawing up battle lines over the River Nile, in an attempt to overturn colonial-era treaties that promoted Egypt and Sudan at the expense of upstream countries. These two countries were given rights to nearly 75 per cent of the Nile’s annual flow. In May 2010, five upstream countries - Ethiopia, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Rwanda - signed a Cooperative Framework Agreement giving themselves equal access to the water.

The Nile flows through 10 nations, and 300 million people depend on its waters. The upstream nations need the water for irrigation, hydro and industrial uses - but the people of Egypt cannot afford to go without it, either.

A July Boston Globe report, headlined “The threat of a water war”, calls for international intervention to “forestall hostilities between the countries,” while an On Line Opinion essay, “Does Egypt own the Nile? A battle over precious water”, looks at the issue of sustainability in more depth. It states:

Yet as the nations of the Nile bicker over its future, nobody is speaking up for the river itself - for the ecosystems that depend on it, or for the physical processes on which its future as a life-giving resource in the world’s largest desert depends. The danger is that efforts to stave off water wars may lead to engineers trying to squeeze yet more water from the river - and doing the Nile still more harm. What is at risk here is not only the Nile, but also the largest wetland in Africa and one of the largest tropical wetlands in the world - the wildlife-rich Sudd.

It continues that the Nile’s “entire annual flood is captured behind the High Aswan dam,” and released as required for agriculture. The river’s silt, which historically kept the Nile delta fertile, is accumulating behind the dam. Egypt’s rapidly eroding farmland is maintained by fertiliser.

Access to the waters of the River Jordan is a source of tension between Israelis and Palestinians. The lower reaches of the Jordan, which flows 251 kilometres (156 miles) between Israel, Syria and Jordan - with water extracted by all three countries - is too polluted for Biblical-style baptisms, according to Israel's health ministry and various environmental groups. According to an AFP report:

In recent years the flow of the river has slowed to a dirty trickle as fresh water running into the river has been replaced with sewage.

"Sadly, the lower Jordan River has long suffered from severe mismanagement with the diversion of 98 percent of its fresh water by Israel, Syria and Jordan and the discharge of untreated sewage, agricultural run-off, saline water and fish pond effluent in its place," the statement said.

But don’t go thinking water scarcity is solely a developing country problem. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) issued a report in July 2010 stating that the western and southwestern United States face urgent water shortages. Civil engineering website publicworks.com, in the article Report: More Than One Out Of Three U.S. Counties Face Water Shortages Due To Climate Change, stated:

Washington - More than 1,100 U.S. counties - a full one-third of all counties in the lower 48 states - now face higher risks of water shortages by mid-century as the result of global warming, and more than 400 of these counties will be at extremely high risk for water shortages, based on estimates from a new report by Tetra Tech for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

The report finds that 14 states face an extreme or high risk to water sustainability, or are likely to see limitations on water availability as demand exceeds supply by 2050. These areas include parts of Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. In particular, in the Great Plains and Southwest United States, water sustainability is at extreme risk.

Reports on diminishing drinking water tend to contain the following common strands:

• population pressure - demand is increasing all the time, with the global population set to pass 8 billion by 2025;
• increasing pollution - contamination that is effectively decreasing the amount of available drinking water;
• poverty - it’s incredibly expensive to tap new sources of water, and it’s the world’s poorest that are suffering water shortages;
• climate change - many parts of the world are getting dryer;
• mismanagement - much of the water tapped for irrigation leaks or is lost to evaporation; and
• conflict between domestic users - power generation, industry and agriculture - all heavy consumers.

Respected - and greatly missed - peak oil guru Matthew Simmons made, as ever, penetrating observations about declining global resources. His February 2010 presentation, Twin Threats to Resource Scarcity: Oil & Water (PDF 3.41MB), noted the “historical irony” of the intertwining of oil and water. “The two do not mix and we can not get along without both.”

Having noted the global importance of oil, the long-time energy investor notes “water is even more priceless” - as it is central to both food growing and energy generation. “For a century mankind ignored depletion of both precious resources.”