Water: Essential and Sacred
By Ted Schettler, SEHN Science Director
It’s easy to take water for granted until it’s gone. Or contaminated. Then the Native American understanding that “water is life” gets real for everyone. Water is not only essential. Water is sacred.
Although water covers about 70 percent of the earth’s surface, slightly less than three percent is freshwater and most of that is locked up in ice caps and glaciers. Only about one percent is readily available for our use and to support many of the ecosystems on which we depend.
According to the United Nations, worldwide four billion people experience severe water scarcity for at least one month each year. Over two billion people live in countries where water supply is inadequate. Half of the world’s population could be living in areas facing water scarcity by 2030, primarily because of climate change. In the United States, some regions more often experience droughts where they were previously exceedingly rare. In the arid West and Southwest, droughts have become more extreme.
The combination of more frequent droughts and new demands on available water due to the evolution of our economy and technologies has led to an inevitable decline in the quantity and quality of many water resources. An extensive 2023 New York Times analysis reported that water levels have significantly dropped in 45 percent of wells nationwide since 1980, with 40 percent reaching record-low levels in the past decade. Weak state regulations, combined with a lack of federal oversight and no comprehensive national data, have made it possible for farms, cities, and businesses to over-pump and over-use water. In some areas, groundwater loss has caused the land to sink, making recharging the aquifer with improved water management difficult. Do we wait for even more taps to begin to run foul and dry?
New demands on uncertain water supplies
The two largest categories of water use in the United States are thermoelectric power generation and crop irrigation. Other demands come from domestic and public water requirements, industry, mining, farm animals, and aquaculture.
At the Science and Environmental Health Network (SEHN) we have been working for several years, along with other organizations, examining the public and environmental health impacts of the proposed buildout of an enormous network of carbon dioxide (CO2) pipelines. These pipelines, largely funded by tax credits, are intended to capture and transport CO2 from various industrial sources for burial deep underground or use in enhanced oil recovery. Until recently, largely lost in the debate surrounding these pipelines is the obligatory water use associated with the technologies of carbon capture, transport, and sequestration (CCS). Much of the water demand is directly related to the substantial energy requirements of CCS. Water use varies depending on the specific technology at play, but ranges from one to ten cubic meters (264-2640 gallons) of water per metric ton of CO2 captured from the exhaust stream of a gas- or coal-fired power plant after combustion. The water is used in the CO2 capture process, for cooling the CO2 during compression and for generating the additional energy required for CCS.
In the Midwest, ethanol production from corn also requires large amounts of energy and water—about 3-4 gallons of water for every gallon of ethanol produced. In 2023, Iowa produced about 4.6 billion gallons of ethanol, which is approximately 30 percent of total ethanol production in the United States. Iowa’s ethanol industry, therefore, accounted for about 14 billion gallons of water use that year. Adding CCS to an ethanol plant adds another gallon of water use per gallon of ethanol. In more arid corn-growing regions of the United States, the crop must be irrigated, putting additional demands on dwindling water supplies in order to produce ethanol that will be burned as a fuel, thus increasing greenhouse gas emissions.
The rapid buildout of large energy-intensive data centers for artificial intelligence and other purposes in many parts of the country is creating new pressures on local and regional water supplies. A prodigious amount of water is necessary to cool the equipment and produce the electricity that the centers require, as well as in the upstream supply chain that manufactures the needed chips and other components. A mid-sized data center uses around 300,000 gallons of water a day while a large single data center can account for up to five million gallons of drinking water per day. Many data centers in the United States are being built in areas where water resources are already over-stressed.
Although crop irrigation has become more water-efficient, new areas need irrigation that were once adequately supplied by rainfall. Competing water demands, drought effects on surface water supplies and groundwater depletion have altered the regional distribution of irrigated production.
Water use regulation
Cumulative demands on water resources deserve a closer look. Now, a patchwork of federal and state regulations governs or, too often, fails to govern water use adequately. Water allocation is generally controlled by states and their approaches vary widely. In some states, for example Texas and Oklahoma, landowners own the groundwater beneath their land. In Texas they can use the water or sell it as they wish, as long as it is not withdrawn maliciously with the purpose of injuring a neighbor or to willfully waste the resource. In Oklahoma, landowners do not need a permit to withdraw groundwater and they can use it for domestic and farm or agricultural purposes as needed. In other states, groundwater is a public resource and withdrawal and use is more closely monitored and permitted.
Access to surface water also varies from state to state, and historical precedents often prevail. The federal Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act address water quality in surface water and drinking water aquifers. Many of their requirements, however, are allocated to states for enforcement, which can be inconsistent.
SEHN resources
At the Science and Environmental Health Network we are exploring cumulative demands on available water, which is declining in quantity and quality in many regions.
This 25-minute video presentation outlines these concerns in a little more detail and poses questions for groups and individuals to consider in their specific locales.
We also have a fact sheet that hopefully will be useful for raising broader interest. We know that concerns about water availability and quality are shared across the political spectrum.
Our coalition website's Water page has these and many other relevant resources.
Water governance models may differ but at their core, they must be designed and updated to face water-related threats in the regions where they apply.
What else is needed?
Baseline data: What are current local or regional water withdrawal and consumption* patterns? What are recent and historical trends in surface and groundwater levels, withdrawals, consumption, and quality?
Publicly available data on water use, quality, and changes in groundwater, surface water resources.
What are estimates of projected demands and water impacts of proposed projects? Transparent data collection and public input into decision making are essential as additional demands on water arise.
Examination of the legitimacy, fairness, and appropriateness of the economic value attached to water and how it should be adjusted to meet current and future conditions.
Water flows across jurisdictional and political boundaries. It connects humans to ecosystems. It sustains life. Water is life and must be protected.
* Definitions
Water withdrawal: freshwater taken from ground or surface water sources, either temporarily or permanently, and then used for agricultural, industrial or municipal uses.
Water consumption: defined as “water withdrawal minus water discharge,” and means the amount of water “evaporated, transpired, incorporated into products or crops, or otherwise removed from the immediate water environment.”