[HN Gopher] 'Water Is the New Oil' as Texas Cities Square Off ov...
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'Water Is the New Oil' as Texas Cities Square Off over Aquifers
Author : littlexsparkee
Score : 9 points
Date : 2025-03-31 20:48 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (insideclimatenews.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (insideclimatenews.org)
| potato3732842 wrote:
| The cynic in me wonders whether they're actually worried about
| the water, or if they're worried about their own land valuations.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| > At the same time, he said, "Bryan can't claim the water."
| Groundwater is a private property right in Texas as sacred as any
| other. Everyone is allowed to pump whatever their land produces.
|
| This leads me to believe that if someone owns just enough land to
| access the aquifer, they would be entitled to pump with no limits
| until it's depleted?
| kragen wrote:
| > _so long as they don't affect other permit holders
| "unreasonably,"_
| kragen wrote:
| This is kind of a red herring or a tempest in a teapot; we're
| talking about municipal water use, not agricultural water use.
| The number being bruited about here is only 89 million gallons
| per day (3.9k/s in modern units) for 270k people: 14.4
| milliliters per second per person, or 1250 liters per day per
| person, so I guess they water their lawns a _lot_.
|
| I mean, they say that's three times what Bryan uses now, but
| Bryan is only 83980 people, so the per-capita use there is
| actually slightly _higher_.
|
| You can get water pretty cheaply if you have unlimited energy,
| and the rapidly dropping prices of solar panels have made that a
| reality.
|
| The ocean is only 250km a way, and the Sorek desalination plant
| http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/israel-proves-the-...
| was already desalinating seawater for 58C//k in 02016 at 7.1MPa
| ([?]7.1kJ/). At US$40/MWh (US$11/GJ) the energy would cost
| 7.9C//k, so designing the plant to be energy-efficient is an
| important priority. At US$15/MWh (US$4.20/GJ)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43468177 or less you can
| afford to use simpler, cheaper designs for the desal plant, at
| the cost of using more energy. But even at 58C//k, we're talking
| about a cost of US$260 per person per year.
|
| This is not the new motherfucking oil. We're not "talking about
| our survival". It won't "basically stop[] all the economic
| development we have". Not unless you think rice farming is the
| path to economic development.
|
| It's trickier for places that are further from the ocean.
| Condensing water out of thin air generally requires cooling the
| air to the dewpoint, removing its heat of vaporization
| (2.2564MJ/kg [?] 2.3MJ/) and letting the air heat back up again.
| The cooling and reheating process doesn't inherently dissipate
| energy (you can do it in a countercurrent heat exchanger) and
| anyway involves much less energy than the condensation does.
| 2.3MJ/ at US$4.20/GJ is 0.95C/ per liter. At 1250/day per person,
| that would be US$12/day per person, a much more alarming figure.
| Even dividing by the coefficient of performance of a typical
| vapor-compression heat pump (3 or so), giving us about 0.3C//,
| we're talking about US$4/day per person.
|
| But residential Los Angeles uses 70 gallons per person per day
| (3.1m/s per person in modern units, or 260/day per person)
| https://xtown.la/2023/09/05/residential-water-use-in-los-ang...,
| though total potable water use is about twice that
| https://spectrumnews1.com/ca/southern-california/environment...,
| and at Burning Man we use 6/day per person (0.07m/s)
| https://burningman.org/event/preparation/playa-living/water/.
| 6/day from a dehumidifier at 0.3C// is 1.8C/ a day or
| US$6.60/year.
|
| We need to find ways to make dehumidifiers cheaper, because at
| that point the energy cost is basically insignificant.
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