The Oil Drum | And we thought Colorado had problems

109 comments on And we thought Colorado had problems

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GeoPoet on February 22, 2006 - 1:54pm

OT but pertinent...

In another comment, I mentioned something that bears repeating.

My company is currently suspending drilling operations in Oklahoma due to lack of available water. State, municipal and private water owners have all told us that they will no longer sell water to us. We are experiencing similar problems in Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico, but not to the degree we have encountered in Oklahoma.

So what we have here in Oklahoma is one resources scarcity(water) precluding the extraction of another (petroleum) declining resource.

Yea - Hubbert was right, but his science is about so much more than oil...!!

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Leanan on February 22, 2006 - 2:15pm

That is what Tainter meant by the cost of complexity. As resources decline, the solution often cause more problems, until it's just not worth it any more.

Ethanol also has water issues:

BISMARCK, N.D. - Ethanol plants need more than corn: If all the proposed factories in North Dakota were built, they would use more than 1 billion gallons of water.
Drought in future years could curtail North Dakota's burgeoning ethanol industry or at least limit potential plant sites, particularly in the Red River Valley, officials say.
Ethanol plants are big water users. The Sioux Falls, S.D.-based American Coalition for Ethanol says it takes at least 3 gallons of water to produce 1 gallon of ethanol fuel.

http://www.grandforks.com/mld/grandforks/news/state/13906471.htm

Water might turn out to be a bigger problem than oil.

Of course, if we had enough energy, we could build desalination plants...

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Magnus Redin on February 22, 2006 - 2:34pm

Shameless PR: Build your ethanol plant in Sweden, we have almost unlimited fresh water, good logistics and plenty of electricity.

But shipping cost money and energy. :-/

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Leanan on February 22, 2006 - 2:57pm

But shipping cost money and energy.

Exactly. The idea behind building ethanol plants in North Dakota is to put them where the corn is.

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Magnus Redin on February 22, 2006 - 3:17pm

Will there be much corn in the future if the region do not have enough water for ethanol plants?

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Leanan on February 22, 2006 - 3:26pm

Ethanol needs a lot more water than corn.

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Don Sailorman on February 22, 2006 - 4:57pm

LeAnn,
That depends on where you grow the corn: In the irrigated Sacramento Valley and San Joaquin Valley of California much corn is grown with humongous quantities of highly subsidized water, obscene quantities of fertilizer, and enough pesticides to kill off a medium-size ethnic group. The yields are fantabulous.

By way of contrast, in God's Own Country, i.e. Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, parts of Nebraska and some other places we get plenty of rainfall to grow corn without irrigation, though the quantities of artificial fertilizer and pesticides are huge, and the erosion of soil is not a negligible issue.

Like Sweden, Minnesota has abundant water. Indeed, a Swede will feel right at home in Minnesota, except that most of the Swedes I know speak better English than many of us do. Shucks, we even have Finnlander jokes and Norweigian jokes, just like in 'da Old Country. Yah, you bet.

As far as the Great Plains go: I say, give it back to the bison and the Native Americans--and quit draining the Oglalla Aquifer.

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TrueKaiser on February 22, 2006 - 6:04pm

"obscene quantities of fertilizer, and enough pesticides to kill off a medium-size ethnic group."
That is the deal killer for ethanol made from corn or just about any crop used to make ethanol. It won't free us from fossil fuel usage, it just hides said usage behind a politically good facade.
I guess with the public, out of sight is out of mind.

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unplanner on February 22, 2006 - 9:04pm

That depends on where you grow the corn: In the irrigated Sacramento Valley and San Joaquin Valley of California much corn is grown with humongous quantities of highly subsidized water, obscene quantities of fertilizer, and enough pesticides to kill off a medium-size ethnic group. The yields are fantabulous.

Almost. Much of the corn grown in the central valleys of CA are fertilized courtesy of factory farming operations. Megadairies, hog farms and chicken mills need a certain amount of acreage to spread the dried animal waste on for disposal purposes. Corn is the most common crop to use for that purpose. The problem is these factory farms are still dependent on imported feed from the midwest, which of course uses fuel for transportation. It's quite remarkable to note that both Valley farming and business interests are celebrating the arrival of ethanol plants to the 99 corridor for their economic value. When I was a planner there I thought this was a bone-headed idea because the feedstock was imported (albeit at times augmented from local sources at times) from the midwest consuming fossil fuels, limited water supplies (from a depleting aquifer), electricity and natural gas. The natural gas situation needs additional comment because the valley's supply (south of fresno) has pipeline capacity limitations more constricted than the overall tight national situation. Rapid residential growth has further exasperated the situation. The wet mash was touted as a "perfect fit" for the S. Valley's factory farm operations, without any consideration to the water considerations of those facilities. Corn + Dairies + Ethanol production = considerable water and energy expenditures. This concept is not understood by government regulators and ignored by the private sector interests. More on factory farming and resource consumption: http://unplanning.blogspot.com/2006/02/plans-that-stink-to-hog-heaven.html

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unplanner on February 22, 2006 - 9:05pm

Correct URL:
http://unplanning.blogspot.com/2006/02/plans-that-stink-to-hog-heaven.html

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odograph on February 22, 2006 - 8:44pm

The mash, fermentation, separation cycle should allow a fair amount of water recycling. (FWIW, the old chemist/brewer in me speaks)

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SocraticGadfly on February 23, 2006 - 3:58am

And, of course, this doesn't count the NG needed for fertilizer. Of course, in the Dakotas, thanks to our real Fearless Leader, farmers in the Dakotas can get coalbed methane from his home state of Wyoming. Just don't expect any water to be left to flow down the Powder River into the Missouri, and from there into the Dakotas, that's all.

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Gets IT on February 22, 2006 - 2:58pm

Hey Magnus, we're on to you. The price of drinks in Sweden is so high, we know you're never going to send it back to us.

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ET on February 23, 2006 - 12:57am

Isn't a lot of bauxite shipped to Sweden and Norway to refine into aluminum because of the low cost of hydro electricity? I remember 5th grade geography when we learned that steel was made near the coal mines and not near the iron mines because coal is heavier than iron ore (generally speaking). Lots of this type of resource transportation going on. NG is tough to ship though.
I think we are seeing fertilizer production already moving toward where the NG is.

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Agric on February 23, 2006 - 1:22am

Yes, aluminium production is virtually uneconomic without low cost hydro-electric, the electricity input is massive, one might worry that the aluminium producers may sell their electricity and stop producing aluminium until the price gets silly.

Yes, NG fertilizer production in US has become uneconomic, odds are that all US fertiliser plants using NG will shut down.

Cheap transportation has perhaps temporarily distorted normal economics, that has swung back a bit and will swing further.

There will be further 'adjustments' along these lines.

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GeoPoet on February 22, 2006 - 3:29pm

The water that is boiled off during distillation can be recaptured - it just hasn't been the typical practice, because until this last decade, we had few major water issues. The last time we were into alcohol in a big way was the 1970's, and back then there wasn't a water crisis in sight.

It's not really a complicated problem - just one that the ethanol plants need to address. They could make some of their money back selling recaptured process water for irrigation, or else just return it to their own process.

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joule on February 22, 2006 - 3:30pm

Desalination plants!

Now there's a topic I haven't heard much about in a long, long time, except maybe with regard to the Middle East.

The Saudis and their neighbors have the biggest ones in the world. Even with high-efficiency, multi-effect evaporators, vapor recompression, etc, they are highly energy intensive. To some extent, the Saudis are in effect drinking a certain portion of their oil and gas. I wonder how well the increased population of Saudi Arabia and some other countries in the area could be sustained without desalination.

Back in the Sixties the Johnson administration had gradiose ideas of making the Southwest deserts bloom through the use of huge dedicated nuclear-powered desalination plants. It doesn't look like the concept got very far, and given our current energy situation, I think we can kiss that one goodbye, at least in the near term.

Indeed, water resources is going to be a worsening problem in parts of the US, and we're not going to easily solve it through expending energy from our shrinking supplies.

There have been some wild schemes for building pipelines from the Great Lakes, but I suspect you can only do so much of that sort of thing before you seriously start impacting the hydrology in the Great Lakes area.

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Leanan on February 22, 2006 - 3:46pm

Desalination plants are big in the Middle East. Israel is hoping desalination plants can reduce some of the conflict with the Palestinians and other neighbors, which is often over water.

But they are all petroleum-powered, so far as I know. Israel's new Ashkelon desalination plant has its own natural gas power station.

There used to be proposals to tow icebergs down the the Middle East and sell them for fresh water.

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Gets IT on February 22, 2006 - 7:31pm

See! I wasn't lying about towing those iceburgs.

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davebygolly on February 22, 2006 - 11:23pm

Better tow them fast!

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ptone on February 22, 2006 - 4:51pm

I was surprised to learn when I moved here a while back, that Santa Barbara, CA actually has a full scale desalinization plant that was built in the drought of the 80's at huge cost. Of course as soon as construction was finished, the drought ended and it has been unused in standby mode ever since.

-Ptone

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Gets IT on February 22, 2006 - 7:28pm

Saudi Arabia's population can not be sustained at this very minute without the desal plants. A giant plant in the east keeps Riyadh alive with a 4 ft diameter pipeline and a 6 foot diameter pipeline. A desal of approximately equal size keeps Jiddah ticking, for now.

Back in the 70's there were some schemes developed to supply SA with alternate sources of water that went to the extremes of sending tugs up to greenland and towing back an iceburg. In Riyadh the average humidity is 8%. You feel like you need a drink every 15 minutes of walking outside. If you leave a piece of bread out on the kitchen table, its rock hard in 10 minutes. Outside August temps are 127-130 in the SHADE! 104ºF at 12 midnight. In the Sun, temps reach 150-160ºF near ground surface. I've left a cassette tape in my car parked in the sun and come back to find a melted globb of plastic.

There are no rivers running all year anywhere in S.A. except for a short fat inky looking one downstream of the Riyadh sewage treatment plant, which quickly disappears into the sand.

Occasionally it will rain and the drops dry up on the way down and never hit the ground. Watch out for the lightning though.

Much of SA's water is drilled and pumped from undergound "fossil water" aquifers, meaning it entered the aquifers thousands of years ago and needless to say, just like the oil, once it's pumped out its never replenished.

We think we've got problems. All we have to do is downsize our cars. Try matching a camel on MPG-H20.

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joule on February 22, 2006 - 8:35pm

Very enlightening comments about living Saudi Arabia!

It is obviously a very inhospitable environment in which for humans to live.

The indigenous nomadic tribes seemed to have been able to make a go of it, but their population was but a small fraction of the population of modern-day Saudi Arabia. It seems that the very existence of modern Saudi Arabia is totally dependent upon consuming large amounts of oil, a certain fraction of which they drink, via oil-fired desalination plants.

These exemplary entities, such as Dubai, seem to be artificially propped up through a massive influx of fossil fuel. Am I being over dramatic, but does anyone else out there think that Dubai closely resembles a nicer version of the planet Tatuine (sp?) of Star Wars? It makes Las Vegas seem absolutely natural.

I feel too old to move anywhere, but if I had to, I think I'd pick one of the Scandanavian countries, as they seem to have mastered the art of living cooperatively instead of competitively. Or maybe I'm misinformed. The climate, though, is another story. Cold weather doesn't help curtail one's alcohol consumption.

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Magnus Redin on February 22, 2006 - 9:11pm

Most of the scandinavian countries have toyed with different levels of socialism and they still are quite or very homogeneous societies. All of them have functioning democracies and legal systems and very little corruption.

We do not have an uncompetitive culture, for instance IKEA comes from Sweden and Nokia from Finland, both of them learned their skills on the domestic market. There is no socialist paradise in any country although Norway probably comes closest and Swedish health care is a good example of a lumbering command economy that produces a lot of aimless work and consumes vast ammounts of money.

I think the cold winter is a key factor. Collect a lot of firewood and have consensus in your house or you will die cold and miserable, repeat this for hundreds of generations and it affects the culture.

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Gets IT on February 22, 2006 - 10:00pm

Magnus, You are taking me back. I worked for a Swedish company for the 10 years I was in Saudi. You guys have a very competive culture, just not a lot of people to compete with. It is my impression that sometimes it gets very personel, yet it is still easy to maintain a very healthy and friendly sprit in doing so, since everyone has the collective desire that all should succeed. I also liked how, if mistakes were made along the way, nobody wasted any effort in witch hunting for the guilty, like they love to do in the USA. It surprized me that nobody had the slightest interest in firing someone. We just immediately regrouped and worked our way out of the problem as quickly as we could. That was a very refreshing change. But I won't mention the number of times that I went to the company doctor and got the wrong medications. Fortunately nothing serious, as you say, just took time to get the right one.

I was surprized at the work they would let me get involved with whenever I offered to try something new and different from my usual work. I think perhaps the Americans engineers specialize too much in that regard. I would never have been allowed to do 75% of the stuff I did, if I was with a US company, due to the specialist mentality they usually have. I learned much more than I would have otherwise and did so in a very short time. Perhaps, when you have a relatively small population and live in remote areas in harsh conditions, everyone develops a level of self sufficiency that is quite advanced, regardless of the collective good political atmosphere. The combination seems to be a good one.

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Generaly on February 23, 2006 - 8:55am

Good thing that SA is injecting so much water into their oil fields. Yum! Tasty oil field water...

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Gets IT on February 26, 2006 - 8:27pm

Even the air smells like oil and dust. Whenever I get home and take that first breath of fresh air coming straight off the center of the Atlantic, it seems very strange that it does't have that oily smell.

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Gets IT on February 22, 2006 - 7:30pm

Right. At one time Lady Bird was talking about diverting the Missouri River!

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JLA on February 23, 2006 - 1:24am

Desalination is not just for the Middle East. Tampa Bay has a fairly advanced plant.

There is much room for innovation with water conservation. Singapore may be on the cutting edge with its water reclamation plant (i.e., "from toilet to tap"). What, you didn't realize that your bottle of Evian was once T-Rex piss? Singapore is just making the hydrologic cycle a bit more concise. ; )

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Agric on February 22, 2006 - 5:54pm

Oh, yes and yes, GeoPoet and Leanan, complex systems can be fragile. While control and resources exist the weak parts of the chains are shored up, maybe strengthened; but when they do not it breaks so fast to be almost unbelievable.

I am reminded of a benefit of trade / globalisation: agricultural production is determined by the least available of its requirements, be that water, fertilisers or minerals, labour, etc. The movement of these resources mutually increases production for deficient areas. The principle is a general one, and we have exploited it to our benefit.

Now imagine it in reverse.

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Gets IT on February 22, 2006 - 7:37pm

That's the problem with complex systems. When one breaks there's 10 more on the brink. All of a sudden the previous feed back loops don't work any more, 10 systems spiral out of control and you hit the windscreen pretty hard.

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Proof on February 24, 2006 - 2:06am

This would help solve the problem of the oceans rising - how many "desalination plants" would we need to lower the sea by an inch?

"That is what Tainter meant by the cost of complexity. As resources decline, the solution often cause more problems, until it's just not worth it any more.
Ethanol also has water issues:

BISMARCK, N.D. - Ethanol plants need more than corn: If all the proposed factories in North Dakota were built, they would use more than 1 billion gallons of water.
Drought in future years could curtail North Dakota's burgeoning ethanol industry or at least limit potential plant sites, particularly in the Red River Valley, officials say.

Ethanol plants are big water users. The Sioux Falls, S.D.-based American Coalition for Ethanol says it takes at least 3 gallons of water to produce 1 gallon of ethanol fuel.

http://www.grandforks.com/mld/grandforks/news/state/13906471.htm

Water might turn out to be a bigger problem than oil.

Of course, if we had enough energy, we could build desalination plants

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Gets IT on February 22, 2006 - 2:56pm

See...Water pipelines. Told you I'd be doin' those next. I thought it would've been farther "downstream" than that though.

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Stuart Staniford on February 22, 2006 - 3:13pm

GeoPoet: Is Ogallala depletion the underlying issue here?

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GeoPoet on February 22, 2006 - 3:32pm

Well it has to be part of the issue - along with the current drought in Oklahoma and Kansas. We cannot recycle our water - it is turned into literal mud. The only way to get it back is evaporation in a field, which releases it to atmosphere. And water isn't expensive enough to do anything more than that yet...

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Gets IT on February 22, 2006 - 7:42pm

In Riyadh we used to get the car washed with diesel. Diesel was 20¢/Gal... Water was 4X that at 25¢/Liter. It was prohibited to wash anything with a garden hose. We'd get water for 1 day, then it would be turned off for 2 or 3. Electricity always worked though. Couldn't live without the AC.

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dipchip on February 22, 2006 - 4:11pm

Growing up and spending the first 18 years of my life on the banks of the Platte River, It was/is the primary stopping off place for migrating water-foul. The past four or five years, I can't be sure, the river has been bone dry each summer, June to October, until it receives the water from the Loup, and Elkhorn Rivers, near Columbus and Valley. These two rivers carry 2/3rds of the drainage basin for Nebraska. The Platte carries the water East of the continental divide for Colorado, and Wyoming. June through August is the prime irrigation season for corn. The eastern third of Nebraska is nearly all irrigated corn with center pivots, and produces 1.2 to 1.4 billion bushels of corn annually. IMO the reason the river is dry in summer is because the water table drops during irrigation season. New irrigation wells in Nebraska are no longer licensed, and irrigation hours and volumes are controlled also. I don't know the details. I don't remember the river being dry my first 60 years of life. So now do you think the Ogallala aquifer has a problem? BTW there is also an Ogallala, Nebraska, and a native tribe of Nebraska named the Ogallala Sioux.

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Johnny on February 22, 2006 - 10:31pm

A farmer friend told me about another farmer that is extending his wells to 1000 ft. He has 40 central pivot irrigators. Each one has a 350 Hp engine to pump the water. It costs $85.00 per acre just for the water.

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steverino on February 23, 2006 - 2:07pm

dip....i had a friend who worked some time on a turf farm in colorado springs...in the time he worked there (~7 years), the well output fell from 600 gal/min to 50 gal/min., this from the western extent of the ogallala. the ogallala has an extremely long recharge time, which wiki refers to as paleowater, from the last ice age. when it's gone, it's gone

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knmnloyd on February 23, 2006 - 12:14am

See http://www.jsonline.com/news/state/dec03/190646.asp.
Somewhat dated, but featured in a recent post by Mike Shedlock ("Mish") at http://www.whiskeyandgunpowder.com/index.html (Peak Water?).

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Prof. Goose on February 22, 2006 - 4:50pm

can we draw an analogue from the water scarcity situation here to what other countries are going to do with their oil once they realize its scarcity value, therefore retarding fungibility? seems to me that we can make a strong comparison...

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Nate Hagens on February 22, 2006 - 5:56pm

I wonder how many Wall Street analysts use systems dynamics to look at future projections.

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Gets IT on February 22, 2006 - 8:10pm

I think its pretty much the 200 day moving average for the average analist. Some get a little more exotic with various other indicators, including using a ruler from time to time, but I think you know the answer to your puzzle already. Of course I would expect a few live wires there, because it seems like picking up physics grads is the thing for major houses to do these days. Seems like they are concentrating on predicting short term prices using neural networks, genetic algorithms and various fast fourier transformations with special windowing techniques for the data now that they can get realtime high speed data streams on their PCs, but (hey don't kid me) I'm sure the % is gotta be low.

Some of the researchers at the Federal Reserve Banks get into heavy duty Baynesian and Markov Chain based what if studies. I've read a lot of them (despite not knowing what "supply and demand" means, Don) and I don't remember seeing any specific studies using systems dynamics modeling.

I have no doubt that complex systems models are routinely used in the FED and Treasury basements, but for WS.. its a long shot. Certainly my broker doesn't (he's me. Nobody watches my money as well as I do.) What do the other brokers out there say?

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Don Sailorman on February 23, 2006 - 3:16pm

There used to be tons and tons of nifty research done at each of the 12 Federal Reserve banks, and you could also get piles of really good educational pamphlets free for educational purposes. The Fed is ENORMOUSLY profitable, and for decades they skimmed off some of this for research. The the Treasury (which by law keeps the Fed nonprofit) cracked down, and the quantity of research and free stuff has gone down. However, the quality of economic research at the various Fed banks is A+ because they get the very brightest Ph.D.s right out of grad school in many cases and (to some extent, depending on the people involved) pretty much turn them loose to do new and interesting and important things.

The Fed banks have been involved in economic dynamics and modelling it at least since the 1950s and bigtime in the 1960s and 70s, before that Treasury squeezed funds. With no false modesty, I can say that some of the best research was done at the Minneapolis Fed, and at one time we had about three of the top ten macroeconomists in the country on the staff. Then they go on to some second-rate place like Harvard to get six-digit salaries and huge consulting fees.

You want to see some interesting stuff, go to your nearest Fed District bank, find the librarian, and talk to her.

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Gets IT on February 23, 2006 - 10:08pm

I'd like to, but its like 4500 miles away. I have to dig on the net for it.

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Don Sailorman on February 24, 2006 - 12:44am

My impression is that most of the good stuff is not to be found on the Net. However, if you know exactly what you are looking for, those Fed librarians are very knowledgeable, very helpful. Also, the each of the 12 Fed Banks has its own website, and you can get a lot of good (popular and recent) research papers and general-education stuff from those.

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peakearl on February 22, 2006 - 8:32pm

In one part of Canada, natl gas extraction is being limited to keep up pressure for oil production. In the oil sands, lack of sufficient natural gas is limiting planning for capacity expansion. I think we will be seeing these competing situations more frequently.

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Heading Out on February 24, 2006 - 12:15am

I have also heard that trucking in the water to do the hydrofracing in the Barnett shale of North Texas (and then hauling away the spent fluids) is generating some irritation from those who watch it and cannot use water themselves to water their lawns.

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