Transcript: Our Dependence on Water, Water's Dependence on Energy

THE CNA CORPORATION

ENERGY:  A CONVERSATION
ABOUT OUR NATIONAL ADDICTION

“OUR DEPENDENCE ON WATER; WATER’S DEPENDENCE ON ENERGY


SPEAKER:

MARK SHANNON,
Director, the Center of Advanced Materials for the Purification of Water with Systems,  
Department of Mechanical Science
and Engineering,
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign


MONDAY, APRIL 9, 2007
5:45 P.M. TO 8:30 P.M.







Transcript by:
Federal News Service
Washington, D.C.




    STEVE WEHRENBERG:  Good evening ladies and gentlemen.  If you take your seats, we’ll get started.  Actually, we’ll get started whether you take your seats or not.  Well, good evening to you all of you and welcome to the 13th evening in this series of conversations about energy security, and related topics.  We started to move this to Friday, but we thought why would we tempt fate, you know?  There’s really no point in doing that. 

    I am Steve Wehrenberg.  By day I work for the Coast Guard – a fine organization with which I just celebrated my 38th anniversary, by the way.  By night I’m on the board of a nonprofit energy consensus dedicated to educating decision-makers about energy and related issues.

    We have a very interesting speaker this evening – I’ve had the pleasure of dining with him at this point, so – who will continue to widen our apertures, or at least that’s my hope.  While I have your attention, though, I’d like to just make a few quick announcements. 

As is my habit, I’d like to thank our sponsors which now include the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, Department of State, Department of Agriculture – some of you were here 13 months ago and you remember that we only had like one little sliver to thank there – the Environmental Protection Agency and the director of National Intelligence.  And thanks, of course, to Mitzi Wertheim and the CNA Corporation without whom this effort would never have gained any traction at all.

In response to your feedback – (applause) – just wave real quick, Mitzi; there you go – (laughter) – just so they know who they’re applauding for, that would be – Mitzi knows everybody in the room; by definition, I mean, that’s why you’re all here.  Absolutely. 

In response to your feedback, we’re restructuring our presence in cyberspace.  We want a website that attracts you by providing you with something that you find genuinely useful.  We’re looking right now at RSS feeds of energy related news and information as being one thing that might attract you.  We want to enable you to find other people with similar or even dissimilar interests; we find that that creates some interesting creative juices. 

And we’d certainly like for you to be able to build on the synergies that might exist as you connect with other people.  So that’s really what we’re trying to do is connect folks together.  You can see that two-fifths of our brand image up here is about listening and learning and three-fifths of our brand image is about connecting and sharing and collaborating.  So we think that’s a very important objective of this series and that which a lot of us are involved in. 

So far in this series, we’ve spent a fair amount of time trying to understand the full nature of the problems we face with respect to energy security and some of the options that may present us with opportunities to mitigate those problems.  We’ve begun to explore a larger system-wide connection, looking at the relationships of energy security, and the environment.  And tonight we’ll carry that a step further by looking at the relationships among energy security and water.

Next month on May 22nd – I’ll say this now because you won’t hear me at the end – next month on May 22nd, we’ll welcome Neil Conklin from Department of Agriculture to our conversation.  Neil will expand our understanding even further by looking at the big picture of agriculture and its role as both an energy source and a large consumer of energy.

In June, we’ll start cutting to the chase: what is the defense community doing already and what initiatives lay in our future.  We’ll do this with a series of panel discussions where members of the defense community will describe their efforts on land, sea, and air related to all the things that we’ve been talking about.  These panels will probably alternate with other topics throughout the remainder of the year.  You can be sure that the (inner leave ?) topics will be as interesting and as timely as the conversations that you’ve experienced so far.

Tonight, Dr. Mark Shannon will address our dependence on water and how our access to water depends on energy.  And if you doubt our dependence on water, by the way, just remember that without water there would be no beer and no wine.  (Laughter.)  I have a personal stake in this, okay, that’s very important to me. 

Professor Shannon was a post-doc fellow at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab before joining the faculty at the University of Illinois where he holds the James W. Bayne chair in mechanical science and engineering.  He directs the micro-nano mechanical systems lab – it doesn’t get any smaller than that, by the way, that’s a very small lab at the – (laughter) – University of Illinois – and some time ago became the director of the Center of Advanced Materials for Purification of Water with Systems – that’s about 2004 or so. 

You may want to suggest that all that means that Mark thinks about very small things in an ivory tower, but his concerns are quite practical it turns out.  He developed a concept with (DARPA ?) and NSF funding to purify water with very low energy use, using distillation with ice to create fresh water from inland saline lakes and aquifers.  He’s also worked on low-energy active ion pumps as part of the next generation of sea water desalination systems, thus keeping the beer and wine flowing, ensuring my enduring gratitude, if nothing else.  His major interest areas are water, energy, and education and the relationships among them and I believe that makes this a perfect venue for him. 

Mark? 

(Applause.)

DR. MARK SHANNON:  Am I on?  Everybody can hear me?  Great.  No?  I’m not a podium guy, so I’m going to stand out in front of the podium, if that’s okay.  Also, I’d like to urge people to interrupt me and come up to mikes and talk to me if you get an issue, particularly if you just can’t wait until the end and you know, perhaps it will – we can go as long as you want.  So – that may not be that long, I don’t know.

So I want to talk about the dependence on water and water’s dependence on energy and I’m going to start off telling you a little bit about what the water campus is.  This is a National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center; this is, I guess, the largest type of center that NSF funds for looking at the basic science of the aqueous interface.  So we really looking – we have physicists, chemists, biologists, virologists – you name the scientist, we probably have it – as well as material scientists and engineers and even mechanical engineers like myself, and a lot of environmental engineers as well.

So what we’re doing is we’re trying – we have nine universities, three partners, one of which is Sandia National Labs – and I see John here – but we have Sandia in Albuquerque and Livermore, we have Berkeley, Rose-Hulman, EPA NRML – so it was nice to see that EPA is also one of the sponsors here – Clark, Atlanta, Howard, Yale, MIT, Michigan, WMRC – I can never get them right – Chicago Water District, and, of course, the U of I, which is the largest. 

So this is – our mission is to really develop revolutionary new materials and systems to purify water for human use.  We’re not an environmental water center – that would be great – we’re not an ultra-pure water – those are folks who work on getting very, very pure water.  We’re trying to do this for humans, specifically for their daily either potable water, energy use, food, so anything that’s related to humans.  And our real purpose is actually to educate.  We’re a National Science Foundation Center, so that does have an education with it and we are a university, so we’re here to educate and develop the next generation of scientists and engineers who are working in this area.  So that is just as important.

But my purpose is really to talk about what I think needs to happen next because hopefully by the end of this evening, you’ll understand what a challenge we’re facing and it’s an enormous challenge. And it’s the type that if you really start to get – try to grasp and get your hands around it, it seems insurmountable, and most Americans are quite unaware of this.  As I’ve heard it explained to me, they say, I turn on my tap, water comes out, I don’t see anybody dropping dead, I can afford it, so what’s the problem?  So it is a problem and it’s a problem that’s going to be growing. 

And the reason why I’m really here to talk to you today and why I’m really excited to do this is that it’s going to take decades of intensive work and trillions of dollars to try to get a handle on this.  And it’s not on anybody’s radar screen – or not very many people’s radar screen – and it can’t turn on the dime; we can’t have some major catastrophe happen and then say, oh, well, let’s just pour billions in and get it done tomorrow – which is sort of the way most of us, myself included, do things; you know, we say, okay, let’s get it solved.  We’re going to have to do some planning and so that’s why, you know, I was really excited that Mitzi invited me so that – because you all are the people that are going to be doing, I guess, this type of planning and looking into the future.

So really I think there is a role for the federal government and for scientists like myself and just up front, my bias is I’m a science geek, that’s what I do.  I have – you know, that’s what I like, that’s what I turn to first and foremost.  There may be lots of other ways of helping to solve this problem perhaps better than science and technology, but that’s my bias, and so I just wanted to let you know right off the bat so if anybody would think, why is he always talking about that, well that’s what I am, I’m a scientist and an engineer.

So we also need to get everybody’s help and including major companies and so I’ll end telling you a little bit about what we’re trying to do to enlist the help of major corporations as well as all sorts of agencies in the federal government for this problem. 

So this is the ubiquitous where’s our water and I just love this picture because we’re really a water planet and this is in square miles, which is just a freakish – one square mile is just a freakishly large quantity.  So if 332,500,000 square miles are water – but if we start to break down where – what water we can use out of that vast quantity, well 99 percent of it – 99.23 – is unavailable to us.  So we may be on a water planet, but it’s not very useful for human use.

What we really can get at is – well, that’s rivers, and this is close – but actually we had to blow this up more because if I gave you the true scale, you wouldn’t have been able to see it; it’s that little compared to the amount of ocean – lakes, again, is blown way up and then ground water.  And so this is what we use, but what I hope to let you know is with future research we can get not only the oceans, but we can get saline ground water which is larger amounts than the ground water we have and also saline lakes.  And if we can make use of these, we can solve a lot of the problems that are looming.

So I want to talk a little bit about the problems of the world.  Most of what I’m going to be talking about is the United States – we’re a National Science Foundation Center, we’re funded by the U.S. taxpayer, so we focus on the United States.  That said, the problems that the rest of the world is facing – and in particular, Asia – makes our problem seem tame.  And this is really an important issue and it’s one that actually is scary because the problems that China is facing with water dwarf ours.  The problems that India is facing is dwarfing ours. 

And when one thinks about a couple of billion people on the face of the earth that within the next 20 or so years will not have adequate supplies of water and what that means from destabilization, security, what it means economically to this country – I mean, everybody knows our ties to China and how close we are connected economically to China, can you imagine if 700 million people in China do not have adequate water, what that will mean in terms of our economic well being as well as our military and other security.

So right now, 1.1 billion people on the earth lack clean water, adequate clean water, and 35 percent of the people in the developing world die of water related problems; that’s more one out of three in the developing world.  It is the leading cause – bad water’s the leading cause of malnutrition.  Malnutrition?  It’s the leading cause of diarrheal diseases, you have to eat a lot more food – sorry about that for those of you done with dinner – you have to eat a lot more food to get the same amount of calorie intake.  So it is the leading cause of that and 35 – or is it 37 children die every 10 minutes in the developing world from the lack of water.  So it is an important problem.

One of the biggest environmental disasters is in the Bengal region – Bangladesh and East India – where some 300 million people have inadequate clean water, in particular with respect to arsenic; 30 million of those are being poisoned, have actual systems of arsenic poisons; 500,000 of those are going to be dying of arsenic poisoning and cancer directly related to that. 

It dwarfs almost any medical problem we’ve thought of and yet we don’t really have really have good adequate ways and – many of you have heard about probably the big Granger prize to clean up arsenic out of the Bengal region and it was given a National Academy’s of Engineering – a contest and prize.  And if you know about that that’s a wonderful thing and it’s a million-dollar prize, it’s like an – (unintelligible) – prize, but it’s to cut the arsenic concentrations down to 70 parts per billion. 

And if you remember a few years back we went through this tussle of should we drop ours and when the National Academy of Sciences came out and said, you know, even five parts per billion is too high, then we adopted the 10 parts per billion standard here.  (Cell phone rings.)  Is that me?  Somehow it got turned on.  Okay, it’s trying to let me know that I’m here.  (Laughter.)

MR. WEHRENBERG:  So far, so good.

DR. SHANNON:  Well, it’s going nuts on me.  I turned it off even.  There we go.  I’m going to get rid of it.  (Chuckles.)

So – did I skip two?  I’ll back it up.  Okay so, what we’re about is to try to figure out ways that we can not only impact the United States and water, but the world as well, because if we can do things here, we can actually help other countries.  And I think it’s in our self interest if not for ethical or moral reasons to do the same.  Because if we cannot help address other people’s problems, then who will?  Are we going to – the question at the end of the night I’m going to ask is if we don’t take care of our problems, who’s going to help us?

So anyway, the value of water – it is, in fact, I think the cheapest, highest quality product there is.  I mean, we do move massive quantities of fresh water.  I’m told that the pipes going into New York City are now – there’s one that’s 10 meters across.  Does anybody know that for a fact?  Because that just seems so large, the amount of water that moves through there – it’s just massive quantities of clean water.

It has a huge impact on everything: energy – which we’ll talk about a lot tonight – agriculture, livestock – livestock, I didn’t believe this number, but then I had to double check it, triple check it: Cargill – scientists at Cargill – told me that for every kilogram of beef that we export, we export 15,000 liters of water with it, because that’s how much water it takes to come up with one kilogram of beef, which is – how many would that be in pounds? – 2.2 pounds, so 15,000 liters, that’s a lot of two liter bottles for one.  And that’s because it takes 15 kilograms of grain, which gets us back to agriculture, to get that one kilogram of beef and it takes a thousand liters of water to get that one kilogram of grain, so that’s how the number comes about. 

So it affects – and, of course, it affects our jobs, homes, health, and it affects every aspect of the economy.  So more water at a lower cost means more wealth; the inverse of that is also true.  So the places that have the most clean water at the lowest cost are the wealthiest countries on earth.  And Sub-Saharan Africa – we have over a thousand meters per year – cubic meters per person per year – in the United States for every person; Sub-Saharan Africa, less than 100.  It’s almost a linear connection between how much water we have and use and the wealth of the country.

There’s two notable exceptions and I think they’re important for us to consider.  One is Israel and the other is Singapore.  Both of those tiny little countries outspend the United States on water by an order of magnitude in terms of how much money they spend to try to acquire, to do research to improve their water supplies.  Both of those countries have a higher standard of living in the amount of water they use, but they put a huge amount of water in it. 

And I’ll talk a little bit later about Rafael Simiat (ph) who heads the national water group in Israel when they’re building their desal plants, but he says, you know, 100 million cubic meters of water can be desalinated for the cost of one day of war of Israel with Syria.  So they are very focused on making sure that they have sufficient water; so Israel has decided their entire country is going to desalinated water because that way they don’t have to destroy the dam if Syria cut the water off. 

So there is all sorts of issues that are related to security and water around the world but it always comes back to these traditional concerns: safety and health – this is the number one thing that people think of when they think of water when I was talking about this.  But I think water has gone – the issues of water and water security – have gone beyond safety and health.  I think it really encompasses everything about our lives and it’s so ubiquitous that we don’t even think about it. 

And so really it’s hard to overestimate the importance, but it is taken for granted by the most of us and I think, you know – in fact, I’m really excited to see this many people here; I wasn’t sure how many people would come, you know, we usually take our water for granted.

So megatrends: I don’t have a crystal ball, but I think we have to look at some of the megatrends that are coming down and things that I think we can clearly see.  As the American Waterworks Association has said, the era of infrastructure replacement is upon us.  We have so much cost for infrastructure: between $800 billion to a trillion dollars is going to need to be replaced over the next 20 to 30 years; that’s over $550 for every American alive today that now owes this money to be able to replace the infrastructure.  We have over $10,000 invested in each and every American in terms of our infrastructure right now.  This is – those old systems now – they started getting placed in the late 1800, early 1900s – have to be replaced.  And I’m going to tell you, it’s not just that.

It’s the fact that the distribution systems, there’s more than a quarter of a million water main breaks a year in the United States now in these old systems.  We have a lot of problems with our distribution system, but our water treatment facilities for both water and waste water are also aging and need to be replaced.  So this is upon us and we have to start planning for that.  And there is a lot of planning that’s going on for that. 

But we also have – at the same time that we’re going to have to replace the infrastructure which we now take for granted, we have population growth that’s been growing more than one percent per year – 1.14 percent over the last 30 years.  This is going to increase demands for water, food, and energy and this is a really major player.  Now, even if – this is not even taking into account the last five to 10 years which has been at a higher rate for this due to immigration of all sorts. 

Energy growth:  This is the largest withdrawer of water and we’re going to talk a lot about withdrawal and consumption, because these things are – it’s got to be clear what the difference is and it’s usually confused a little bit.  But for mining, refining, generation of electricity – so you know, refining the oil, mining, taking out the coal, going into slurries, et cetera.  So it’s the largest withdrawer of water.  The largest consumer of water is ag and livestocks. 

And then this other big megatrend is contamination of water sources.  Our water sources are becoming increasingly contaminated and, to this day, most of the United States dilution is the solution.  You’ve maybe heard, you know, it’s not supposed to be, but it is.  And I’ll give an example in our own little area at the University of Illinois.  The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign sits right on a great glacial – you know, we call alluvial aquifers – that’s from an ancient valley that got filled when the glaciers came by and – (unintelligible) – the land and filled it with water and then dropped two meters of clay that prevents any of the water from the surface from communicating with this and it’s beautiful, fresh, clear glacial water. 

And so we pull it right out of the ground and in Illinois – because all water rights are different across the country, but in Illinois, I own my land, I can drop a well and I can start pumping, no questions asked.  In Texas I think you have to buy your rights, but in Illinois, you can just do this. 

Well, some of the spots actually have hot spots for arsenic, even in this beautiful alluvial aquifer.  And so what they do is they just take it from other parts and you blend it and you bring it down below the standards.  And as more – so this is done typically around the country, but as long as more and more water becomes contaminated, you can’t do this anymore.  So with this megatrend of contaminated water, we’re not just going to be able to have to replace the infrastructure we currently have; we’ve got to now bring and start treating water. 

There’s a lot of major water systems in this country that do not treat the water: New York City for one, San Francisco for another.  You know, but there’s many that don’t treat the water or minimally treat the water, you just dilute.  Well, we’re going to have to start treating the water and so new plants are going to have to be built to do this and new treatment modalities.  That’s going to be very expensive. 

These are the  megatrends; this is what we’re facing.  And at a minimum, just for this, we’re probably facing another trillion dollars in the next 20 to 25 years.  But when you start to count for all these others, it may grow much, much faster than that.  And we haven’t even talked about the elephant in the room.  I’m going to get to get to the elephant in the room.  There’s a big – or 800 pound gorilla or whatever – it’s there and that’s what are we going to do about coming up with new water.  And that cost is going to really drive all these.  So population growth is going to just accelerate all these problems. 

So let’s just get through with where our water comes from currently.  This is what most people think about; they think about lakes, rivers, and aquifers, the standard alluvial and glacial aquifers.  And so you’ll see all the rivers, major rivers and lakes in the United States, you’ll see all the major aquifers in the light blue; these green – greenish, yellowish, whatever that color is – is these alluvial aquifers, these sometimes called fossil aquifers, where you have the fuel – I mean, you have the water that was left over by glaciers or even older. 

And the interesting thing is that almost all our lakes and river water were near max utilization – more than 60 percent of our water comes from these and if you remember that first one, it’s a very small amount of the total water that we have in the United States, but this is our major source of water.

And then the standard aquifers, more than 20 percent of the water comes from this and this is the fastest growing segment.  More than 10 percent come out of these alluvial aquifers and these are being depleted; these are not replenishable.  And yet they’re being depleted very quickly.

And then the other thing is the reservoir system.  Reservoir systems were built in lots of money – in fact, a lot of federal dollars were spent on the reservoir system.  The reservoir system is – a lot of reservoirs are silting up and people are saying, well, we need to build more reservoirs.  And interesting, more reservoirs will help in terms of evening out the flows, making it available and keeping that type of thing, but reservoirs themselves increase the consumption of water from evaporation.  Reservoirs are one of the biggest users of water there are.  When you build a reservoir, you trade evening out with loss of source water.  So while most people think reservoirs are a source water, they are and they aren’t.  So we just have to keep that in mind.

One thing I did want to point out is all water sheds – all water is local to the water shed.  So you say, okay, if it comes out of one water shed or one water source, and it leaves the other – to the water shed it left, well, it’s gone, it’s lost.  So it may not – it may have been withdrawn from an aquifer and deposited into a river which – that’s happening all the time, being deposited, you know, into a river – but if it leaves that and you’re getting your water from the aquifer, you’ve just lost your water.  So it might as well be consumed to you. 

So this is why these issues of withdrawal and consumption – these are not very clear, black and white, we know exactly what we mean when we mean withdrawal and consumption.  Consumption usually means it goes into the atmosphere as evaporation and once it gets into the atmosphere, it’s lost.  So yeah, okay, it comes down someplace else, but does it really matter if it comes down in Europe?  (Laughter.)  We care about it here.  It comes down someplace. 

So here’s the ones that we know of and actually I was – I got another updated list and I was going to start updating it on the flight in, but I actually got in 29E, in the very back of the plane, you know, so I couldn’t do that.  (Laughter.)  But here’s the ones that we know about.  Now, we know about the arid Southwest and so the red is the currently stressed aquifers and then the yellow ones are the ones that are being impacted by over-pumping. 

And so this is the great – I mispronounce it so many times – Ogalal?  Somebody help me out here.  Ogallala – Ogallala aquifer – so this one we – for those who have been hearing about it know it’s the big great aquifer, you know, in the middle third of the country that’s starting to go dry in many, many parts.  So we know about the arid Southwest, we’ve heard about all the problems in California, particularly southern California, right where all the population’s at. 

But the ones that really get me are the ones that are in the Southeast and in Florida.  Every time I visit there it’s always so green and it’s always rainy and there’s so much water and yet they’re having extreme water problems.  And the other day, I heard somebody at the ACS conference sit there and say, we don’t have – from Georgia – ah, we don’t have any water problems, we got lots of water.  But actually, it’s one of the places that are impacted the worst in the country. 

And in Florida, they’re building desal plants around Tampa Bay.  There are no deep aquifers in this area and there are no deep lakes and so the water runs off and so it can’t be captured.  So they have significant over-pumping of the aquifers. 

And then, of course, the one that really gets me is the greatest source of fresh water in the world, Lake Michigan, and it’s being terribly over-pumped all around it.  And this is an important lesson of what we’re facing and why I think technology and science can be a real help.  Chicago owns the water rights to Lake Michigan.  The city of Chicago does not meter their water for any of the citizens.  The citizens pay for it through their taxes but do not see it; they get no bill.  So water is essentially free. 

Now, if you just happen to be on the other side of Chicago, in one of the Chicago suburbs, you do not have access to that water; you’re paying a lot of money for your water and you can be – and so if you fly into O’Hare over the summer, say August, when you’re looking down, look down if it’s a clear day and you’ll see exactly where Chicago is and where all the suburbs start because you’ll have green grass on one side of the block and you’ll have brown grass on the other.  And it’s because of this.

And so as I had – the water resource person for the state of Illinois told me, Illinois does not have a water problem, it just has a distribution problem.  He was serious.  So I am positive that the good citizens of Chicago will decide to meter their water, start charging themselves water, and start sharing the Lake Michigan water with their brethren and sisters to the south and east of them and the west of them, right?

MR.     :  (Off mike.)

DR. SHANNON:  (Laughter.)  It’s about the same, I think.  (Laughter.)  See, I don’t expect that to happen.  Not in my lifetime or my kids’ lifetime or my kids’ kids’ lifetime.  So you know, it’s just a distribution problem; there is no hunger in the world, it’s just a distribution of food problem.  There’s no poverty; it’s just a distribution problem.

So anyway, this is one of the major issues, and it is, in fact, pumping the alluvial aquifers down.  These aquifers were thousands of feet deep and they’re dropping – they’ve dropped – I was just reading, they’ve dropped 900 feet and they’re dropping at a rate of 17 feet a year.  It’s not – and the cost to pump this water ever deeper is going through the roof, energy wise.  So this is a major problem in this country. 

So if you sit there – and this issue of contamination now becomes a crucial issue.  Because if you look at these critical contaminants by the EPA, they show – if you look at where they are and these are 56 priority pollutants that are tracked and there are, by the way, 3,000 on the candidate list which aren’t reflected here.  But you see a few things: you see that much of these critical contaminants are right where the population was and you see that they’re right where these major aquifers that are impacted are. 

There is now starting to be communication – because of human activity, you cut through to build buildings, you cut through that clay cap – there’s communication now between these aquifers and a lot of contaminants are getting to them.  So if you notice what – the other major trend is treatment itself is an issue.  So water treatment itself – what do you do to treat water? 

Well the first thing you do is you start to shift the pH and then you put in chlorine to try to – because you need that to make water safe – then you put in ammonia to cancel out the chlorine which, you know, makes it HCl, and then you put in sodium hydroxide.  All of this means it leads to salting of the water.  If you do this like in the major river system that starts here and just wanders its way down through, the water’s getting continuously saltier as it goes and you have to then use more aggressive chemical treatment as you go.  And as the contaminants get worse, you have to do even more aggressive chemistry.  So water is treated with basically bulk chemicals now, for the most part, and every time you treat, it gets worse.

This has become so crucial along through the Colorado, the virgin rivers, and the places in the West, that large portions of the land and the water are now beginning to salt.  It’s not just because it runs onto the land and runs off, it’s also because of human activity and the aggressive chemical treatment we have to do for contamination. 

So this attachment to contamination and water source supplies is an exponentially growing problem.  These are coupled together and I’ll keep using that word coupled again.  One thing affects the other which turns around affects the other which means you have to do more.  So as you need to treat and the water gets dirtier, you need to treat more, which gets it worse and worse and worse.  And this is a runaway problem.

So this is something that we need to address.  So – they are starting to actually – I don’t know, do you know if they’re actually building the desal plants?  They’ve certainly been proposed – to desalinate some of the water going into Mexico because the water is so brackish by this point. 

I actually stood by a river – a picture down in this portion – a picture from 1929 as a virgin river and it was, you know, white water that was over, way over your head in this picture – in July and I was standing right there and there was like this muddy creek that went by.  I mean, it’s all been withdrawn and consumed and by the time it makes it, that water is very, very salty.

So this impact of contamination treatment and water supply and population, they’re all highly coupled.  And as the population grows, the contamination grows, the water source gets more contaminated,  you have to treat more, you have to lose sources because you can’t dilute.  So all this is occurring simultaneously.  That’s what’s going to lead to this issue of needing to do something to get our water supply up.  And I’m going to keep going because it just gets worse.

So – nobody’s stopping me, so you don’t mind a talking head? 

Yeah?

Q:  (Off mike.)

DR. SHANNON:  So the question is climate change on water, and yes, I have.  You know, climate change is a politically loaded term and I am a scientist and I try to avoid politically loaded terms – (chuckles) – because it scares me.  But, you know, I can face down a room of scientists right and left, but you know, it’s –

Q:  (Off mike.)

DR. SHANNON:  No, actually it’s a very important question because climate – you know, the water getting fresher could slow down the, what I call the nightmare scenario, which is the ocean currents which – global warming leads to frying of the tropic and freezing of the poles and that’s hard for most people to grasp that can happen.  And so – but it will really change the distribution of water a lot and unfortunately if it melts, it’s actually still a salt water for us.  Right, it’s just that thermal salinity pumps drop and it can change our rainfall patterns and the projections – and that’s what they are at this stage is projections – although there is now eight more growing degree days in the upper Midwest and farmers now even as far as south as southern Illinois are now talking about doing dual planting. 

So you don’t have to be a scientist looking at projections; farmers are speaking with their feet, they’re putting in soft winter wheat because they can get two crops in.  That wasn’t possible 30 years ago or even 20 years ago.  And they’re now growing more corn and beans up in Minnesota because you have a longer growing day.  So it’s changing.  The upper Midwest might benefit a lot, but Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, I don’t know.  Yeah?

Q:  Yeah, I’m Mark Crawford –

MITZI WERTHEIM:  Say your name, please.

Q:  I’m Mark Crawford and this is my first time at this meeting.

DR. SHANNON:  Mine too.

MS. WERTHEIM:  And who are you with?

Q:  I’m with the Department of Commerce, not that that matters.  (Laughter.)  The – in the oil industry, there’s something called Hubbard’s Curve and in this point in time, we are close to the precipice of the Hubbard’s Curve where all known recoverable reserves are being depleted at a faster rate than new reserves can be found and brought on line.  Where are we in time in terms of the United States on a curve similar to that in terms of our supply situation?  How close are we in a macro sense to a crisis situation?

DR. SHANNON:  That is an excellent question and I wish I had a defined answer to that.  One of the problems are we know a lot about surface waters in the United States.  The USGS tracks river flows.  You can go online – if I could get online, you could go click and I can pick a river and a point and you can actually see the flows real time at that point.  We know a tremendous amount about the surface waters, those lakes and rivers.  And we are pretty well maxed out.  Certainly on the West, they’re completely maxed out.  The only thing that’s preventing it, you build more dams in the West, you just get rid of the water because of evaporation. 

We are near max utilization of surface water.  Some estimates that we maybe might be able to expand – we capture almost 30 percent of the water that falls on the United States and utilize it.  Now, you say, well that leaves us 70 percent.  Well, not really.  I mean, unfortunately water falls like in Katrina – one Katrina counts for a whole heck of a lot of water in terms of that balance – and flight control, you have to get rid of the water; you just can’t capture it. 

So surface water, they thought we might be able to move it up to 32 percent.  Europe is right at 32, 33 percent and they don’t think you can get any more utilization of surface water than that.  So we have a little bit that we can maybe move on surface water – not in the West, but in the East. 

Ground water is not well known because we don’t have a USGS-type mandate that I know of to map all the aquifers.  We’ve been trying to map the Mohammed (sp) aquifer now for the last 20 years and money gets put into the state and then it gets canceled and you know, et cetera.  So we only have a much more tenuous grasp on ground water.  So we don’t know where we’re exactly at on ground water; all we know is that it’s falling.  And then the saline aquifers, all we have is almost anecdotal reporting from the oil industries.

Q:  One other question: I noticed in your map of the U.S. where you’re showing all the contamination, all the red areas, and I was really amazed at what I saw with Maine –
DR. SHANNON:  Yeah.

Q:  – with a population of 1.2 million people and all that land mass and all those forests.  What is causing all that contamination?

DR. SHANNON:  I don’t know.  At the end of this thing, there’s – I actually hire people to go and try to get all the contamination data and everything, try to assemble it, and put it into the plot.  I don’t know what’s causing that because I’ve never – actually, it’s one of the two states I’ve never been to, Maine and Alaska.  But I’m told that Maine is rather rural and rugged.

Q:  (Off mike.)

DR. SHANNON:  I don’t know.  What?  Pulping?  Wood, okay.  So I don’t know the issue of Maine.  Maine will pop up again, which really surprised me, when I get a few more slides down the line.  Did I hear another – there was another question?  Okay.  So let’s talk about water withdrawals here.

This is – I – you can get these things down into really parsed into very, very small, small things, but I just wanted to parse these into four biggies.  One is thermal electric power and it’s 39 percent; industrial mining – this will encompass some of the parts of energy as well – so in terms of mining and refining.  And if you took this section of mining and refining, which is about half of this pie – a little bit more than half – and you add it to this, this will exceed irrigation and livestock, okay, as the biggest water withdrawal.  All the things that we think of – the public self-contained potable water systems – are at 12 percent of withdrawals. 

So the big feet are power, energy, and food.  And so we’re up at about 124 trillion gallons a year are being withdrawn from the water.  Costs are related to withdrawal; you have to pay to withdraw, you pay with the pumps to withdraw this.  You have to channel it, you have to move it.  California spends over – I just was told – over five percent of its entire electrical consumption in California is moving water, withdrawing water.  It’s a big deal. 

So – but consumption is a bit different.  Consumption is the amount that’s lost to the atmosphere.  Now, look at the difference in the pie.  Thermal electric power generation has dropped down from 39 percent to three percent and livestock irrigation is up – it’s the big – it’s the elephant in the room.  Okay, so this is the big issue.  The public system is at eight percent and industrial. 

So the big concern when one starts talking about biomass for fuel is it going to change this part of the pie?  Everybody’s projections in the future want us to become more efficient for – and to do less irrigation, okay, to reduce this pie.  But what if this pie grows?  What’s going to be squeezed out?  This is the big question when it relates water to energy, and particularly biomass.

But note that it’s about 30 percent of the water withdrawn is consumed.  There’s another issue and that is as our population is growing – oh, and this directly affects the source amount.  As our population is growing – and I’m talking about projections, so those are the data; now we’re going to talk about projections: population-driven, application-driven, and source-driven.

Okay, so here’s the population in 2000.  Every dot is 5,000 people.  This is what it’s going to look like in 2030.  It doesn’t seem that dramatically different, but if we sit there and I look at it in terms of its effect on water, it’s actually somewhat surprising.  Here’s where we start off in the year 2000.  We just crossed the 300 million barrier, and if we’re at this 1 percent growth, which is less than the 30 year average, we’ll be out at 432 million in 2040.  Okay, we’ll have grown 130 million people in, what, 34 years?  Something like that.  That’s an amazingly fast growth.  And if we look at the effect of water – I’ve got three different curves here.  This is the curve – the orange curve here is the curve where we continue to use the same amount of water per capita, which is at around 1200 cubic meters of water per person in the United States.  If we use that same amount, we need to increase the total water withdrawals by 43 percent.  Okay, 43 percent by 2040. 

This is the projected growth rate of our water because our water rate per capita has been increasing, domestically and with respect to energy.  In that case, we have to increase our water supply by 65 percent.  Nobody expects that we have that amount of water.  We certainly don’t have it in the surface water, so where’s this water going to come from?  Are we going to pump out all our aquifers?  Because that’s the only place that we have right now to come up with this water. 

Now, what about conservation?  Everybody says conservation – and it’s a good thing, I’m not here to say bad things about conservation at all.  If we start right now dropping our water use per capita four percent per year, we – to do this, by this time, we will have to cut domestic use by 50 percent; we’ll have to cut our use by energy per capita by 30 percent; and we have to reduce our agricultural use by 20 percent for each and every person.  If we do that, we only have to grow our water supply by 30 percent. 

This is the thing that’s challenging.  The growth rate – this growth rate, by the way, assumes – because the withdrawals are not proportional to, so there’s another issue here.  It’s not that – because there’s a lot of water that’s withdrawn from various purposes – you know, the lakes and rivers and all this stuff, they’re flowing, we’re doing these things, we’re generating our electricity, regardless of whether the population’s there or not.  So there’s this base.  So as you grow, it’s not as large; so it’s about .6 of the growth rate. 

But water consumption is proportional to the people.  So you see this issue is water consumption out of this total pie will grow and it won’t be 30 percent, it will be 40 percent, which means we’ll have less source waters to play with.  So for folks who are wanting to build a power plant or if you’re wanting to build a biodiesel plant or if you want to build an ethanol plant or if you want to do any type of thing like this, you’re going to start finding out that you can’t because we don’t have water withdrawal rights.  You have to be able to withdraw the water to be able to use it.  And those rights are tightly controlled.

So this is the big – this is the, I guess you want to call it the elephant in the room.  Where’s this water going to come from?  But that was on average.  Locally, it’s far worse.  Let’s take a long look at this one – (chuckles) – because this one has taken us a lot of time and effort to – we’ve been going county by county looking at projections, hiring grad students and – you know how hard it is?  The data’s all there, but somebody’s got to gather it.  And everybody has these projections. 

Now, this is percentage increase which is somewhat misleading because if you look at this, you say, oh the West – by the way, this is – these reds here are what, 100 to 300 percent increase and by 2030, so this is a big amount.  But this is already starting from a big amount.  Maine – (chuckles) – which is where I was going to say, Maine is looking at a 300 to a 1,000 percent increase, but it’s a small amount.  So – but if you sat there and you look at this, overall the average over the entire country, it meets this 43 percent and then this projected up to 65 percent growth.

But certain areas, look at Denver, look at all throughout Texas, and, of course, you can’t even see this for the forest over here in the Midwest, and the East coast.  So the folks that say, oh, we don’t have any problems in the East coast: not yet, but how are you going to come up with water changes of 300 to 1,000 percent in 30 years?  So a lot of localities are going to see major displacements. 

Yes, there’s going to be a lot of – if you want to make sure that you have plenty of water, I guess Montana’s looking pretty good, Idaho.  There’s various parts of the country that are looking just fine.  But that’s not where the population’s growing.  So, this is what – this is the challenge that I think everybody in this room has got to start thinking about:  How are we going to do this and meet our energy needs which are going to require a lot of water to do – which I’m about to talk about – and meet this issue of contamination, reducing the amount of available supply, unless we treat more?  And, of course, we have this era of infrastructure replacement.

So economic issues: we just mentioned all these things.  More than a trillion dollars is needed for infrastructure and treatment in the next 20 – the demand for potable water currently exceeds available resources and major water projects will – oh, this is for the folks that follow capital.  Most of this capital has to come due when the baby boomers have retired.  Where’s the source of capital going to be to come up with this to do this?  Those are the people who understand finance and banking, but I’m told that this is a major issue.  Who’s going to finance it?  Who’s going to come up with the trillions of dollars to do this?  The taxpayer?  The rate payer?  China?  India?

MR.     :  If they pay a high enough return, the baby boomers will finance it.

DR. SHANNON:  Okay.  (Chuckles.)  But it’s a large amount of capital and so capital costs will go up, right?

MR. WEHRENBERG:  There’ll be a sign up sheet next to the door.  (Laughter.)

DR. SHANNON:  So I mean, it is all about economics and really economists really need to be – so my next goal is to really try to get to economists and the council of economic advisors because this is an economics issue in many respects.  We’ve got to understand all these issues.  I don’t understand it, but somebody here has got to understand this thing. 

So really, in many respects, our economic security is at risk for the lack of clean water.  That’s the take-home message.  But you know, what impacts people the most – trillions of dollars doesn’t mean a lot to most people.  So when I talk to people, I actually ask them what their household budget is. 

And so this came out of the CBO, it’s a wonderful thing.  In the late ’90s, right around year 2000, 50 percent of Americans paid less than $20 a month for their water and only three percent paid more than three percent of the household budget of $28,000 a year for a family of four.  And I don’t know a single family that lives on $28,000 for a family of four, but I guess I have wealthy friends.  But the point is that this would be $70 a month.  For the infrastructure replacement only, nothing else, 25 percent by 2019 will pay less than $20 and then 34 percent will be paying more than $70 a month, and this is all in 2001 dollars. 

So where’s this money going to come from?  For this mythical family of $28,000 a year household budget, if this money’s going to water, it’s not going to something else, and that’s why you tell – no matter what business you may be in, I’d start to worry about this if the consumers are spending it on water and aren’t spending it on product X, Y, or Z.  But these estimates do not include the cost of acquiring new water, and that’s what I want to talk about next.

What is the cost of new water?  There are water projects today who are delivering water at $5 an acre foot and they’re in the West typically and these things, I think, are, I don’t know, grandfathered in forever and, you know, you’re thrilled if you get this.  But most of the water, old water – that means the installed water base that’s already there that you’re drawing out of the lakes, you’re drawing out of the rivers, you’re sucking out of the ground – is between five and a hundred dollars an acre foot, on the national average, about $50 an acre foot.  An acre foot is how they price it; an acre foot is 1233 meters cubed, or 325,000 gallons. 

So if you reclaim some water and it’s non-potable, but you reclaim it, it’s going to cost you between $100 to $150 an acre foot.  If you take and use conventional water – say I want to put in a new water system with conventional methods – it’s going to be between $100 and $200 an acre foot to drop a well into an aquifer or a direct drop from a river.  If you want to do a new developed water project – dams, canals, et cetera – it’s going to be between $300 and $500 an acre foot.  See the difference between old water and new water?  Suddenly new water’s going way up – they’re already an order of magnitude  more expensive than the average.

If you want to do direct reuse – and direct reuse is taking waste water and directly cleaning it up so you can use it – that’s between $430 to $500 an acre foot with current technologies.  Desalinate brackish water – these waters in the inland – that’s between $500 and $600 an acre foot, and that’s only going from 8,000 to 1,000.  If you want to desalinate water, which is what everybody talks about, I went and collected numbers and I’ve really been forcing the people – $584 an acre foot is claimed by Singapore – don’t believe it, they’re not doing it.  This is a political claim – I don’t think that’s really – that’s too low.

Rafi Simiat (ph) says he thinks asymptotically that Israel will get down to $650 an acre foot for the next generation’s 200 million plants.  But he’s closer to the $720 that’s claimed in Tampa Bay that they’re now getting.  Eight hundred dollars an acre foot is closer to the actual cost.  And then if you did the multi-state – (unintelligible) – distillation, that’s around $1,000 an acre foot.  But the point of the matter is even if you could get it to the $500 an acre foot, you’re still talking an order of magnitude more for new water than old water. 

And so if you factor this in – if you factor this in to the cost of water, what you see is, if I – as the population grows and our water supplies drop and we have to start pulling out more, we have to start creating new water from brackish water, from salt water, or reusing water – this pops us from $50 an acre foot to $500.  And as we have to use more and more of that water, the water prices grow exponentially.  So the cost of new water will actually tack on to that growth of $70 an acre foot – $70 a month – this cost of $100 to $200 by 2040.  And this is all in 2000 dollars – 2001 and dollars. 

So this means – this is what we all have to grapple with.  Do we have to live with this type of water price?  Right now, current technologies, this is what we can do.  We’re going to change from $50 an acre foot to $500 an acre foot and we have to come up with 30 to 40 percent of that new water has to be that cost?  That’s what we’re facing.  Yes?

Q:  Will you remind me of how much power plant consumption of water represents of the big pie, on a percentage base?

DR. SHANNON:  For water withdrawals, 39 percent.

Q:  Thirty-nine percent. 

MR.     :  (Off mike.)

Q:  And that’s for –

DR. SHANNON:  Enough for consumption, three to four percent for consumption.  And that number’s moving up, but that’s another discussion.

Q:  So three or four percent of the entire pie is just water consumption by power plants.  So that’s not going to give you – if you could cut that consumption in half –

DR. SHANNON:  Wouldn’t do you much.

Q:  Doesn’t do you much.  Okay.

DR. SHANNON:  Doesn’t do much.  Yes?

    Q:  Alexey Voinov, Institute for Water Resources.  You’re probably getting there, I expect –

    DR. SHANNON:  Maybe or maybe not (chuckles).

Q:  – but it looks like really a no-brainer that where you really need to invest all your resources is into population control.  (Laughter.)

DR. SHANNON:  I’m not going there at all.  (Laughter.)

Q:  Why not?

MR.     :  (Off mike.)

DR. SHANNON:  I have three boys.  I like my kids; I don’t want anybody telling me I can’t have kids. 

Q:  But you realize the baby boomers at least in the ’60s and ’70s did that; 9.1 – I’m sorry, 1.9 children, you need 2.1 replaced population.

DR. SHANNON:  I guess I ended up with three, so I didn’t help out there.  You know, the issue really is immigration more than population control.  And immigration, as at least some of us have witnessed, seems to be a hot political issue.

Q:  Brad Hollomon at Institute for Defense and Homeland Security.  Just another question you may be getting to in the future, but obviously when we’re thinking about energy and you look at numbers like that, your mind turns not necessarily to population control, but to conservation and I wonder if in your study you looked at what other people have been able to do cost-effectively in places like let’s say Israel or some place like that where they’re already confronting water shortages.

DR. SHANNON:  Yeah, conservation is absolutely crucial in many respects.  Israel has some very effective irrigation where you, you know, you don’t do flood irrigation.  These figures can go a long way in the United States.  They’re still doing, if I understand this correctly, flood irrigation of rice farms in Arizona.  Not an effective use of water.  But you know, as the price of water has gone up, certain places in California, they’ve done better jobs of, actually in trees and cutting way down on the use of water.  So certainly, one could do a lot in conserving water on agricultural use. 

And I’ve been told that one can’t ever do anything about water until you get the ag interests involved.  And there may be – we can talk later – a convergence here with respect to water for ag interests.  There are people who know ag far better than me, and maybe you guys can talk about that next month and address this issue. 

Q:  Peter Garretson (ph), Headquarters, Air Force.  Now, when you are tacking this cost on, is that just the cost of placing the infrastructure, or does that count the yearly operating costs for whatever it costs to manufacture that water?

And then the second question is, is if you’re making this water with desalinization, what kind of energy bill am I talking to be able to desalinate the water?

DR. SHANNON:  Okay.  To answer the first question, the cost of water is just the cost to make the water.  It’s not the cost of the infrastructure.  So this is just a cost to make – well, I guess it includes the amortization of the capital costs, so that does include the infrastructure.  Because these figures are the amortization of the cost – the chemical pre-treatments and the energy.  The energy cost is 40 percent of that.  So that’s about right.  So of that, say, $800 an acre foot, 40 percent of that will be energy cost.

Q:  What is that in kilowatt hours or –

DR. SHANNON:  (Sighs.)  Can I do a kilowatt hour on the fly?  I have figures for that coming up.  I’ll show it to you.  I don’t trust my memory right now.  I think it comes in at around five kilowatt hours per liter, but it’s coming up.

So, anyway, this is – these three plots – this is the conservation plot.  So, even if we conserve water and cut way back, it’s still not going to do as much.  By the way, as you’ll see soon, if we have plenty of energy, lots of this stuff goes away.  So interesting, it’s this neat thing.  Lots of cheap energy, we can get lots of cheap water; lots of cheap water, we can get lots of cheap energy.  (Laughs.)  So the question is, you know, which comes first?  Without the water you can’t get the cheap energy.

So anyway, so the impact on energy – so without sufficient water, we won’t be able to really, I think, meet the needs of the growing population.  Either we have to start conserving – and it may be that where we really need to conserve is not so much on the water but on the energy side of things – light-weighting cars, making more efficient appliances.  I don’t like the word “conservation” because it often denotes doing without.  As we move toward LED-driven lights, you know, you get all the light you want with one-tenth of the energy – I mean, there’s lots of technologies we can do on the energy side of things that would then obviate the need for so much water, and that might be a great strategy for those who are, I’m told, systems people because as you can sort of see, what we really need is some really intensive systems analysis across the entire spectrum here. 

Our ability to transfer to the hydrogen economy will be impacted.  I’m going to talk specifically about that.  You know, it’s one of these systems analysis things.  Everybody says, ah, we can get to fuel cells – and by the way, I make fuel cells, so I’ve done a lot of fuel cell research.  And we do hydrogen fuel cells, methanol fuel cells, formic acid fuel cells, ammonia fuel cells – fuel cells that you never even heard of.  The biggest mass-produced fuel cell is about to go into business that you can actually buy.  And it’s not going to be here in the United States mostly; it’s going to be overseas.  But that runs on formic acid, not on anything else.  And, you know, that’s the stuff ants produce.

So fuel cells – you say, oh, I want it to run on fuel cells because I could get to 50 percent thermal efficiency, which is 40 percent more efficient than the best car that we have today, and that sounds great, but it may be to get to that hydrogen economy it could cost us so much in the way of water that we won’t be able to get there.  So I’ll talk about that.  Our ability to use biomass and clean coal, which is another big movement.  If we don’t have sufficient water, we won’t be able to do this.

We’re the Saudi Arabia of oil shale, but oil shale requires a lot of water to process.  And in fact, oil shale and sand tar is – we had a group – a delegation from Alberta show up at my center – Canada – and they said, we have all the stuff; we can’t do anything with it because we don’t have enough water.  I didn’t know that Alberta – I thought Canada was just absolutely awash with water, but apparently that basin isn’t.  They said, we’ve got to build a big pipeline across from the place where there is water to get to that.  But we need a lot more water if we’re going to exploit this huge energy source that the United States has.  And our ability to use plug-in hybrids – you know, plug-in hybrids is the next one that we would want to be able to do – more efficient vehicles – but if we don’t have the electrical generation, how can we plug it in?

So this is this issue on coal.  If we think about coal – I think maybe – did I skip two?  Did I already get this one?  Oh, okay.  So, okay, largest withdrawal.  Coal uses about – pulverized coal plants use about 33 percent more water for scrubbing than standard, like methane.  But the new sources all use a fair amount of water, so for the refining of the stuff, like ethanol, you’ll use between four to six gallons of water for every gallon of ethanol you get out for refining.  That sounds bad, but it’s not really.  What’s really bad is it takes about 130 gallons withdrawn.  So if you’re in that Mohammed aquifer, like we are, and the Anderson’s (sp), who have a grain elevator, have gotten together with other farmers and said, we’re going to build a little ethanol co-op, but the cheapest thing – and this is happening all over the Midwest; hundreds of these are going in – the cheapest thing they can do is drop a well, pump the water out of this clean aquifer, and then use it and discharge it.  And that’s what they’re doing.  So they’re using 130 gallons for every gallon of ethanol out. 

ADM and Cargill are saying, you know, we’re going to us a zero-discharge system so that we don’t have to discharge anything.  Okay, except for they’ll still use the four to six gallons evaporated.  That requires capital costs to do that.  That requires money.  These small co-ops don’t have it.  You know, they can’t compete with the ADMs and the Cargills of the world.

So it’s an issue of, of course, money then:  Can I afford the infrastructure?  Can I afford the amortization of the costs of equipment to do this?  It also takes energy to recover and go back to zero discharge.  So if it’s without that subsidy, could they even afford it?  I just approved a proposal to look at using an air conditioning cycle to decease the water uses coming out of – the cooling water.  Yes, we can use less water, but it will cost us more energy to do so.  So it’s a tradeoff.  Which is more important, the water or the energy?  So if we don’t take care of these water withdrawals, that’s two orders of magnitude larger than the amount that’s used.

So this is taking coal – and this is a study that came out of Illinois for Illinois Number Six Coal – if we could take the coal and convert it to hydrogen with the water-gas shift – so we take coal, we burn it, we generate electricity, we generate some heat, then we convert it to hydrogen.  If we just forget about all the other stuff and say that’s a normal thermoelectric generating plant, and we just talk about how much water we need to convert to hydrogen – there’s three different things.  Right now the United States uses about 30 quads in its transportation system.  So we want to use – we want to replace oil with hydrogen – this is off sometime in the future – so that we can make use of this 50 percent thermal efficiency in fuel cells, which is the highest we can achieve.  We’re not going to beat that.  You know, I think the absolutely theoretical maximum is 51 percent.  You can’t do better.

The best ones that I know of are running at 42 percent.  But let’s say through more research we get it all the way up, okay?  It just gets worse if you go down in efficiency.  The point is is that to replace this we will need 2 trillion gallons more water consumption a year to do this.  And if we grow up to 40 quads, we need 2.7 trillion gallons of water.  And it’s likely to be far worse than this.  The good news is the theoretical minimum is just way down here.  It’s down here at, you know, much less than this. 

But this is – just so you can get a picture of this, these little parts say how much water consumed compared to how much water is consumed by people.  So if we were to grow to 40 quads, that’s the same as 260 million Americans’ water.  Now, that’s just to do the water-gas shift.  Now, it may be worth doing.  I’m not saying it’s not worth doing, but we just need to be able to supply it. 

So the point is is that there’s no perfect technology.  You can’t say, oh, I want the hydrogen economy without saying, where’s the water – Waldo?  Nobody got that one.  They don’t have kids.  Anyway, so – (chuckles) – “Where’s Waldo?”  I don’t know; where’s the water.  I was just trying to lighten things up because it seems pretty serious.  (Laughter.)

So anyway, 30 to 60 billion gallons of ethanol have been talked about.  Again, as I said, it currently consumes about four to six gallons for every gallon of ethanol.  So if we were to do straight through, that would be another trillion gallons of water, if we were just doing the straight-through.  If we can get it down to four (?) gallons, we’d only need 120 billion gallons to do this. 

But these breakthroughs that we’ve been talking about using cellulose rather than starch – I’ve been talking to folks that have been doing this – it involves another couple of stages that involve more water use in the refining than starch.  Starch is really efficient to convert to ethanol.  And so the numbers are still not here yet, how good those numbers are for cellulose because lots of different competing processes are out there. 

But cellulose may in fact have its own issues.  And then of course if we have to irrigate seed corn to do it with starch, this is going to add another four to seven gallons for every single gallon of ethanol, and if we irrigate marginal lands – and irrigating marginal lands to get this, it could be 1,000 times more water.  It’s just nobody is talking about being able to come with that.  That’s just pie in the sky. 

So here it is: the source matters.  This came out of a 2004 report out of Minnesota that shows that 20 percent of their aquifer draws – and this is an alluvial aquifer by the way – is now coming from processed ethanol.  At the rate of growth, we’re going to be out.  So something has clearly got to happen here. 

So the impact on agriculture – so 4 percent of the field and a higher percent of seed corn is irrigated at least during the months of July.  If we’re really going to expand corn – which I know many people are talking about it, certainly my secretary – she’s a farmer and her husband is a farmer.  They’re thrilled by ethanol.  Corn prices are going up.  They’re really happy.  Farmers are happy.  I’ve never – farmers love to grouse – sorry if you’re a farmer out there – but I think it’s wonderful.  I have no problems with farmers.  The problem is that they’re really happy, but the livestock growers are not so happy because their costs are going up. 

So the question is, this is this sort of – this interesting time.  Grain growers and livestock – poultry, hogs and cattle – have traditionally been really strong allies – you know, the market and the customer – but with ethanol, grain growers now have a second choice.  And there is a little bifurcation, and so there may be an opportunity to actually say, let’s do something different about agriculture here so that we can sustain the water that we need.  And there might be some really interesting things.

The issue is is that the issue of climate change may impact, you know, what we have to do to irrigate tremendously.  So we have to think about that as well.  I don’t know – I’m not doing any modeling of this, but other people are, and so we have to start thinking about that.

And then finally, you know, a lot of people are talking about using switchgrass, Miscanthus and other grasses to grow cellulosic to get ethanol, but you change the runoff.  These high, tall grasses evaporate a lot of water.  Water does not run off the same way.  If we started planting 20 to 30 to 40 to 70 million acres of these grasses, what will this do to our water supply system on the surface?  Has anybody given any thought to that?  I think somebody needs to because that’s how many acres you’re going to have to plant – 70 million acres, thereabout. 

So I think this is – so the water problems are coupled, they’re growing.  You know, we can do various things.  We can re-use water, we can desalinate.  We can disinfect water differently so we don’t have to create so many chemicals.  You know, we can remove contaminated waters in new, different types of ways, so I think that there really is hope here, and so I’ve gotten down to the depressing part, so I’d like to go to what we can actually do and so what we can really start having a dialogue about, and that is there’s lots of opportunities.  Physically we’re far off the thermodynamic limits of being able to separate compounds and water.  That means, from a scientific point of view, there is room to move.  We’re not trying to do that last 1 or 2 percent.  You know, there are several folds (?) that we can move.

New materials are being developed right and left that might be able to do separations much more intelligently than just doing these bulk intensive chemical processes.  This gives us a lot of hope to be able to do separations much better.  And so lots of research is being worked on.  You know, we’re working on things – we’re working on all sorts of different things, and one of them – I guess I’ll start – if you could do electrostatic trapping of viruses and pathogens rather than doing intensive chemical treatment, you could do a couple of different things here.  If you could put it in the format so that you could actually trap these things without using intensive chemicals, the water won’t salt up as much, and you could robustly do it.  Also, did you know that most of these treatment plants, they’re the size they are because the residency time that it has to be – the water has to be being treated is very, very long because you size it so that the fastest little pathogen that can move through is likely to be killed.

There are many other ways of doing it.  You could actually put it in with these types of filters and things like this that could actually – water could go right through, trap them easily and quickly, and you can move much more water through the same plant and you don’t have to build new infrastructure but you have to come up with a new way of doing this and prove its robust.  Nobody wants you to start doing this and then have a bunch of people die on you, okay?

So you’ve got to be able to do this.  Maybe there’s other ways of catalytically oxidizing these pathogens with UV treatment or visible treatment.  There’s a lot of work that’s doing this.  If you can do that, you can dramatically reduce the amount of chemicals you’re using.  You reduce the amount of chemicals, you reduce the costs.  You reduce the costs, you also reduce the impact on the environment and then what you have to do later to the water.  You could improve membrane separation processes.  They’re getting better all the time.  But fouling has always been – always been the Achilles’ heel. 

So many people say energy is the cost, right?  Desalinating takes a lot of energy.  Okay, Saudi Arabia is still flaring off natural gas.  Their energy is essentially free, but it costs a huge amount for them still to desalinate.  Why?  Because their plants – these thermal plants – they foul up, the crud up, they – you have to replace the exchangers.  It’s still very expensive.  These plants that are doing reverse osmosis desalination – these membranes foul, and so you have to spend a lot of money on chemical pretreatments, but we’re developing new materials that won’t foul nearly as badly, and in fact, when they do fully recover – and so you don’t have to replace the membrane so frequently – this could bring that cost way down that people are asymptotically coming to.  They’re coming to it asymptotically because they still have to use a large amount of chemical pretreatment, and they have to use a large amount of energy. 

Even if you could do all that, if you’re in the heartland here and you’re desalinating the inland saline lakes and aquifers, you still have residuals left over.  You have this briny stuff.  What do you do with it?  Well, you know, historically I guess out in the desert they just deposited it on the desert and let it evaporate.  But I’m told that the land in Arizona is so expensive now you can’t even do that.  (Laughter.)  I don’t know; it’s getting more difficult.  But it’s also – you know, you can get toxic runoff and the like, but in the Midwest and down here, it doesn’t evaporate.  (Laughs.)  It’s so humid, it’s not going to go anywhere. 

So what do you do with the brine?  Well, if you really concentrate the brine, the brine has actually got commercial value, but if you spend $500 a ton to make it, and you can only sell it for $50, it doesn’t do you much good.

So if you can come up with new ways that you can actually make it in a way that it’s at least somewhat competitive, the whole cycle, you could take it and make it into a concentrate.  So you don’t even have to dispose of it; it comes with a chemical precursor. 

So we’ve actually been developing a new freeze distillation method to do just this, that can take you right to the precipitation point and you precipitate the salts out, and it doesn’t take a lot of energy to do it. 

There is membrane bioreactors that are being developed that will digest all the stuff in sewage and clean it up to the point that you could directly treat it and use it.  In Europe they do this, but they follow it with a reverse osmosis process, which makes it very expensive again.  But there is new materials that are being developed that can do this.

So we could start to reuse it.  The wastewater that comes out of our cities is enormous in terms of source.  Chicago has four plants, each one of which puts out 60 cubic meters a second – a second.  And in just looking at this room, in two seconds you could fill – one plant could fill this room with water.  That’s how much water is flowing through.  That’s a huge amount of water – huge amount of water.  So we could start to recover this water and use it.

So you see, what I’m saying is that as bleak as I’m showing you, there is some technological and science things that can be done, and there’s ways of picking out things.  So right now – most of you guys live around and you heard about the lead problems in Washington?  Do you recall that?  That was last year some time, or is it two years ago?  I can’t remember.  This was a post-9/11 problem because they shifted from chlorine gas to combined chlorines/chloramines, which then shifted the pH, which then started leaching lead out of the pipe.  So then you had to come back and chemically treat and change the system.  It was one of those unintended consequences.

Well, there’s a lot of unintended consequences, but typically what you would do to get out the lead, the mercury, the arsenic is you treat all the water chemically, which is expensive.  Why do it?  Why not develop techniques that just remove the toxins and leave all the – (unintelligible) – constituents alone and not do massive chemical treatment.  Is it possible?  Yes.  We have a scientist in our group who is actually using DNA – DNA – it’s a type of DNA that he has developed that traps specifically lead, specifically mercury, and leaves everything else alone.  And you put it into a construct that can do this.  There’s all sorts of people that are working on doing these very, very biologically inspired materials.  This is coming out of the NANO (ph) Initiative, so we might as well make some use out of all that initiative money that was spent and start using it for this type of stuff.

And by – and getting rid of these micropollutants, we can do a lot of these types of things such that we can recover the water.  So I say there really is hope, technically – I don’t know if there’s hope politically but there’s hope technically that we can do this, okay?  So there’s all sorts of different types of pollutants.  So, you know, this actually came out of Sandia, right? – this is the new and improved roadmap – but this is underlying most of the United States is these huge saline aquifers.  We already have pumps down there.  It’s where oil wells are and gas wells.  And a lot of this is pumped up and then we turn around and spend energy to pump it back down.  We can actually start thinking cleverly about using CO2 that’s coming out of coal plants, sequestering it and pumping it back down, pressurizing these things, bringing it back up, using the CO2 to separate out all the hydrocarbons in a very efficient separation process that CO2 – supercritical CO2 is tremendous for absorbing hydrocarbons – cleaning out, getting what we want, then using that water, desalinating it in an efficient manner, and having produced water.  It’s possible.  We can’t do it technically now, but it’s possible. 

So the other thing is is that we’re way, way, way away from the theoretical minimums in terms of energy.  The physical limit is only .8 watt hour per liter – .8 watt hour per liter.  But we’re way up here in the range of typically five to eight is our minimum, and that is if throw away most of the water.  So the water comes into the plant – most people don’t know this – the water comes into the desal plant and one-half to three-quarters of it is thrown away and we only collect the rest.  That’s why you can only use it around the sea, because you have to throw it away back to the sea.  What do you do if you’re inland?  So there’s all sorts of techniques that we can do to recover this, and this is actually showing, you know, what the theoretical maximums are for the science-inclined.

But the point is – the point is if we can do this, instead of producing water at $800 – new water at $500 to $600 an acre foot, if we could produce it at $200 an acre foot, all that – you remember those curves that went up?  All of that basically goes away.  And $200 an acre foot is twice the theoretical minimum.  The theoretical minimum is $100 an acre foot.  So you’re going to figure you’re going to have inefficiencies; things aren’t – you’re never going to get to the theoretical minimum, but if we could just get to within, you know, 50 percent of it, it’s going to curve.  So this is the hope that I was talking about.  We can do a lot of this stuff, but we have to do lots of stuff yet.  We have to do science, we really have to study the science – you know, we have to synthesize new materials, we have to build systems and integrate them into water treatment systems because, you know, all sorts of people come up with good ideas, but which ones are really going to be adopted in the marketplace?  Which ones are really going to be vetted and work?  I don’t know.  But somebody has got to start building significant systems to figure this out.  Somebody has to start doing research on all these places that we can get water from.  There is water all throughout the system, you know, that you can recover water in all sorts of different places.  It’s there.

So after I’ve just told you that we don’t have water with current systems, that doesn’t mean it’s not possible.  So it’s possible to get water from all sorts of different areas.  But what do we need?  We need much better information on the aquifers.  This is the – what did you call that curve?

Q:  Hubbard’s Curve.

DR. SHANNON:  Hubbard’s Curve.  Who knows, because we don’t have good enough information.  The saline aquifers probably we mostly only have anecdotally from oil companies and gas companies, you know, how much water comes out.  These fresh aquifers really need to be fully investigated.  We also don’t even know how they’re full interconnected.  You pump down one; how does the flows change from another?  We don’t really know these.  We need, I think, a bold new research program on new methods to desalinate water and inland aquifers with residual waste management.  This could be, you know, sort of like an Apollo effort.  If we do this type of thing, we could solve this problem.

We need new research in science and technology of water purification for reuse, contaminates removal, and disinfection so we can really cut down on the waste.  But the public scientists and policymakers really have to know the real value of water.  If we don’t know the real value of water, we’re not going to invest in it.  That’s – you know, at the end of the day, it is economics.

So one of the things that I am hoping that I can convince somebody here – all I have to convince is one person who has real play, but – (off mike) – it keeps slipping – but to have a major meeting to really set a strategic plan for the nation on how to do this.  We need industrial input because, you know, somebody has got to actually do this and get it out.  People say, oh, I get calls all the time saying, I’ve got process X, Y, Z.  Why is it – I approach municipalities; they don’t want anything to do with it.  And I have to patiently explain to them – I said, if I was a municipal water manager and I came and tried your product and it didn’t work, I ought to be fired.  (Chuckles.)  You know, it’s not like I should, I mean, because it’s too important; water is too important for people.  You have to be conservative; you’ve got to know what works.  They have to see a history.  So no water manager is going to do it unless they see a history, you know, that it works and they know. 

So where is this – we need a – we need some pipeline to take us from the research lab.  We’ve got to have some people vet this technology, try it out for at least 10 years so that we’re ready in 2020 with new technologies.  We’re not there yet.  That’s why I said you’ve got to look decades ahead because if we’re not looking decades ahead, this problem is trillions of dollars and takes decades to do.  We’ve got to start right now.  I’m not willing to wait – and I wasn’t willing to wait in the year 2000 when I started writing this original proposal.  It was in 2000; it took us three years to get it going and it’s taken us four more years to get to this point. 

The point is we’ve got to start moving right now and hitting the ground running and not being shy about it, not being coy about it.  We’ve got to do this now because if we don’t, where are we going to have the 10 years of history so that they can know?

So, I would actually say how can we respond?  We probably need a multi-agency program.  We need everybody – DOD, the Department of Interior, Bureau of Reclamation, DHS, DOE, everybody – everybody who has to deal with water, and apparently it’s every agency practically, and we need to get public-private facilities that have a multi-year pilot and demonstration treatment methodology, and we have to have verification based on new water classes.  Everybody’s water needs to be treated differently – not really; that’s what everybody claims.  We need to get some verification here.  We need to get a unified treatment modality for categories of source water.  Every local place does it differently.  Nobody knows what to do.  It keeps consultants in the hay.  But we’ve got to get it down to just a few things that everybody knows what to do, and it has been vetted.  If we can do this, we can start to do this in a major way.

So this is what I want to leave – end on, which is the water economy.  This is going to be trillions of dollars worldwide market.  This is a mega trend; this is for sure.  Major companies – GE, Siemens and others are banking on it, billions and billions of dollars.  So it’s not just me up here telling you; this is major corporations putting major money into this.

There is going to be this intense competition from Europe.  What is this?  Why is this doing this?  Don’t do this.  Okay, there is an intense competition from Europe and Asia particularly to capture this emerging market.  So who are we going to – the problem is here.  We’re going to have to pay for it.  Are we going to pay people from India, China, Singapore, Israel, Europe for this, or should we become the world leaders in this?  We’re not, by the way.  If anybody thinks that we are the technological leaders in water, you’re wrong.  We used to be, but we’re not anymore.  It’s the EU.  Europe is the leader, Singapore, Israel.  They’re the leaders; we’re not.  So either we’re going to be importing this technology or we can take the lead, become the world leaders on this, invest money.  We did it for the nanoscale initiative, right, the National Nanoscale (sic) Initiative.  Say that fast many times.  (Chuckles.)  And we invested billions.  I don’t know if there is going to be a payoff or not, but there definitely will be a payoff here. 

So if water is the oil of the 21st century, who is going to command the world market?  And so I presented this to the Office of Science Technology and Policy – which is how Mitzi found me – and they said, this is great; if this is just an SNT piece, you know, not much is going to change from the current progress.  We’ve spent about $30 million a year in the United States on water research – maybe.  It’s hard to gauge.  Somebody here who knows funding in Washington might know much better than I.  But from what I can tell, my center at $4.4 million a year may be the biggest in the country, you know, and Singapore is spending, what, $300 million over five years; Israel is spending $150 million over the same period, and Europe has historically done much better than us.

So if we’re not going to do this, who is?  So I went – they say go out, but if it has to do with American competitiveness, then you can come back, and if you can get companies and others to say America’s future depends on this, then $30 million isn’t nearly enough; $300 million a year probably isn’t enough.

So maybe the people in this room would know how to do this, particularly if you want to connect it to energy.  We are signing a memorandum of understanding with Sandia to look at this energy-water nexus with EPA to do the environmental water nexus, and who knows for Ag. 

So I’m done now, so you can ask all sorts of questions, or not.

(Applause.)
 
Q:  My name is Caius (ph) and I’m representing West Technology.  We are a small firm in D.C. area, and not too long ago we invented an application that converts raw sewage and the raw manure to a solid energy fuel.  And if you run the application for – (unintelligible) – gas.  So we have business with you.  We’re talking – we have already done this and lately we have been in contact with the Department of Agriculture in College Park, trying to get them to validate the test results on the data on the power plant we ran for four years.  And also, we are working with a host (?) and cement plant in Baltimore to place a demo in the vicinity so anybody that wants to see that can come and take a look at it.

    But one of the problems I have, because I’m the inventor of the application, was when I was trying to get it started after college, it was too hard to go to government trying to get funds.  But luckily for me, my family was able to finance it. 

    DR. SHANNON:  Oh my goodness.  (Chuckles.)

    Q:  So it was done overseas because here I was given a price about $25 million dollars.  I knew they were not going to give me $25 million dollars, but overseas it cost $1.7 million dollars to get it done.  So now that we’re here in the States, I actually am always looking for collaboration trying to get application in the market because we have spoke to several investment firms, but they always come back to, do you have anybody to validate the test results? 

    DR. SHANNON:  Right.

    Q:  Is there anything that you could do for us, you know, because I was about to be flying back overseas –

    DR. SHANNON:  My center can’t, because we’re an NSF center and we don’t do that.  But, you know, the EPA does have the ETV, which is the Environmental Testing Validation, which is designed, I think, to do exactly what you’re talking about.  But, of course, I think you have to pay for it.

    Q:  Yeah, because we have everything that you’ve been talking about here we have –

    DR. SHANNON:  But you clearly see the problem of being able to get this pipeline to take this technology and get it into practice.

    Q:  Yeah, but what happened also – the way the application is designed that you can put it in an existing plant and run it, so you don’t have to have a plant somewhere.  And also those in the agricultural industry, you can still take the raw manure coming from them and convert that to solid energy fuel.  And the application is self-sustaining, so you know, it’s not using electricity.  And it’s environmentally friendly. 

    DR. SHANNON:  I don’t know what to – there wasn’t really a question, was there? 

    Q:  No, the question is that why is it when you go to government it’s too hard for somebody to answer your questions – (laughter) – and you need to be –

    DR. SHANNON:  (Chuckles.)  I don’t know. 

MR. WEHRENBERG:  I’m pretty sure that’s not his to answer.

DR. SHANNON:  I don’t know.  I don’t know that.  Sorry.

MR. WEHRENBERG:  Good question, though.

    Q:  I’m John Shilling with the Millennium Institute and I very much support your approach to the problem systemically because it does – water relates to almost everything else, as does energy.  But I want to go back to an early point you made about the difference in rules about access to water from state to state, and even within the states – where Chicago has access to Lake Michigan and its neighboring communities don’t.  In some areas, people have unlimited access to rivers and others they don’t, and things like that. 

How can you effectively apply this kind of a improved technology and water management conservation system without having a common approach to the access to the water to begin with, that would keep the oil companies or the thermal companies from just pumping as much as they want if they have unlimited rights to put a well down right where they are.  Don’t you need an integrated national water policy to underlie this whole approach?

    DR. SHANNON:  That’s an excellent question.  (Chuckles.)  I know that, you know, what little I know about – because I don’t do water policy or resource management or any of those issues.  There’s a lot of people who do.  From what I know, water rights are one of these things that are so incredibly ingrained and have gone through and been involved in innumerable lawsuits and court decisions and battles and literal wars – not even figurative – that I don’t even begin to know how to approach dealing with these things.

    Actually, one of the things that got us going, not from a policy point of view – I’m really not the right person to ask that question – but this guy showed up and he says, you know, I can’t get any water rights to pull or to discharge.  See discharge, you have to get rights to discharge because the EPA and others will govern it.  So he says, I can pull out of an aquifer, but I can’t discharge.  So I said, can I actually clean it up and use one of your MBRs to re-inject it back into the ground?  Because all I have to have is a certain loading by – in terms of pathogens (?).  And if I can get the cost down below a certain amount, I could do this.  And so we figured it out.  We actually connected them up with a small company, and he’s in fact doing exactly that.  He’s pumping back out.  He’s going through – and the idea was, he says, first I wanted to do a little station.  He says, you know, there’s lots of freeway overpasses.  This is entrepreneurism at work.  I love it.  It’s, you know, the innovators. 

    He said, I want to be able to put up a McDonald’s and a gas station.  He says, I can’t – but you have to be able to flush toilets and have this type of stuff.  I can’t do this, you know, because I can’t get it discharged right.  I can pump out.  So we put it through an MBR reactor and make it cheap enough that he can just do it and drop it right there. 

    And they need to start building these little 500 house units, 1,000 house units and you can do these types of things by just doing this recycled system.  Self-contained recycled systems.  And this can be done technically, and can basically work around all these legal rules.  I know that may sound – it’s the only way I could come up to even a potential solution.  If it’s going to be on a bigger scale, then it will have to be done politically.  I mean, obviously.  But the water resource managers, right or wrong, they’re saying, you know, Chicago’s discharging this water.  Could this be a product source for us?

    Right now, the water is still – after the treatment – and this is not saying anything, because I have good friends on this, and I’m going to go give this talk in a couple of months in Chicago to this same group.  But, they’ve now bought 4,000 acres of farmland off the river – the Chicago River before it went into the Illinois River – so they could pass all the water through it to try to bioremediate it, to get it cleaned up enough – get the phosphates down, the nitrates down, and all this type of stuff.  The micropollutants down enough so that they could, you know, the next communities could use it.  But could we clean it up enough right then and there, that it becomes a product source? 

Then the outlying communities – which by the way, you know the famous story of Chicago?  Maybe you don’t.  You could always pick the richest areas of a city and the poorest areas of the city by which direction the water runs.  All major cities are like this.  And so the rich area is upstream, the poor area downstream.  So Chicago, the rich area was downstream, so what did they do?  Reverse the direction of the river – for real.  And so the Chicago River went the other direction for that very reason, and that means all the downstream people – well –

MR.    :  (Off mike.)

DR. SHANNON:  I know.  I know I’m being a little unfair.  But that’s okay, it’s a nice story.  (Laughter.) 

But they were having some intake water problems from the discharge from the Chicago River.  I don’t know.  It’s a valid point.  If you can do it politically, you may not need this.  But we can do it scientifically.

    Q:  Yes, I’m Scott Shove (ph) from the Naval Research Laboratory.  I’ve also been involved with the new energy movement and with Infinite Energy magazine.  And the situation that I wonder about – well, first off, I think your talk was excellent.  And I think your appeal to nanotechnologies is especially telling and interesting because there are many new energy technologies associated with smaller kinds of things. 

But the question that I’ve encountered in my dealings with these kinds of areas involves the role of government.  And government can be hamstrung by the politics.  This is especially true of some of these more advanced energy technologies.  And the issue at hand is, where should you go? 

I mean, for example, I recently encountered a very idealistic person.  He called himself a community organizer named Stephen Kaplan, who is the head of the new energy movement.  And he comes in with a particular venue – you’re not into political science.  I’m not.  But he comes in and he gets involved.  And he’s, you know, I mean for example if these water concerns are so important, and they seem to be, appealing to the larger movements – and there really is an evolving movement, the new energy movement.  It might be appropriate.  I mean, there could be a groundswell if people get concerned enough about this. 

And I guess the final thing is, are you entirely reliant upon government, or have you branched out?  Are there private entities involved?  And are there really things like the new energy movement involved?

DR. SHANNON:  Well, we have, we’re tying to get this consortium together for the U.S. Strategic Water Initiative.  We call it the U-S-S-W-I.  Almost sounds like a ship.  But it’s – we have 20 companies now signed on from the size of GE, Simmons, ADM, Cargill, Praxair – I can’t remember all the names of the companies.  But they’re moving because they see some of these critical issues to their bottom line. 

And so I think it’s going to take an assortment – people from industry.  We’re also reaching out to WEF –

Q:  To what?

DR. SHANNON:  WEF – the Water Environment Federation –

Q:  Okay, good.

DR. SHANNON:  -- and others because we have to get the whole value chain involved.

Q:  What about the EU?  I mean, I know a guy, for example.  His name is Russ George.  He’s involved with a company called Planktos.  And what he does is he sells carbon credits.  Right now it’s just to the World Bank and places like this.  But, this is an issue.  This is a –

DR. SHANNON:  Well, I’m going to go give two talks in Zurich in June on this issue, trying to link up.  But again, I typically link up with scientists and engineers first and foremost because that’s who I know. 

Q:  I’m the same kind of person, but because of my involvement with Infinite Energy magazine, people have been – (inaudible) – and it’s worthwhile.

Q:  Peter Garretson (ph), Headquarters Air Force.  I wanted to ask a little bit more about the actual technologies that are promising behind desalinization.  In particular I wanted to ask – I didn’t see – as a pilot, they teach us if we’re out on our own to create a solar, evaporative still.  And I’m curious if that’s an effective method on a larger scale because I didn’t see that sort of thing listed in the approaches for new water.

DR. SHANNON:  I mean, that’s an excellent question because I’ve been asked this question a few times.  It certainly works.  Again, it’s an issue of economics.  To get evaporative – you know, think about taking a polymer, a lightweight polymer that passes light and heats the water and then traps it such that you can actually run it off and you can do some rivulets.  A lot of people have done these types of calculations to look at how much area would be needed for sunlight to hit and the cost per square meter. 

And so when it comes down to basically all these methods, you’re looking at the cost per square meter, and the flux, then, per square meter per cost.  And the evaporative methods are really way down the cost structure when you’re doing that.  The whole goal in almost all membrane research is really to get the flux up or the cost down to get the cost per square meter per flux.  So you want to get how many liters per hour across this membrane, or across anything.  So you have dirty water on this side, clear water on this side.  You have some mythical thing in between, and there’s going to be a flux.  How much water per time goes across at what cost?  And so, in that particular case, the energy could be free because it’s the sun, right?  But the cost still is high.  And the other thing is that it could be a technological thing that could come about – is that the polymers that were used, the original ones were glass.  And glass has got a certain cost, but it gets dirty over time.  How do you clean it?

And what happens is over time it starts to get dirtier and dirtier and you can’t see through it, and you get less and less light through.  So then, if one could imagine – and people are working on this, by the way – like titania particles and things like this, embedding them into polymers so that they can be self-cleaning from sunlight.  They just decompose. 

But the other thing is the polymers themselves over time, the UV light breaks them down.  So could be come up with a polymer that does not get degraded by UV light, and yet can use UV light from the sunlight to clean itself – to keep self-cleaning – so that you can keep the flux going.  If you could, maybe the cost could be brought down to where it could be effective. 

But then you have the issue of land areas.  So, you have to find a place that’s sunny a lot, and that the land is relatively cheap.  And that’s usually where people aren’t.  (Chuckles.)  Because if a lot of people are there, land is expensive.  So I guess – I know a number of people have looked into it.  Small-scale solar stills are certainly very effective, but remember you’ve got to supply – if you’re going to really have a big impact, you’ve got to be able to supply something on the order of 50 cubic meters a second of water.  That’s big.

Q:  (Off mike.)

Q:  I’m trying to step back to thinking about this in sort of a systems – sorry about that, Mitzi; I’m usually better than that.  Adam Siegel, Energy Consensus.  Thinking about this from a system of systems.  This talk might have been more effective, and I think you’re aware of it, to try to separate – yes, you’re technical and thinking about the engineer, but the overlay and the interaction between the policy, the fiscal, the interacting circles, at least to lay them out – even if you’re to say, I’m not the expert on them, or, I want to avoid questions on them. 

Because let’s say we did talk about the policy arena of all the different water rules around the country.  Another way of the system of systems.  In this group – a lot of people when we talk about Hubbard’s Peak and how oil and changed oil and the latest prediction of Robert Hirsch was just in Sweden with someone defending a dissertation that he says was the best prediction he’s ever seen on oil, which has a 2009, I think it is, peak.  Is that this infrastructure that you’re talking about is at the same time when we’re probably going to be hit very heavily economically with some very serious energy challenges requiring some massive, tens of trillions of dollars of investment related to moving toward a new energy system.  So that – and we may not have the capacity to do that energy switch.  We need a water switch.  We need other, so it’s the interaction – system of system challenges of dealing with all of the challenges that are coming with the coming decades.

DR. SHANNON:  I agree with you a hundred percent.

Q:  Well, I’m just – and it will even keep going with one of the things, then, let’s take to one, is that I was surprised not to see a perhaps – I would have expected, and that demonstrates perhaps my ignorance, of a lot of a discussion of what are the changed systems, the systems efficiencies that could perhaps lower that demand significantly in the water. 

For example, use the example of, oh, why he wanted to put a McDonald’s at a highway stop, and you said, well, they need to flush toilets.  Well, if I look at architecture 2030, are people looking at smart building.  Well if I put in an airport a no-flush urinal, I save easily 40,000 gallons a year of water use.  I have a, you know, a composting toilet.  I eliminate that whole question of flushing, which is actually a reasonably large use of that (urban ?) use.  Now, that’s a relatively low, you know, that’s what 15 percent of the overall water use in the country, but you can have that massive impact by lowering the demand.  And I’m sure you’re very aware of all that, but it was not coming out as a system of systems issue to me.

DR. SHANNON:  Yeah, this wasn’t that talk.  It just wasn’t, because that research I personally don’t do and we don’t – we’re just now starting to fund people to start thinking about certain aspects of it. 

Q:  It would be an interesting overlap, at least to raise it in the conversation of one or two or three – (inaudible) – because I think a lot of people –

(Cross talk.)

Q:  But also it’s that overlap is how a lot of us come to – (inaudible).

MR. WEHRENBERG:  And I think we have detected that, and now we’ve just got to find the right people to talk about it, whether it’s a policy overlap, or the conservation overlap or whatever the point is.  So, a note to Mitzi –

DR. SHANNON:  I guess my biggest point was clearly, conservation plays a huge role, but it’s not sufficient unless some other things change, because these mega-trends are bigger than that.  That was one of the key messages I wanted to leave.  The other key message I wanted to leave was that we do have to actually – I mean, by looking at the energy side and the ag side, you can do a lot to change this equation, and that’s something that, you know, people definitely have to start to address at a policy level and an economics level. 

MR. WEHRENBERG:  You have to look at it all at the same –

DR. SHANNON:  You really do. 

MR. WEHRENBERG:  Right.

DR. SHANNON:  Because food prices are changing.  I mean, even the blip going to four dollars a bushel for corn started, you know, those riots – or not necessarily riots – or protests in Mexico over tortilla prices.  So this is, you know, I mean there is this connection here, and I –

Q:  And if we do the one benefit, it will eliminate all these –

(Cross talk.)

Q:  Just to reiterate the previous question, you mentioned somewhere at the beginning of your presentation that there seems to be a direct correlation between the quality of life and the consumption of water.  That’s indeed so, but that curve has a very, kind of, quick saturation.

DR. SHANNON:  Yeah, it does.

Q:  And as a matter of fact, in this country we consume 217 cubic meters per capita per year.

DR. SHANNON:  That’s actually, the total is 1,297.  It depends on – domestically, you’re right, but the total it higher.

Q:  But if you compare that to European countries such as Germany, where it’s 66 or Netherlands when it’s 28, you can really see that there’s huge capacity that comes on the demand side, where we’re talking almost about orders of magnitude that we can actually save with also new technologies and with new applications that may very likely be much cheaper than some of the very energy-demanding technologies that are sitting on the supply side.  So if we’re really talking about some kind of integrative solutions, I would argue that we should really try to combine the whole scope of approaches to solving this problem.

DR. SHANNON:  But I – the point taken, like energy efficiency is not necessarily energy conservation.  I mean, you could have just as much light, and if you use – you have a technology that uses one-tenth the power, you’re not suffering at all.  You’re just more efficient.  You can do the same thing with water.  I do know that lots of people hate our low-flow flush toilets, though, so – (chuckles).  Did you have a – you in the back?

Q:  I know that you showed a chart for minimum separation of something, but I apologize, I was too dense to understand what we were talking about –

DR. SHANNON:  I probably wasn’t at all clear.

Q:  – my question is, is there a theoretical minimum energy needed for desalinization –

DR. SHANNON:  Yes.

Q:  – and what is the most efficient way to put that energy in?  Is it electric?  Is it mechanical in some sense?  Is it thermal, and if it’s thermal, can you efficiently use like a nuclear power plant to just boil off water to –

DR. SHANNON:  So you’ve asked a really good question for this techie.  There is a minimum.  And interestingly, I’ve actually done these calculations theoretically from all sorts of different ways, and it doesn’t matter how you do the separation – whether you do it electrically, thermally, mechanically, chemically – it all comes to this same answer.  That’s, you know, from a science point of view.  From a technical point of view, it makes a huge difference, and what I like to point out is that, you know, we gave this theoretical minimum is approached every single day trillions of times everyday in biological systems.  Our engineered system is the ones that are way, way off.

And so what do I mean by that?  A simple example of how to get ions out of water.  All (human ?) methods that we do – we remove the water from the solution.  So let’s say you have a million parts of water, and it’s got 30,000 or 35,000 salt particles in it.  Seawater.  What do we do?  We take about the 970,000 parts of water and leave the salt behind.  Okay.  What nature does, is it removes the ions from the water.  It goes after and removes the 35,000 plus the hydrated shells across these ion channels.  Much more efficient.  Not only that, nature has this amazing system – and I always like to use this little thing – if nature, in our cells, every second, trillions of times a second, we’re passing ions across cells, cell walls, membrane walls through nanoports that are very selective for certain salt ions, and they’re hydrated, you know, so it can discriminate between a sodium and an potassium and a chloride.  And they move them right across, and it does with just barely more energy than the random thermal fluctuations that are out there.  That’s the vector that we need to be shooting for, because nature has already solved this problem.  We don’t know how to do it yet, but nature has solved this problem. 

We would have to eat a hundred times more food just to pass our ions through, just to keep us going if we were as efficient as reverse osmosis.

Q:  I’m going to give it a shot.  (Laughter.)

DR. SHANNON:  Many of us, probably, if we could do the sudden switch, we would sit there and say, fantastic, now I can eat all the food I want.  But I don’t know about that.  But anyway, so the upshot is is that there is – so we have, we’re exploring things and other people are exploring things.  Can we develop mechanisms that are similar to what nature did to move ions through – move the hydrated ions out and leave the water behind – the fresh water behind.  That’s another technique that we could actually get there.  But there is no specific answer to your question. 

What people have been doing historically with electrical is really not, you know, or electrodialysis – they really pass electricity through a conductor which generates heat, right?  It’s a conductor.  You pass electricity through it.  That’s i squared r.  That’s loss.  And so, it’s those losses that start to build up.  And reverse osmosis, where you apply pressure to mechanically separate – they pile up, all these ions pile up on the surface, and they get a concentration and they start flowing back the other way, fighting against – you know, like salmon swimming up a stream.  That’s just direct loss.  So there’s lots of things that we do that just don’t make a lot of sense from a science point of view.  There’s huge amounts of room to move. 

I don’t know if I answered your question, but there is no one specific answer.  There’s no one best method that we know of yet.

Q:  I know it’s getting late, and I’ll make it short.  I’m with the Army Corps of Engineers in Champaign, Illinois.  I’ll see you in a couple of weeks.  My name is Henny (ph).  My question is very simple.  You made a great case for, like you know, the accelerative growth and the need for water for industry.  You made very clear and abundant arguments about, like you know, the irrigation needs if you’re going to go into the ethanol economy and all this good stuff.  Yet, when you showed the map for all the research that’s being done – and believe me, it’s hard to engineer.  I know what you’re saying is right.  All of it is for, like, the treatment of water for drinking water standards.  You’re talking about pathogens; you’re talking about fouling with membranes, while there’s this huge great need for water for industry and for water for irrigation.  And that begs the question, isn’t it time for the water economy – us here – to think about levels of service?

When you flew from Champaign, there was first class and coach, and we’re paying for the – we’re the only country, I think, that we’re paying for our cable company more than we’re paying for water.  And we invented cable.  We’re going to invent, like, water purification.  So my question is, why isn’t it, like, time to talk about levels of service in delivery of water.  That pipeline issue that you had is physical pipeline, in my opinion.  Why is that water that we drink, water that we shower in, water that we can use for irrigating our gardens and different prices, escalating prices like any industry, for that type of water that you have.  And that would really get us out of the jam of, like, the sanitary engineers who invented that thing from – my father is one and he went to the U of I, too.  (Laughter.)  I left the industry because of that.  We treat everything to like the EPA standards no matter what we’re going to use it for, whether Arthur Daniels Midland are going to use it to process corn, or we’re going to use it to flush toilets, and anything in between.  Isn’t it time to think about levels of service in the water industry?

DR. SHANNON:  Well, you know, full cost pricing and all that – Sally Gutierrez (ph) from the EPA – (unintelligible) – she said, you know – the way we set our system up originally was to have one distribution system and it’s sized for fire, and everything has to be potable.  And she says, you know, and she said, and the world followed us.  We were among the very first, which was just a terrible thing to do. 

    Q:  (Off mike.)

    DR. SHANNON:  And if we had a non-potable system that was, you know, for fire and all other non-potable things, you could have very small little line that you could make very clean and not leak for potable water, and it could be easily spread and it would have made a lot more sense.  And then a gray water return, and take care of a gray water return and handle that.  But that’s not how we set up our system originally.  And then we have this huge installed base.  It’s like the folks – who is it, my friends went to Costa Rica and had a fantastic phone system because it was all fiber optic and wireless.  They never went through the system that we went through first, you know.  You’re right, I don’t know how one addresses that, because when you have this huge installed base, it’s hard to change something. 

    Q:  Thank you.

    MR. WEHRENBERG:  Looks like we’re going to let you off –

    DR. SHANNON:  Okay.  All righty.  Right on time.  Well thank you very much.

    MR. WEHRENBERG:  That was absolutely beautiful, Mark, and I’ll tell you what, if water is the 21st century oil, is that what you – the oil of the 21st century, we just got around to figuring out that oil is the oil of the 21st century, so water seems like it’s going to be quite a challenge for us unless we begin to think of it all at the same time.  Part of my solution, of course, is to drink as much beer and wine as I can – (laughter) – right now, okay.  Because the more you put away now, the less you’ll have to worry about it.  You might – yes, absolutely.  If you would be so kind as to put your tent cards, your name cards and your ID badges in those envelopes and drop them off in the baskets on the way out the door, on the way out, that would be just great.  It would be one more thing that we could recycle. 

    Thank you very much.  I’ll see you guys on the 22nd of next month, and please bring your friends.

    (Applause.)

(END)



   

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