Biofuel Production to Cause Water Shortages?

WED Fan writes "Scientists meeting in Stockholm are reporting that increased food and biofuel production will place higher demand upon irrigation and water resources." From the article: "Demand for irrigation -- which absorbs about 74 percent of all water used by people against 18 percent for hydro-power and other industrial uses and just 8 percent for households -- was likely to surge by 2050. Many nations are also shifting to produce biofuels -- from sugarcane, corn or wood -- as a less polluting alternative to fossil fuels. Oil prices at $75 a barrel and worries about global warming are driving the shift."

Comments

Not an issue...

[evilviper]

increased food and biofuel production will place higher demand upon irrigation and water resources.

Well then, it's a good thing water is a renewable resource, isn't it?

The only thing in danger is CHEAP water, really. Desalination can ramp-up to whatever volume you want, and most countries are located near an effectively unlimited source from which to draw saline...

Re:Not an issue...

[MichaelSmith]

Desalination can ramp-up to whatever volume you want

Using energy from what? Oil? I doubt that you could irrigate biofuel crops with desalinated water, use the biofuel to power desalination, and wind up with an excess of energy.

Re:Not an issue...

[RsG]

Actually, desalination means centralized power generation. We generally don't use oil for that.

Using modern technology, that would mean nuclear, coal or (in some areas) passive power (hydro, solar, wind, etc). The latter option isn't going to work everywhere, but building a nuke plant or two should solve the water problem rather nicely. In places where tidal power is available, you also have an abundance of salt water, though that does raise issues regarding transporting the desalinated water, or selecting our biofule agricultural land to be near the ocean. Using coal would contribute to gobal warming, but even then we get the economic benefits from using biofuel over oil, since coal isn't in short supply or in the hands of unfriendly nations.

Using probably future technologies, fusion would work wonders. Fusion plants scale up better than they scale down, which is exactly what we'd want for a desalination facility. Orbital solar is another possibility along the same lines. Even without such technologies, a more modern fission reactor design would be an improvement over using existing nuclear plants - something like an integeral fast reactor or a pebble bed reactor for instance.

Priority Management

[Anonymous Coward]

What these environmentalists need to do is build a priority management system. This shotgun approach has got to end. They are going to have to decide if global warming is worse than water shortages, if nuclear power is worse than coal, etc.

Good grief! The only solution that the shotgun approach gives is for all humans to go live in caves--with the caveat that 5 billion or so of us dissappear (remember that farming and ranching contribute to global warming as well).

Childish nonsense

[Flying pig]

Current methods of washing and waste disposal are extremely wasteful, and there are technical solutions that could reduce domestic water use with no adverse impact. We could also reduce domestic energy use enormously without adverse impact on our lives just with better insulation and more sensible behavior (who really needs patio heaters, surely the most stupid device ever invented?). But as the article makes clear, this is about irrigation water, compared to which domestic use is a trickle.

To reduce the demand for irrigation requires a whole lot of technologies, some cheap and some not, but the situation is far from hopeless. This is not about environmentalists, it's about politicians finding the political will to do something concerted and practical. In the US, bioethanol is largely a porkbarrel project. In Europe and Brazil, it's about energy cost and so more practical. Growing the wrong crops in the wrong places and spending a fortune on irrigation is stupid. Moving the US economy to dry States and then irrigating golf courses is stupid. And your post is stupid.

On the other hand, working out a plan to find the best places to grow biofuels and then, say, providing tax breaks to make it happen might be a sensible option. What is clear is that politicians need to be talking to scientists and economists on the whole energy and water issue, not to lobbyists.

Re:yes

[shilly]

You're right that it's all about the tradeoffs -- and effective solutions will be multi-part as well. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't anticipate and try to mitigate issues with new energy sources as well. We want to avoid adding to the sum total of woes we already face, after all.

Biofuels have at least two really significant challenges that I know of:
1) It takes a lot of cropland to produce fuel. While some of that may be established cropland, lots of it is created by destruction of existing habitats.
2) It encourages industrial-scale farming, with all the concomitant problems, including the need for large volumes of water, large quantities of toxic biocides and fertilisers that cost a lot of energy to produce and bugger up the local environment, the tendency to monoculture with all its attendant risks (remember the Irish potato famine, anyone?), etc etc.

I know that technology is a useful tool to help us solve the problems we face, but we continually seem to forget that humanity has seen dozens of societal collapses through environmental strain which technology has as often exacerbated as it has prevented.

Re:Well, assuming that's true.

[indifferent children]

The article (ok, at least the summary) ignores the fact that we have oil-producing algae that grow in salt walter.

Re:Living on starvation

[Luscious868]

No, the long term outlook is big shortfalls, it's called "peak oil" and the only debate amongst credible scientists is when it occurs, not if. I'll give you a hint, the most optimistic estimates are for around 2035, with most realistic estimates coming in at about 2010. Unless you consider 20 years to be long term (I wouldn't) then it's not right to say the long term outlook is of a surplus.

Wrong. We are not running out of oil. People have been saying that for decades. What we are running out of is cheap oil that is relatively easy and inexpensive to extract. That's been the case for years. As technology improves we are able to extract oil from places we previously thought impossible or to expensive to be feasible. As the price of oil increases thereby increasing oil companies profits they are able to further invest into research and development to come up with new and improved ways to get to the oil reserves we know about but have previously been unable to tap. In addition, as the price increases it becomes possible to tap previous reserves that have not been heavily tapped because the return on investment wasn't there with prices being low. The Canadian Oil Sands are a great example.

The bottom line is that we are not running out of oil and will not run out of oil anytime soon. What we are running out of is the cheap and inexpensive oil that we are used to. However as technology advances and/or prices increase we will be increasingly be able to tap into reserves that were previously impossible or simply cost prohibitive to tap.