Foxconn Will Drain 7 Million Gallons of Water Per Day From Lake Michigan to Make LCD Screens (gizmodo.com)

Earlier this week, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources granted permission to Taiwanese tech manufacturer Foxconn, best known for assembling Apple's iPhones, to siphon off seven million gallons of water per day from Lake Michigan, despite protests from conservation groups. From a report: The massive diversion of water from the lake will be used to produce LCD screens at the company's planned $10 billion, 20 million square foot manufacturing plant set to be built in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin. Nearly 2.7 million gallons of the water -- about 39 percent of the daily intake from the factory -- will be lost in the process, primarily from evaporation. The remaining water will be treated and returned to the lake basin.

Wisconsin's DNR noted in a statement that the requested withdrawal will "only amount to a 0.07 percent increase in the total surface water withdrawals from Lake Michigan." For environmentalists in the region, the issue is not so much the diversion for the Foxconn factory itself but rather the precedent it will set for how the lake water can be used. "If we allow this to happen, it's going to happen all over the basin, with other states and then it's going to be the thirsty states and nations to come," Jennifer Giegerich, the government affairs director for the Wisconsin League of Conservation Voters, warned during a public hearing about the diversion, according to the Wisconsin Gazette.

Comments

Manufacturing

[friedmud]

If you want manufacturing jobs - then you have to let them do manufacturing here. Manufacturing takes water and power... no way around it.

I'm sure that the water is not so much "used" (as in it disappears)... I'm sure they have a method for returning most of it. I would be more interested in what their controls are for the re-release of that water.

Re:Manufacturing

[friedmud]

Just looked through the article - they estimate that ~40% of the water will be evaporated - with 60% going back. So that means this is only going to "drain" 2.8M Gallons per Day... and how much of that evaporated water will fall back into the lake as rain too?

We simply can't have it both ways: we have to find some middle ground with manufacturing if we want the jobs. As long as they are using the natural resources responsibly and not polluting them or making a long-term impact... we need to allow them to do their thing.

Re:Manufacturing

[OzPeter]

Just looked through the article - they estimate that ~40% of the water will be evaporated - with 60% going back. So that means this is only going to "drain" 2.8M Gallons per Day... and how much of that evaporated water will fall back into the lake as rain too?

We simply can't have it both ways: we have to find some middle ground with manufacturing if we want the jobs. As long as they are using the natural resources responsibly and not polluting them or making a long-term impact... we need to allow them to do their thing.

No industrial process is going to the 100% clean

So the big question is what else goes back with the water?

Re:Manufacturing

[friedmud]

Agreed - so instead of talking about the "7M Gallons, the horror!"... let's talk about the environmental protection controls and oversight that are going to ensure that this operation is safe.

Re:Manufacturing

[LynnwoodRooster]

The Clean Water Act would be a good place to start... Anything on the banned list is, well, banned. And it's often true that discharged wastewater is actually cleaner than the original intake water.

Re: Manufacturing

[Bing Tsher E]

The contaminants in Flint were already in the pipe network the water was delivered through. The lead pipe network was sitting there, a ticking time-bomb. It was the introduction of slightly more corrosive water that dissolved the lead into the water supply that made the problem. If the pipe network had been ceramic, or pvc, or stainless steel, there would not be a problem.

Re: Manufacturing

[nospam007]

"If the pipe network had been ceramic, or pvc, or stainless steel, there would not be a problem."

In a country that still nails power lines to wooden posts as it did when Edison still was alive?

You must be kidding.

Re:Manufacturing

[LynnwoodRooster]

Except they didn't. The US Federal Government exempted fracking from the SWDA act in 2005, but the Clean Water Act still exists, and violations of the SWDA can still be enforced if the injection happens above 1000 feet deep (meaning within about 4X the depth of most wells). Get your facts straight, please...

Re:Manufacturing

[Kohath]

No industrial process is going to the 100% clean

So the big question is what else goes back with the water?

A higher standard of living for people in the community.

Re:Manufacturing

[jonadab]

> how much of that evaporated water will
> fall back into the lake as rain too?

Either directly or indirectly, most of it. It's going to evaporate in Wisconsin. Prevailing wind direction in the area is west-to-east. If you start in Wisconsin and go east, you pass over the drainage basin of the upper great lakes. What doesn't fall in Lake Michigan, or a river or lake that drains into it, will fall over Lakes Huron, or a river or lake that drains into it. Which is technically the same lake. (The strait at Mackinac is in fact a strait, not a river.)

Yes, sometimes you will get enough wind out of the northwest to push some of that evaporated water down into the watershed of Lake Erie. (If the plant were further north in Wisconson, this would be negligible, but the proposed location is pretty far south.) Even so, it'll be a small fraction of the whole amount evaporated. Furthermore, transferring water from Lake Michigan to Lake Erie, if you transfer enough to make an actual difference, would (slightly) lower the level of lake Huron, which would result in less water flowing out at Sarnia and downstream to Lake Erie that way. As long as you don't transfer so much as to dry up the St. Clair River, the overall impact is limited by this.

Bear in mind too, this is the Midwest. There is a lot of water. We don't, as a rule, trap rainwater and try to keep it. We route it downstream as efficiently as possible, to prevent flooding. Polluting the lake water would be a problem. But evaporating some of it? Come on. It's going to rain somewhere around 15-20 days next month. You really think the lake's gonna dry up?

Wow, that's a lot of water.

[CrimsonAvenger]

Oh, wait, it's not. Lake Michigan is somewhere around 4500 cubic km of water. And seven million gallons per day means that, even if all the water removed is pumped to Arizona for disposal, it'll be 500,000 years before the lake goes dry.

And the water taken out won't be pumped to Arizona. Eventually, it'll go right back into the lake....

Color me unimpressed with the Environmental Catastrophe In The Making....

Re:Wow, that's a lot of water.

[apoc.famine]

While I'm not really on the 'environmental disaster" bandwagon, your argument is stupid. Are you unfamiliar with what lakes are and how they work?

Lakes have topography. They're not cylinders. If you drain 10' of water from a lake, it gets a LOT smaller. Large amounts of any lake are less than 10' deep. That impacts the rivers that flow out of it, all of the people that live near it, all the boating and shipping that uses it, and the massive amount of wetlands around the lake. It also kills off a ton of shallow-water habitat where lots of things live. Yes, that will eventually come back, but it's not an instant process.

Once the shallows are gone, there is a lower surface area to volume ratio, which impacts oxygen exchange. If that goes down enough, you get toxic algae blooms, and lots of stuff in the lake dies.

Saying that there's 500,000 years of water is a ridiculous statement which ignores everything about the lake except for its geometric volume. Pretty much everything you've ignored is more important than the exact volume of water in the lake.

You can't just expect to remove a lot of water from a lake and nothing to happen. I don't think this particular factory is going to be a huge issue, but the point made in the summary is an important one: This is the first major exemption granted. If it sets the stage for more of them in other states, they could eventually add up to enough to be really significant.

Re:Wow, that's a lot of water.

[Citizen of Earth]

2.6e-5 km^3 water drained divided by the 58000 km^2 surface area = 4.5e-10 km of depth lost per day = 0.00045 mm/day, which is slightly less than your assumed 10 feet. Plus, this water will return to the lake pretty quickly. The water consumption is the stupidest thing to be worried about. It's not like they're sending it into a black hole for disposal. The contamination of the returning water is the main thing to be concerned about.

Re:Wow, that's a lot of water.

[PPH]

If you drain 10' of water

Reductio ad absurdum.

And if you drained 1000' from Lake Michigan, it would be gone. Why not use an argument that even remotely resembles the actual situation? Drawing off 3.3 million gallons of water will reduce the lake level by less than a wavelength of visible light. What is a legitimate argument is that there are rules and processes that have to be followed to make such a draw. And so far, it appears that Foxconn followed the proper procedures. And even if you extrapolate this precedent to some ridiculous level, it still isn't that big a deal.

Re:Wow, that's a lot of water.

[thegarbz]

Large amounts of any lake are less than 10' deep.

And some amounts of lake Michigan are 1/4 of a km deep.

You can't just expect to remove a lot of water from a lake and nothing to happen.

Define "a lot". 7 million gallons per day is significantly less than the 2 billion gallons per day removed by the city of Chicago just by reversing the flow of the Chicago river, and that's before you take into account commercial, industrial and residential users of the lake.

Never before has the phrase: Metaphorical drop of piss in the ocean been more apt.

Not really a lot

[LynnwoodRooster]

According to this study, natural evaporative losses can be up to 0.6 inches per day. Assuming it's really just under half an inch (about 12mm), natural evaporation from Lake Michigan can reach 183 billion gallons per day. That 2.7 million gallons lost per day - and as the article says, most of it to evaporation - is about 0.0014% of the current evaporation. Is moving evaporation from the lake surface to a site right next to the lake surface an issue? In other words, relocating around 1 thousandth of 1 percent o the evaporation is the concern?

Re:Does it disappear?

[LynnwoodRooster]

Lake Michigan can naturally evaporate around 100,000 times that amount per day in the first place; I don't think you'll see any significant change in local climate, other than from the greater expanse of parking lots, buildings, and localized electrical heating.

Re: And it will put it back

[sycodon]

Lake Michigan, according to satellite measurements and formulas, holds One Quadrillion gallons of water.

http://blog.livnfresh.com/how-...

Re: And it will put it back

[www.goatse.ru]

Exactly. And seven million gallons of water is nothing by manufacturing standards. Miss Mash's use of "siphon off" shows her bias against manufacturing and lack of understanding of the language. Ever talk to someone working at a Yokohama plant or International Paper factory? Here are a few claims on the amount of water needed for every-day items.

13. Making two pounds of paper requires 793 gallons of water—so think before you print!

15. Making two pounds of beef requires 4068 gallons of water. Feed for the livestock accounts for 99 percent of that massive footprint.

Source

Pair of Jeans
It takes around 1,800 gallons of water to grow enough cotton to produce just one pair of regular ol' blue jeans. [2]

Cotton T-Shirt
Not as bad as jeans, it still takes a whopping 400 gallons of water to grow the cotton required for an ordinary cotton shirt.

Single Board of Lumber
5.4 gallons of water are used to grow enough wood for one lumber board. [3]

Barrel of Beer
In order to process a single barrel of beer (32 gallons of booze), 1,500 gallons of water are sucked down. [3]

To-Go Latte
It takes 53 gallons to make every latte, as I've noted before:

That sugar, doesn't that have to be grown as cane first? Hm. And then there's that plastic lid, which has to be created and distributed over hundreds of miles. And doesn't plastic require a pretty vast amount of water and oil to produce? Come to think of it, there's the sleeve and the cup itself too . . .

Gallon of Paint
Takes 13 gallons of water to make.

Individual Bottled Water

This irony shouldn't be lost on anyone: it takes 1.85 gallons of water to manufacture the plastic for the bottle in the average commercial bottle of water.

One Ton of . . .
Steel: 62,000 gallons of water
Cement: 1,360 gallons

One Pound of . . .
Wool: 101 gallons of water
Cotton: 101 gallons
Plastic: 24 gallons
Synthetic Rubber: 55 gallons

Source

That's all? That's a drop in the bucket!

[rjune]

I worked at the Linwood water filtration plant, one of two in the City of Milwaukee. There was a North and a South side section of the plant and the slowest rate the plant could handle was 30 million gallons per day. That doesn't count how much the Howard Avenue plant was pulling. Lake Michigan has one quadrillion gallons of water, that's 1,000,000,000,000,000 gallons. http://blog.livnfresh.com/how-... If this group was truly concerned about Lake Michigan, they would be complaining about the untreated sewage that MMSD (Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewage District) discharges during heavy rainfalls. The city of Milwaukee has combined sewers (sanitary and storm) so that heavy rainfall overwhelms the treatment plants. The deep tunnel system can't always hold enough, thus the "diversions" The city of Milwaukee doesn't want to spent the money to separate their sewers like most everyone else has.

The impact to this is most likely near zero.

[Anonymous Coward]

The real issue is whether or not chemical pollutants are being released in the waste water.

Assuming the wate water is pretreated at the plant to remove manufacturing chemicals, either with clarification or ultrafiltration, there is no issue with significant water "usage".

Evaporation gives me a minor cause for concern, as I assume the evaporation occurs in curing or drying ovens, which allows for the potential of VOC/SVOC releases, but I assume they will have the customary protections used in modern Western plants, such as wet scrubbers and after burners, along with real time participate monitoring and emissions sampling. Generally, permits for any reasonable sized heating operation in Wisconsin requires an extended evaluation and environmental safety plan.

Yes, I'm in the environmental industry in Wisconsin.

Re: And it will put it back

[dryeo]

The problem is that the 7 States and 2 Provinces have an agreement not to remove any water from the drainage basin.
7 million gallons (is that American or Canadian gallons?) here and 7 million gallons there, repeated enough times and we're up to some big numbers that might have an affect.