http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqxENMKaeCU&feature=player_detailpage#t=570s

I linked to this video at about the 9:30 mark, but feel free to begin it whenever you wish.

My point:

Why are we wasting our water to extract energy from hydraulic fracturing and tar sand oil?

[Edited on June 30, 2012 at 5:29 AM. Reason : Thre!ad]

6/30/2012 5:26:10 AM

Because Obama is a socialist.

6/30/2012 7:30:14 AM

Because the extracted fuels are worth far more to us than the resources it took to extract it.

6/30/2012 8:40:40 PM

yeah, natural gas will be worth more than water in a disaster situation. fuck necessities for life, we need to power this grill.

you are dumb.

7/3/2012 9:37:03 AM

I watched 10 seconds of the video and gave up when I got to "air and water are inseparable" and something about everything is connected.

Oh nature.

7/3/2012 10:29:07 AM

i love how it's gotta be "we're ruining all our water by doing this" v. "if we don't do this we won't have heat this winter"

pick an extreme side, or get out of the way

7/3/2012 10:40:47 AM

so under what scenario can humans get by without water? i can think of ways to combat cold that don't involve natural gas.

7/3/2012 11:33:24 AM

So when NC faces another drastic yet inevitable drought, are we going to tell the natural gas companies to go frack themselves to ensure that we have adequate clean water supplies? Eventual contamination aside, the amount of water used in a single well is mind boggling.

7/3/2012 12:20:52 PM

^^^^

Do you disagree that everything's connected or do you just think the concept has been played out?

I think the idea that everything's connected is pretty awesome, and I'd like to better understand your distaste for it.

7/3/2012 6:22:04 PM

People don't like being confronted with the notion of taking responsibility for their actions/lifestyle to which they feel entitled to.

7/3/2012 7:15:24 PM

Quote :

"Do you disagree that everything's connected or do you just think the concept has been played out?"

You know what, I do disagree that everything is connected. Everything is not connected. The pointless threads on TSB about national politics are, in fact, not affecting national politics, ergo, some things are not connected.

Actually, nature finds it really easy to connect things. Quantum physics could have just as well made all matter one big entangled blog where you can't separate one particle from the next. The miracle of the world that we live in is that it is parse-able in the first place. People who engage in this intellectual drivel are operating on the same cognitive level as modern art and the end of Evangelion.

Furthermore, air and water are very separable. The entire concept of water wouldn't work if it wasn't separable from air. It would be more like Nitrogen gas (which is still separable, but doesn't normally like to separate like water does).

7/4/2012 10:19:36 AM

I appreciate the perspective, but I may have misspoke when I suggested that everything is connected. I was thinking that you were discussing just nature, not politics.

With regard to the video, are you implying that you turned it off after ten seconds due to the technicality about water and air being inseparable?

A minute and a half later, the video mentions that coral is born from the marriage of algae and shells; would you have been as equally perturbed by the broad use of the word "marriage"?

7/5/2012 12:55:50 AM

There is rock on Earth that hasn't moved for several billion years. In fact, it's quite common that something falls into some place and just stays there for 100s of millions of years. The Appalachian mountains are half a billion years old, which is more than a full super-continent cycle.

Sure, there are certain parts of the biosphere that fairly rapidly recycles materials, but if we were so convinced about the impressiveness of our biosphere's dynamics we wouldn't be building landfills. Furthermore, the vast majority of the universe doesn't give a flying flip about a few Carbon atoms. Earth's geology generally proceeds irrelevant of what happens with life. When the Milky Way collides with Andromeda in a billion years we don't even know if it will destroy our solar system.

The biosphere is connected to itself, yes, that is true. Our breath comes from some organisms and our food comes from another. Even the evolution of our own genetics is frequently affected by intrusions of viruses and such.

The problem with the word "marriage" is that it's non-specific. Nature has a number of types of relationships that repeat over and over again, that being competitive, predatory, parasitic, and others. What is the relationship between the algae & shells to the overall coral? I would argue it's neutral because even if it's symbiotic eventually no particular organism of algae or shell has anything to gain or lose by having their remains recycled. The evolution of particular species simply doesn't care what happens after they die unless it helps their offspring.

Saying something is a marriage is probably to imply a symbiotic relationship. There's nothing wrong with using it, but let's not mistake poetry for education.

7/5/2012 12:06:53 PM

Hey man, the water and the natural gas are already connected, so what's the big deal?

Quote :

"so under what scenario can humans get by without water? i can think of ways to combat cold that don't involve natural gas."

Under what scenario can we actually run out of water?

7/5/2012 2:15:10 PM

Quote :

"Under what scenario can we actually run out of water?"

Are you serious? It's more likely than you think. Look into low levels of water in the ground table and Falls Lake. Then check out water shortages in Nevada. Then droughts in Africa. I hope that was a somewhat facetious question.

7/5/2012 2:22:50 PM

No scientific predictions point to less total rainfall in the future. The problem is the water table changing in a way not very nice for life, which means being more sporadic, polluted, and retaining less water.

7/5/2012 3:28:39 PM

and more people. and more plants and livestock to feed the people. and more golf courses.

7/5/2012 3:38:05 PM

It doesn't matter if total rainfall is the same, if climate shifts result in it not falling where we've grown accustomed (and built immense infrastructure to support) growing our crops.

[Edited on July 5, 2012 at 3:46 PM. Reason : .]

7/5/2012 3:45:56 PM

We can overuse available water sources, but it's a self-replenishing resource. We won't literally run out of water in the sense that we don't have any more water in the future.

7/5/2012 4:26:09 PM

Replace 'water' with 'economically feasible to obtain and distribute potable water'.

Also, did this thread's title run out of water?

7/5/2012 4:35:30 PM

Sure, if we could desalinate the atlantic ocean and then pipe it straight to all of africa, then 10s of 1000s wouldn't die from a lack of water. If we could pick-up icebergs in antartica and drop them off in nevada, we wouldn't have a problem.

7/5/2012 4:38:49 PM

Capture a comet.

7/5/2012 4:44:17 PM

Or we could stop living in places that don't have water and never did. People in Nevada need to stop crying about how hard it is to get enough water for Las Vegas (which last I checked was the fastest growing city in America, Charlotte is pretty close though), it's a desert, stop moving there.

7/5/2012 4:47:41 PM

Quote :

"Or we could stop living in places that don't have water and never did"

what about areas like central north carolina that have been experiencing more and more frequent droughts and depleting reservoirs? that will probably now use millions and millions of gallons to frack? which may pollute undergournd water sources as well? water scarcity just doesn't occur in deserts.

7/5/2012 5:00:09 PM

Private Well FTMFW

7/5/2012 10:46:08 PM

Unless your aquifer gets contaminated of course.

Quote :

"what about areas like central north carolina that have been experiencing more and more frequent droughts and depleting reservoirs? that will probably now use millions and millions of gallons to frack? which may pollute undergournd water sources as well? water scarcity just doesn't occur in deserts."

Don't live there either, duh! That's the solution to everything. Let anyone do whatever the fuck they want and if you don't like how it affects you, just move, because that's feasible for everyone. Whatever you do, don't be born some place shitty.

[Edited on July 6, 2012 at 8:55 AM. Reason : .]

7/6/2012 8:52:48 AM

I never said it's not possible or even likely to use water at a rate that it depletes reservoirs and aquifers enough to not maintain the current level of population. But if we stopped using so much water, it would all come back by itself. It's impossible to say that we're going to literally run out of something when it will come back automatically by doing nothing. It's not something where we can say "if we don't stop using water now, there won't be any for our children!" because no matter what we do now our children will determine for themselves whether they have enough water.


As for it being contaminated, that's just theoretical at this point, no? Obviously we shouldn't do anything that pollutes our water supplies.

7/6/2012 10:26:45 AM

According to these two sources: hydraulic fracturing in Pennsylvania uses roughly a million gallons of water a day, and tar sands extraction in Alberta uses roughly 123 million gallons a day (unless my calculations are incorrect or I missed something).

http://wri.eas.cornell.edu/gas_wells_water_use.html
http://www.capp.ca/getdoc.aspx?DocId=193756&DT=NTV

7/6/2012 4:24:05 PM

Quote :

"Private Well FTMFW"

where do you think the water comes from that makes it into aquifers? it ain't magic. as rainfall patterns shift, as more stormwater and streams and reservoirs are collected to provide potable water for humans and livestock, as more and more people dig wells and start drawing water out, there's going to be less and less waters in the aquifers. wells will dry up, or will be forced to go deeper and deepr (and much more expensive). and then there's the possibilty of pollution too. once an aquifer is polluted, there's not a lot you can do to clean it up..

7/6/2012 5:07:26 PM

You can get water from the ocean to make up for depleted aquifers.

Desalinization ain't exactly rocket science.

7/6/2012 9:23:09 PM

So you're saying that it's feasible to (very expensively) desalinate water and then pipe it to the piedmont and further inland? wonder why folks haven't thought of that before?

while searching for long water pipelines, i came across this on wiki:

Quote :

"Bars in the Veltins-Arena, a major football ground in Gelsenkirchen, Germany, are interconnected by a 5 km long beer pipeline. It is the favored method for distributing beer in such large stadiums, because the bars have to overcome big differences between demands during various stages of a match; this allows them to be supplied by a central tank."

[Edited on July 7, 2012 at 12:46 PM. Reason : ]

7/7/2012 12:34:55 PM

Raleigh charges for water by the CCF, or 100 cubic feet. The price varies depending on the specifics of your use and how much the government likes you, and that price ranges from about $2 to $5 per CCF. That comes out to $0.71 per m^3 to 1.77 per m^3.

Costs for large scale desalination today are claimed to be about $0.50 per m^3 by more than one source on Wikipedia.

That said, the fact that Kuwait can deliver water at a lower cost than what the Raleigh government can probably doesn't have much to do with the energetics of the process, and whatever inefficiencies (or legislation) that make water so expensive in Raleigh are unlikely to be eliminated by building a massive plant and pipeline taking water from the coast to Raleigh.

The pipeline itself is also unlikely to be an economic breaker. I don't have any numbers for this right now, but pipeline transport is quite cheap.

I came here to say that it's ridiculous for Raleigh to use desalinated water, but reading about it seems to have proved me wrong. The only problem is that we don't have a very good identifiable reason that it is currently so expensive for consumers to get water. Maybe someone in government just decided that it's good to conserve water so we should charge a lot for it. Environmentally, there's nothing really bad about desalination other than the energy use.

7/8/2012 3:26:52 PM

Quote :

"But if we stopped using so much water, it would all come back by itself. It's impossible to say that we're going to literally run out of something when it will come back automatically by doing nothing. It's not something where we can say "if we don't stop using water now, there won't be any for our children!" because no matter what we do now our children will determine for themselves whether they have enough water."

Seeing as extracted groundwater may be thousands or millions of years old, it seems a bit misleading to suggest that if we just stop using so much it will all come right back. You could say the same thing about oil with some of the timescales involved. Hell, some of the geological processes and climatic conditions that created and filled the aquifers in the first place may no longer exist.

There's also the issue of what happens to all that extracted groundwater that had been segregated for thousands of years.

7/8/2012 3:59:39 PM

Quote :

"Seeing as extracted groundwater may be thousands or millions of years old, it seems a bit misleading to suggest that if we just stop using so much it will all come right back."

Exactly, this is true to some aquifers. Others are replenished by rainfall and, in fact, sustainable. Frankly, the logical extreme of human existence would be that no water flows into the ocean from rivers anymore - it all is lost to evaporation ultimately.

Quote :

"There's also the issue of what happens to all that extracted groundwater that had been segregated for thousands of years."

New water is entering the ocean-cloud-river system all the time. This comes from
- what you mention
- combustion reactions
- melting glaciers

I've heard people express concern about the water we're introducing to the biosphere that comes as a direct product of combustion reactions, and I know the answer - nothing. It's clean water and you can calculate the sea level rise it will cause. It doesn't compare to the melting of Antarctica. It's molehills to mountains.

7/8/2012 7:31:51 PM

Quote :

"So you're saying that it's feasible to (very expensively) desalinate water and then pipe it to the piedmont and further inland?"

Nah, just pipe it to the >50% of Americans who live within 50 miles of the ocean, if it comes to that. Our aquifers and other freshwater sources are certainly capable of supporting the water needs of the other 50%.

Quote :

"wonder why folks haven't thought of that before?"

Plenty of folks have. Which is why water is not a huge concern to policymakers.

7/8/2012 11:14:28 PM

Quote :

"You can get water from the ocean to make up for depleted aquifers. Desalinization ain't exactly rocket science."

Actually it's an incredibly difficult and high-energy process to desalinate water in any decent quantity.

7/9/2012 9:51:55 AM

If by "difficult" you mean "large scale"

7/9/2012 10:03:04 AM

Well yeah, and large-scale things are generally difficult to construct, maintain, and coordinate.

[Edited on July 9, 2012 at 10:15 AM. Reason : .]

7/9/2012 10:15:31 AM

^^^difficult? Well, no. It's not difficult at all. I've worked on desal plants, and while they can be expensive due to their proximity to the ocean and the pumps required, their complexity pales in comparison to wastewater treatment plants. It is a pretty simple process to filter seawater from the ocean and heat it up.

You're right that it is somewhat energy-intensive. At current energy prices, it is simply cheaper to pump water out of the ground than extract it from seawater. However, that's not the case everywhere. In the middle east, oil-rich nations have been using desal plants for decades. California has a handful of desal plants in operation. So does Western Australia. Some of these newer plants use membranes to filter out salts, instead of pure heat to extract the water. Economies of scale dictate that desal will become cheaper as the technology matures.

Desal is but 1 of many solutions if groundwater aquifers are depleted. The reality is that there is an over-abundance of h2o on the surface of our planet. Supplying potable water to the masses is a logistics and technology issue similar to providing electricity to every home. Prices will fluctuate and we'll undoubtedly see bottlenecks during droughts, but we will never have a true shortage of water.

[Edited on July 9, 2012 at 10:27 AM. Reason : 2]

7/9/2012 10:26:53 AM

Quote :

"You're right that it is somewhat energy-intensive."

Quote :

"Prices will fluctuate and we'll undoubtedly see bottlenecks during droughts, but we will never have a true shortage of water."

...As long as we never have energy shortages.


[Edited on July 9, 2012 at 10:33 AM. Reason : .]

7/9/2012 10:33:15 AM

For "forward-thinking" individuals, progressives can be awfully nearsighted when it comes to future technology.

Couple the desal plant with a solar-power plant, since desal makes the most sense in sunny, arid climates. Problem solved, with the added bonus that you don't add any greenhouse gas emissions.

[Edited on July 9, 2012 at 10:58 AM. Reason : 2]

7/9/2012 10:57:12 AM

Sorry, you really try to make it sound like you've got it all figured out, but your ideas seem quite idealistic. Sure, they're possible. But practical or feasible (economically and politically)? Why aren't these industries booming?

[Edited on July 9, 2012 at 11:24 AM. Reason : ]

7/9/2012 11:22:50 AM

If only we had infinite energy everywhere, we could do whatever we wanted.

7/9/2012 11:28:49 AM

Quote :

"Well yeah, and large-scale things are generally difficult to construct, maintain, and coordinate."

...and completely commodified. No need to get in a huffy about the complexity if engineers have already solved all the problems and put a simple price tag on it that we can objectively discuss.

Quote :

"Sorry, you really try to make it sound like you've got it all figured out, but your ideas seem quite idealistic."

There are some propositions that are validly simplistic. For instance, consider the prospects for oil, energy, and fresh water into the future. Energy may grow in supply at rising prices, but at workable price inflation. Solar thermal in hot areas may be 2-3x as expensive as current prices, but if you accept that price level there's no limit to scalability. Our ability to make mirrors or steam turbines will not diminish over time. The same is not true for fresh water and oil.

Quote :

"Why aren't these industries booming?"

Booming like desalination is doing right now?

7/9/2012 11:36:05 AM

Quote :

"Booming like desalination is doing right now?"

Tell me more (seriously). I'm only aware of a handful in the US, and most of those aren't operating near capacity because of cost, other problems, or varying demand.

7/9/2012 12:21:56 PM

There are only a handful in the US, it's places like the Middle East that they keep building them. Lowering costs have also increased demand. The Wikipedia article talked about it growing 12% in a year. Other than that I would have to read more myself.

7/9/2012 1:23:03 PM

7/27/2012 1:50:58 PM

^
lol

This episode of Frontline is a little different than the discussions above, but it's relevant enough:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/alaska-gold/

7/27/2012 4:17:45 PM