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Peter Gleick: Water for energy: The bad bet for biofuels

Posted by: Maven on June 20, 2009 at 7:12 am

From Peter Gleick’s City Brights blog:

In the ongoing debate about rethinking America’s energy future, there has been far too little discussion about water. It takes a tremendous amount of water to produce our energy, no matter how you measure it.

According to the USGS assessment of water use in the United States (done every five years), about half of all freshwater and saline-water withdrawals for 2000 were used for thermoelectric power. Most of this water was derived from surface water and used for once-through cooling at power plants. I will write more about this in the future, and the Pacific Institute continues to work on a wide range of water/energy connections and analysis. Today’s Water Number is one little piece of this water/energy puzzle, but a remarkable one.

Water Number: 50 gallons of water per mile. This is the water required to produce the ethanol biofuels needed to drive a car ONE mile, using irrigated corn. This number comes from a recent Environmental Science and Technology (ES&T) journal article by R. Dominguez-Faus, Susan E. Powers, Joel G. Burken, and Pedro J. Alvarez.

50 gallons of water per mile …! Yes, says Peter, (although he notes that this can vary by half as much up to twice as much, depending on various factors). Find out more of Peter’s thoughts at the City Brights blog – click here.

June 20, 2009 · Filed Under Energy & Water

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One Response to “Peter Gleick: Water for energy: The bad bet for biofuels”

  1. Peter Gleick: Water for energy: The bad bet for biofuels | H2O Report on June 21st, 2009 8:53 am

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