My obsession with shit!

Regular readers, I mean "regular" readers, know all too well that I talk shit. I mean, about "shit."  From wishing you "Bristol #4" to an arty bathroom.  I tell ya, this is one stinking blog! ;)

And then there is that other shit that I am passionate about.  You know about that too--the lack of sanitation infrastructure for hundreds of millions in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.  "If only we can develop less expensive ways of processing shit."  Aha, now you remember.

Do you recall the challenge from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to reinvent the toilet?



In a recent entry at his blog, Bill Gates writes:

I watched the piles of feces go up the conveyer belt and drop into a large bin. They made their way through the machine, getting boiled and treated. A few minutes later I took a long taste of the end result: a glass of delicious drinking water.

Yes, things are happening, even if only slowly.   It is "part of the Gates Foundation’s effort to improve sanitation in poor countries."

Because a shocking number of people, at least 2 billion, use latrines that aren’t properly drained. Others simply defecate out in the open. The waste contaminates drinking water for millions of people, with horrific consequences: Diseases caused by poor sanitation kill some 700,000 children every year, and they prevent many more from fully developing mentally and physically.
If we can develop safe, affordable ways to get rid of human waste, we can prevent many of those deaths and help more children grow up healthy.

The system that we have in this country, or many other countries, is expensive.  It requires sewer lines, sewage treatment plants, qualified personnel, and--to get the system running--electricity, which itself is in serious shortage.

So, if only a re-invented toilet will extract the water from shit and make it potable, and use the carbon in the shit to generate electricity.  My, won't that be multiple birds with one stone?

The project is called the Omniprocessor, and it was designed and built by Janicki Bioenergy, an engineering firm based north of Seattle. ...
Through the ingenious use of a steam engine, it produces more than enough energy to burn the next batch of waste. In other words, it powers itself, with electricity to spare.

 If it were not for Gates Foundation providing the seed money, such efforts to reinvent the toilet might not have even begun?  Isn't that a depressing thought?  To me, this is an example of how we misdirect our talents and capabilities.  We spend enormous amounts on wars.  We develop technologies to send humans to the moon and bring them back. We spend gazillions on sports stadiums that consume more electricity than entire countries in sub-Saharan Africa do.  All these mean that we have the know-how and the resources.  But, we merely choose to spend on things than what are really, really important for humans.

The next step is the pilot project; later this year, Janicki will set up an Omniprocessor in Dakar, Senegal, where they’ll study everything from how you connect with the local community (the team is already working with leaders there) to how you pick the most convenient location. They will also test one of the coolest things I saw on my tour: a system of sensors and webcams that will let Janicki’s engineers control the processor remotely and communicate with the team in Dakar so they can diagnose any problems that come up.

When we talk about the "internet of things" we are only fascinated with examples like how our refrigerators can keep track of the inventory and how an automated drone can deliver milk that a robot will load up in the fridge.  Because, all we do is gaze at our own navels!  What a contrast the Dakar project is--the connectivity that the internet offers is put to such a constructive use.

I will leave it to Bill Gates to wrap this up:

It might be many years before the processor is being used widely. But I was really impressed with Janicki’s engineering. And I’m excited about the business model. The processor wouldn’t just keep human waste out of the drinking water; it would turn waste into a commodity with real value in the marketplace.

Here's the video of the project and Gates drinking the potable water that was once a part of shit.  Give this man a Nobel Peace Prize already!

Nuke coal: Poverty, electricity, and the environment

The few days that I spent in Tanzania were eye-opening in many ways, including how energy-starved people were.  There was no electricity grid network in the village small town--the house where we stayed had its own generator--and women were hunched over smoke as they cooked.  It was no surprise, therefore, that upper-respiratory infections were high in the community.

Poverty and low energy consumption are highly correlated.  But, even worse is how expensive the energy that the poor consume is--the out-of-pocket expenses and the price they pay in terms of health problems.

If only electricity can be generated and delivered to them, right?  Inexpensive at that.  I wonder what that least expensive route is!  Of course, we know that answer, don't we?

While the United States is just now finding ways to try to keep coal a viable part of its power system, the rest of the world is riding even greater technological advances to a brighter future for the dark fuel.

Yep, coal.

the world today faces two contradictory and interrelated challenges: While billions of poor people in the developing world need a lot more energy to pull them out of poverty and drive economic development, improve life expectancies, and bolster human health, the world also faces a looming and possibly existential threat from climate change—caused in large part by greenhouse gas emissions that are the bitter harvest of the world’s reliance on coal and other dirty fossil fuels over the past several centuries.

Yep, all I have to do is picture that Tanzanian community for a real example of the interrelated issues those sentences highlight.

As history shows, without energy there is no economic growth. From 1000 to 1820, global growth averaged about 0.2 percent a year. Since then, growth has been 10 times higher. Modern prosperity, in other words, is built upon the vast amounts of chemical energy first unleashed by coal.

Wait, is that some empty rhetoric based on the old stories of Industrial Revolution in England and the US, or do we have any contemporary ones too?

And there has been no better student of this lesson than China. It has  relied on smoldering coal to achieve a nearly four-decade economic metamorphosis—
lifting more than 600 million people out of poverty, even as it housed them in polluted cities—that has transformed a once-backward agrarian state into the world’s second-largest economy.

But, don't economists say there is no free lunch?  So, any price to pay for that economic miracle?

Meanwhile, this economic miracle has created a large, relatively wealthy Chinese middle class that has brought an ecological consciousness to the Middle Kingdom. Environmental nightmares, especially the choking air pollution fundamentally caused by the country’s overwhelming reliance on coal, have in recent years sparked huge protests by people questioning the legitimacy of the unelected leadership in Beijing.

Damn!  No free lunch, after all.

For the developing world, as India’s struggles show, simply getting power at all is a huge challenge. Globally, for the 1.3 billion people who lack electricity of any sort, shunning a gleaming, new, reliable coal-fired power plant on climate-change grounds is almost an impossible luxury. 

So, let's recap.  There are poor people on this planet.  Their poverty and various aspects of life are interrelated and to untangle them all will require energy.  Coal provides energy at low prices, but then it also generates a whole lot of smog and godawful health issues.  Anything else at this point?

Of course, global climate change, for which burning coal is one awful contributor.  So, can we do anything as we now add climate change to all that interrelated set of issues?  I suppose that will require turning away from coal.  I wonder what the International Energy Agency has to say about this.

The International Energy Agency and the Nuclear Energy Agency suggest in a report released Thursday that nuclear will have such a significant role to play in climate strategy that nuclear power generation capacity will have to double by 2050 in order for the world to meet the international 2°C (3.6°F) warming goal.
With fossil fuels growing as sources of electricity across the globe, the IEA sees nuclear power as a stable source of low-carbon power helping to take polluting coal-fired plants offline.

No kidding!  Nuclear power.  I am sure that will, oh wait, there was that first paragraph:

Since the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident in Japan chilled global attitudes toward nuclear power, the world has been slowly reconciling its discomfort with nuclear and the idea that it may have a role to play in reducing greenhouse gas emissions to tackle climate change.

Ok, let's recap. There are poor people on this planet.  Their poverty and various aspects of life are interrelated and to untangle them all will require energy.  Coal provides energy at low prices, but then it also generates a whole lot of smog and godawful health issues.  And coal is making things worse for the global climate.  Nuclear power is more expensive, but is a low-carbon alternative.  But then something like the catastrophe at Fukushima Daiichi can make people's lives godawful.

Globally, nuclear energy is already making a comeback with 72 nuclear reactors now under construction worldwide, mainly in Asia.“This marked the greatest number of reactors being built in 25 years,” IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven said in a statement. “Nuclear energy also remains the second-largest source of low-carbon electricity worldwide. And, indeed, if we are to meet our collective climate goals, nuclear energy is critical.”

You and I, dear reader, don't have to worry about all these, right?  Because, you and I are in comfortable homes, and comfortable temperatures maintained by air-conditioning or heating.  Ours, for all purposes, is merely an intellectual discussion at this point, as we sip wine or coffee: let's talk about coal and nuclear energy.  We are the modern versions of Marie Antoinette!  But, for the global poor, and those who are not poor but are energy-starved, these are real life hassles that they worry about.  

So, at the end of it all, what do you want to tell those poor folks in Tanzania, and Nigeria, and India, and Bangladesh, and ...?

I, for one, have no answer :(

Father, uber-happy, during our visit to Neyveli in 2002
(Lignite is a low-energy coal. Yep, lots of electricity generated there)

Let there be light ... on the Dark Continent

It was a clear sky last night.  No clouds.  A wonderful summer evening, with a cool breeze, that made me think that putting up with the dark, gloomy, overcast, rainy months was a very small price to pay.

I sat outside on the patio bench--a hand me down from the daughter.  Yes, I have gotten to a stage in life when I have started collecting stuff that my daughter throws out!

I looked up and could see a few stars. Imagine that--a few stars visible here in Oregon. And, despite all the urban lighting.

Over the years, I have pretty much forgotten what it feels like to to look up at a starry, starry night.  One of my most memorable ones in recent years was in Tanzania.  The small town where I was for a fortnight was not only out in the boondocks but with pretty much no electricity.  The night sky was, therefore, spectacular.

The stars above glittered way more beautifully than anything I had seen in the urban world that we humans have created.  Towards the end of the stay, we headed towards the new moon phase.  Thus, with very little lunar shine, and nothing at all from the built environment, the stars looked huge and bright.

As awesome as that was, it was also further evidence on the tremendous under-consumption of energy compared to the phenomenal over-consumption here in these United States.  As this note at the Scientific American points out, the low level of energy consumption gets reflected in the night time darkness imposed by a lack of artificial light:

The post adds:

It’s not because the continent of Africa is devoid of people. It’s because the gift of energy services hasn’t reached many of the billion-plus residents. It’s what is called “energy poverty”, that is, a lack of access to what many of consider to be the common element of modern living: electricity.

As a contrast, the American nightscape:

As African economies pick up, which we hope will happen soon, their energy consumption will also pick up, and Africans will light up their homes and streets in the night time. We would certainly want them to have that opportunity, which we take for granted here.

President Obama says the right things (but then his rhetoric is always lofty, and rarely ever matched by his actions!)

During his three country tour of Senegal, South Africa, and Tanzania, US President Obama has unveiled the Power Africa initiative, in which he has pledged $7 billion of investment over the next five years to increase energy production and access to energy across the sub-Saharan region.
The goal is to double access to electricity across six countries that Obama’s administration has selected for their promotion of good governance; Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Nigeria and Tanzania.

In case you are not convinced why addressing the energy poverty in Africa is important:

Energy poverty severely impacts health and education  prospects. Today, energy poverty leads to more premature deaths than either malaria or tuberculosis. The World Health Organization estimates that almost 4,000 people per day die prematurely each year from household air  pollution from biomass cooking. If nothing is done to address energy poverty, by 2030 this number is expected  to climb to 1.5 million per year—more deaths than will be  caused by HIV/AIDS and malaria combined (IEA, 2011).  Energy poverty also affects the provision of health services (vaccines are hard to refrigerate without electricity)  and hinders education prospects (it is hard to read in the dark without electricity and girls often get pulled out of
school to collect firewood).
Access to affordable electricity is also a major—and in many countries the very top—constraint to economic growth. Business survey data consistently point to the  cost and reliability of electricity as among the most important barriers to business expansion in Africa (Ramachandran et al., 2009). For instance, Ghana’s Valco aluminum smelter is today running at just 20 percent capacity due to a shortage of low-cost power. In Nigeria, 97 percent of large firms rely on (costly, inefficient and polluting) diesel generators to provide nearly two-thirds of their power,  while almost half of all firms operating in sub-Saharan Africa own or share a generator. The economic returns to  modern electricity could be huge for these economies.

Where will all that energy come from?

I sure hope it won't be from coal. China and India are making it very clear for the the people there, and to the rest of the world, that not only can they not meet the demands via coal alone but, and more importantly, it creates problems in many ways.

All the more the reason to explore alternatives. Sooner the better, so that Tanzanians, too, can blog about anything and everything, especially at night, like how this blogger does thanks to the limitless electricity at his disposal.

If India is energy-starved, how about Pakistan?

Today is one of those days when I happened to wonder whatever might have happened if India and Pakistan (and, therefore, Bangladesh) hadn't split and, at least, hadn't fought wars and engaged in expensive arms race.  Imagine!  The possibilities are simply limitless.

Instead, the Subcontinent, including Sri Lanka and Nepal, has been a tragicomedy of wasted opportunities and unfulfilled dreams.  Increasingly, the tragicomedy is looking more and more farcical.

Consider this: India and Pakistan blast nuclear devices whenever one feels the urge to demonstrate its testosterone levels when its government is getting battered internally.  Or, they shoot up missiles.  All these, as even a third grader knows well, is awfully expensive.

Meanwhile, as I noted a couple of days ago, there is a lot to worry about India's economy.  How is it across the border in Pakistan?  It seems to want to outdo India in making sure its people will not have enough electricity:

Demand for energy in Pakistan now outstrips its capacity to supply electricity to industry and households by several thousand megawatts. With preliminary census projections of a population of more than 192 million and the share of the urban population rising, the challenge to power Pakistan will only grow more difficult. Already, hours-long interruptions in power have dragged down productivity in key sectors like the textile industry and sparked confrontations between rural and urban political leaders and the transportation, agricultural, and manufacturing sectors for priority access to what energy is produced. 

 Of course, this is not entirely new; I noted here more than a year ago about Pakistan's floating power plant, which the government had leased from Turkey.

But, now the situation is getting even worse because the government is broke and can't pay up:

nine independent power producers -- which collectively produce 8 to 9 percent of Pakistan's energy supply -- now warn that they can no longer continue operations if government payment is not immediately forthcoming. With fresh borrowing plans, the government is likely to negotiate another settlement with these companies. 

How deep is the government in debts, you ask?  

approximately half of this year's federal budget expenditures were devoted to debt repayment, far eclipsing military spending, government salaries, or development investments. 

The Indian economy is sputtering, and the government seems to be hell bent on making sure there are enough and more to choke the windpipes.  As this column notes, it seems like it is three steps backward for each forward step!   Despite the government's best intentions, it is amazing that the economy grows at all, I suppose.

How did the Subcontinent get so messed up?  How much worse could it have been if there had been no partition?

Did you know smartphones have built-in display projectors? I did not know that!

Far away from metropolitan Chennai, which is very slowly becoming cosmopolitan in nature, here in the small southern towns near the southern tip of the peninsula, electricity is in severe shortage with about eight hours of power outage every day.  That sudden darkness and the stopping of ceiling fans is yet another reminder of the phenomenally luxurious everyday life that I am lucky enough to lead back in the good ol' US of A.

The night sky is full of stars as soon as the lights go off.  Venus and Jupiter are so bright that they could even cast shadows of us mortals here on earth. 

This brilliantly lit night sky is, however, nothing compared to the diamonds that glittered after nightfall in Pommern, Tanzania, thanks to that village without electricity being a lot more isolated from the rest of the electrified world.

Kids being kids, they seem to have even more fun than they usually do, when the power goes off.  I bet that the first thing that comes up in their minds is that they have a wonderful excuse not to do their homework!

Yesterday, there was a great deal of noise next door, with kids screaming in delight.  I stepped towards them; it turned out that one kid was projecting a movie from a cell phone on to the wall, with the sound blaring from the cell phone.

Back in my childhood, excitement was when we found a couple of negatives and projected that image on to a wall using a flashlight.  That is so, so, so lame compared to these hi-tech kids' excitement.

When I asked them how they were doing it, an older person in the group replied: "It is my phone and I had no idea that it has such a feature.  These kids, they figure out everything.  It cost me 7,500 rupees for the phone, and now they are using it as a cinema projector"

After the show was over--because the power supply was back on--I walked up to the kid and asked him what phone it was.  "G5" he said.  I didn't recognize that brand name.  I asked him whether I could take a look at it.  It was a G'Five "wisepad" model, and it comes with a bright built-in projector light.  How awesome!

In the US, I had never a smartphone with a projector feature.  Perhaps this is one of those features customized for markets like India--similar to how Nokia had introduced a few years ago a cellphone with a flashlight. 

I imagined my students doing presentations in the classroom with their smartphones and projectors.  No need then to even boot up the big time display projector in the classroom.  Or public health officials in developing countries doing their campaigns so easily with these smartphones and built-in projectors.  Just awesome.

I ought to thank the power shortage in India; else, I might never have known about smartphones with projectors.  Things we learn, and the strange ways we learn.  But, hey, something new everyday!

Would you be poor without electricity, or not poor in a polluted world?

Yesterday, one of the graduating students I had invited over dinner asked me what my favorite was of all the places I have visited.  I said I liked them all.  Perhaps Venice in Italy stands out in my mind because I can still recall that surreal experience of stepping outside the train station and being presented with the visual spectacle of water-taxis!

But then, the most depressing place I have visited was Tanzania.  Despite all the intellectual readings I had done, it shocked me that there places without electricity.  A simple act that we take for granted--to reach out for that light switch as the Sun goes down--had no meaning there.

Of course, there are plenty of places on the planet where electricity is still a novelty.  And in tremendous short supply.  India is one of those.  Are we surprised then that this country of more than 1.2 billion people with huge economic aspirations wants to produce a lot more electricity than it currently does?  And, given that coal is the most inexpensive way to get those electrons flowing, it ought not to surprise us that India, like China, is rapidly expanding on coal-fired power plants.

From the comforts of climate-controlled rooms here in the West, we are ready to point fingers at India and China for accelerating carbon emissions, which have immense implications for all the nearly seven billion that we are now, and the other flora and fauna as well.  It is simply bizarre that the advanced countries don't seem to appreciate the tremendous shortage in electricity, which is vital for modern economic activities.

The World Bank has essentially shorted its fuse in this context (ht).

The World Bank is planning to restrict the money it gives to coal-fired power stations, bowing to pressure from green campaigners to radically revise its funding rules.

WTF, right?

As Spiked notes, such a decision is the equivalent of keeping the poor in the dark, and contradictory to the Bank's mission to eradicate poverty!

where does this new policy leave China and India? Based on International Monetary Fund GDP figures, adjusted to allow for the lower costs of many items in poorer countries, China is the second-largest economy in the world and India is the fourth-largest. Yet both countries have massive, and overwhelmingly poor, populations. China is only in 90th place in terms of GDP per head, and India is 137th. So are these amongst the ‘poorest’ countries that will still get World Bank aid or not? Even these rising economic powerhouses are in desperate need of development.
But far from fretting about this shocking poverty, Western greens don’t seem very keen on the developed world having reliable electricity at all.

All those greenies who talk a boatload of crap about the simpler and "fuller" lives that the poor lead, well, I think they ought to relocate to places like the Tanzanian village I visited and live there for the rest of their lives.  Yes, I am bloody pissed!

India's minister for the environment, Jairam Ramesh, whose decisions I have blogged about a few times in the past, continues to defy the West and the greenies on this, even while recognizing the importance of protecting the environment.  I say, good for him, and the country too.  The latest:

Union Minister of State for Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh on Saturday asserted that India would not succumb to international pressure on any legally binding commitments to reduce carbon emission.
Speaking at the National Conference and Annual Session of the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) here, Mr. Ramesh said the government would act only in the national interest on the issue.
“I can assure you we are not taking on any legally binding commitments under international duress."

Not only that:

Yielding to intense pressure from the coal ministry and end user ministries of power and steel, the environment ministry has agreed to consider approval of all proposed mining projects that obtained stage I forest clearance before 2010, and also offered to free up more forest land from no go areas for mining.

I am sure those whose blood runs green will be outraged.  But then they are aghast that even the screwed up World Bank plan doesn't go far enough because it spends too much on these conventional energy sources.  Hey, the Bank spends that because of the severe shortfall"

The World Bank's record on funding fossil fuels has long been a target of green campaigners. Last year, for instance, the World Bank was attacked for its controversial decision to grant nearly $4bn (£2.5bn) to the South African company Eskom to build what would be one of the world's largest coal-fired power stations.
The bank spent £3.4bn – one-quarter of all its spending on energy projects – on coal-fired power in developing countries in the year to June 2010. That was 40 times more than the sum spent five years previously.

The Bank knows all too well the reality on the ground:

In 2009, a World Bank blog post by Justin Lin, the organisation’s chief economist, explained why support for coal was essential. ‘The answer is that there is an urgent need for energy in the poor countries that we serve and indeed in my home country, China… Because coal is often cheap and abundant, and the need for electricity is so great, coal plants are going to be built with or without our support. Without our support, it is the cheaper, dirtier type of coal plants that will proliferate.’

But, when it comes to poor people, it is awful that the directly or indirectly their ideological opposition translates to the same Republican Party bottom-line of "screw the poor!"  And they oppose it even if the electricity generation will not be from fossil fuels:

when the Ethiopian government announced plans for a major new hydro-electric scheme - in a country where 70 per cent of people have no access to electricity - greens have demanded that international organisations like the World Bank and the European Investment Bank should refuse to support it (see They don’t give a dam about development, by Nathalie Rothschild).

I can forever keep punctuating my comments here with WTF!

Visualize in your mind the following "famous NASA image that is often called a "satellite photo of earth at night" when you listen to the greenies harshly critique the energy consumption in India and China as the most urgent climate change problem, and point out to them that the problem originates in the rich countries.

Ideally, the advanced countries, and the US in particular, would adopt energy policies that can then speed up the transition to feasible and inexpensive alternatives to coal. Because, climate change is for real, and carbon is one heck of an accelerator of this process. But then here in the US we area lot more concerned about Jersey Shore and Charlie Sheen and Obama's birth certificate and ....  Yes, WTF! yet again :(

Solving the energy crisis is easy

Ha ha
ht

Billion-plus in the dark, while we energy hogs whine

Get this:

An estimated 79 percent of the people in the Third World -- the 50 poorest nations -- have no access to electricity, despite decades of international development work. The total number of individuals without electric power is put at about 1.5 billion, or a quarter of the world's population, concentrated mostly in Africa and southern Asia.
The 1.5 billion figure represents an improvement over previous years, but not because of any concerted effort to expand power connections. Rather, it is a consequence of rapid urbanization with populations moving to electricity and not the other way around, said Fatih Birol, IEA's chief economist.
"This is very bad and is something that the energy community and others should be ashamed of," Birol said. The amount of electricity consumed in one day in all sub-Saharan Africa, minus South Africa, is about equal to that consumed in New York City, an indicator of the huge gap in electricity usage in the world.

In case you missed that last sentence, let me repeat that quote:

The amount of electricity consumed in one day in all sub-Saharan Africa, minus South Africa, is about equal to that consumed in New York City

We don't talk enough about this HUGE imbalance. I suppose it is because we will feel guilty as a result; denial helps, eh!

But, these are the kind of issues that will bubble up at Copenhagen and other conferences.  My metaphorical hat is off to people who bring such issues to our attention:

about 2.5 billion people globally subsist on wood or charcoal. With so much attention on the energy consumption habits of larger economies in the climate talks, the report's authors say they worry that the plight of those without any modern power is being willfully ignored. A quarter of the world is disconnected from debates over clean energy "because their reality is much more basic than that," said UNDP's director of development planning, Olav Kjørven.

This map of the world shows the artificial light used in the night--a measure of electricity usage.

In energy, too, it’s the water

Over spring break, I did what university faculty members are notorious for. I attended an academic conference in Las Vegas — and got more depressed about the state of the world!

At the opening plenary session, the speakers talked about the increasing problems with water in the American Southwest, which might also be related to systematic changes in worldwide precipitation patterns. One piece of local data: Water levels in Lake Mead, the reservoir behind Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, are down to 48 percent of capacity.

So the following day I headed out to Hoover Dam — consistent with the teacher in me who favors field trips as key learning exercises. My previous visit there was more than 10 years ago, when my parents visited us from India. My father had studied about Hoover Dam in his civil engineering program, and I recalled his eager beaver excitement when we were there.

This time around, the low water level was obvious. The bathtub rings above the water’s surface looked like nasty scars. To see the conditions in person was way more real and worrisome than it was when I listened to the speakers while comfortably perched in the conference hall.

Tourists rushed past me as I was parked overlooking the dam, and I wondered how the changing water and drought conditions around the world might affect electricity generation. We tend to forget that even coal-fired power stations need a lot of water; globally, about 45 percent of electricity comes from coal.

I grew up in an industrial company town — Neyveli — in southern India, where the principal activity is to generate about 2,500 megawatts of electricity by firing up the lignite mined there. Lignite, a variety of coal, has a low energy content compared to more energy packed varieties like bituminous or anthracite.

Generating power from lignite requires water every step along the way — which, in Neyveli, came from underground. The area was fortunate to have extensive aquifers, naturally recharged by the approximately 40 inches of monsoon rains every year. However, many engineers, including my father, were and are worried that continued large-scale use of groundwater might catalyze sea water intrusion — after all, the sea is barely 20 miles away.

Thus, strange as it was to think about how water shortages might affect coal-fired power generation while standing atop Hoover Dam, it was more worrying to think about the following confluence of factors:

Coal is being used extensively worldwide as a source of energy. In India and China, 70 percent to 80 percent of electricity is coal-based.

Burning coal is a major source of carbon dioxide, an agent for global warming and climate change.

Huge quantities of water, often groundwater, are needed to sustain coal-based power generation.

Water is absolutely necessary for life on this planet, and there are enough data trends to justify worry about the future availability of water — especially groundwater.

Therefore, instead of urging countries, particularly India and China, to stop using coal, perhaps we ought to focus on how to a large extent it is all about water. Many parts of India, China and other countries have low levels per capita of available water. For instance, while the United States has about 1,600 cubic meters of water per person, the average in China is about 400 cubic meters, and even less in India. This immensely valuable resource can be put to better uses than in coal-fired power plants.

This is but another incentive for us to explore alternative energy sources that do not impose additional demands on water, which will then also mean lesser reliance on coal. Water-constrained countries such as China, India and Israel ought to encourage innovation on this urgent issue.

At the same time, we here in the United States have a wonderful opportunity to use our research and development infrastructure to develop feasible and economical approaches that will ease the pressure on water resources, and thereby help the world.

After all, to borrow a water metaphor, we sink or sail together!

For The Register-Guard
Posted to Web: Sunday, Apr 5, 2009 04:29PM
Appeared in print: Monday, Apr 6, 2009, page A7