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Guest Post: Central Asia's Most Precious Resource - Water, Not Oil
Submitted by John Daly of oilprice.com
Central Asia's Most Precious Resource - Water, Not Oil
“In every drop of water there is a grain of gold.” - Aral proverb
Since the 1991 collapse of the USSR, foreign investors have looked at the former Soviet space as a land rich in underdeveloped resources waiting for Western technology and finance to bring to the world market. Gold from Kyrgyzstan, uranium and oil from Kazakhstan, oil and natural gas from Azerbaijan – all have begun to make their way to the global market, generating rich profits for both their owners and developers.
In the five former Soviet countries stretching eastwards from the Caspian to the western Chinese border – Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan there is a resource both more limited and valuable than even the region’s fabled hydrocarbon resources, water. The arid region has a surfeit of it, what there is is unevenly distributed, and more than 70 years of Soviet industrialization have left an ecological wasteland facing increased demands on its limited hydrological resources.
Water inextricably links agrarian and energy production and industrialization. While during the last 18 years most foreign investors have focused on extractive industries (energy and minerals), water is an issue of rising concern throughout the “Stans,” and concerns ranging from energy companies with expertise to renovate decrepit Soviet-era hydroelectric facilities to business concerns specializing in advanced water purification and conservation techniques or high-yield, drought and pest resistant crops have business opportunities undreamed of elsewhere.
To be sure the Central Asian market is rife with its own peculiarities, but faced with a static resource and rising populations, Western investors with the requisite technology and capital are virtually guaranteed a red carpet welcome, as the region struggles to overcome its onerous Soviet industrial legacy. For those “thinking outside the box,” it represents an opportunity like few others. As things stand, water and its equitable distribution are the number one issue of contention between the Stans, as Allah, who distributed the bulk of the region’s hydrocarbons around the Caspian in the west, did the exact opposite with the region’s water, which is largely locked up in the east, in glaciers in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.
Glacier melt is carried by Central Asia's 1,500-mile Amu Darya and 1,380-mile Syr Darya, which originate in the in the Pamir and Tien Shan mountain ranges at the confluence of the border between Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and China before meandering westwards through Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan before emptying into the Aral Sea. The Amu Darya's headwaters in the form of the Panj River arise in Tajikistan, while the Syr Darya originates in Kyrgyzstan. Besides river water, Tajikistan also contains many glaciers, of which the 270-square-mile Fedenko glacier is the largest in the world outside the Polar Regions.
The desiccated Aral Sea, which has now lost more than 75 percent of is volume, has become a global poster child for water mismanagement. Soviet efforts to divert Central Asian water toward agriculture began in 1918 to gain a market share in the global cotton trade and massive network of irrigation projects began in the 1940s, intensified in the early 1960s, when Moscow’s engineers began diverting ever increasing amounts of the Amu Darya’s and Syr Darya’s water to feed Central Asia’s massive cotton plantations beyond the rivers’ abilities to replenish the Aral, a policy dating back to Stalin’s time when the Genius of All Mankind decided that Central Asia was to become the USSR’s source of “white gold.”
The Amu Darya and Syr Darya water flows, whose combined flow before massive Soviet agricultural projects were implemented equaled the Nile, are unique in that, until 1991, they were part of a single country, the Soviet Union, with water management policy directed by Moscow. The amount of water taken from the Amu Darya and Syr Darya doubled between 1960 and 2000, allowing cotton production to nearly double in the same period, paralleling the Aral’s decline. By the 1980s nearly 90 percent of water use in Central Asia was directed toward agriculture, primarily cotton production, with the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya supplied nearly 75 percent of the water flow.
Simply put, the region’s scarce water resources were misused to satisfy the autarchic needs of the entire USSR, whose breakup in 1991 completely disrupted inter-republic trade patterns, leaving the Stans with the remnants of a centrally planned economy on which to attempt to build national post-Soviet economies amidst raging inflation. In 1992 the five countries established the Interstate Coordinating Water Commission (ICWC) to formulate a regional solution to the problem, but despite numerous meetings, 18 years of complex negotiations have yet definitively to resolve the complex hydrological issues surrounding the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers, leaving each country to pursue its own interests or bilateral relations.
The Soviet centrally planned economy left Central Asian nations with a number of mega-projects, most notably Tajikistan's massive Nurek hydroelectric facility on the Vakhsh River. Nurek, which still supplies 70 percent of Tajikistan's power, was constructed in the 1970s and 1980s. Alarmingly, many Soviet-era facilities throughout the post-Soviet space have had minimal maintenance. The 17 August Sayano-Shushenskaya power station turbine flooding accident at Russia’s largest hydroelectric power plant, which killed 12 and left 64 missing and presumed dead dramatically proved that the risk of system failure is rising, as antiquated infrastructure was blamed for the accident. To give a Central Asian example, aside from potential dam failure, Kyrgyzstan’s Soviet-era equipment and graft mean that an estimated 45 percent of the country's electricity is either illegally diverted or leaks from the transmission system.
Tajikistan’s and Kyrgyzstan’s position athwart the headwaters of the two largest rivers in Central Asia, exacerbated its relationship with downstream Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan, who depend on regular spring and summer water discharges for their agriculture. Over the last few years, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan have increasingly hoarded water in their alpine reservoirs to generate electricity in the winter, flooding their downstream neighbors.
In the immediate post-Soviet era both Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan scrambled to meet their energy needs by arranging barter deals with their western neighbors, trading summer water releases and hydropower for coal and gas for fall and winter use. But as downstream nations began to charge for oil and natural gas imports, the two countries began to alter their hydroelectric facilities’ water flows, increasingly hoarding it in the growing months for winter release to generate electricity rather than pay ever rising energy import bills, raising political tensions with their downstream neighbors.
Tajikistan has few immediate options but to attempt to develop its hydropower assets. Only 7 percent of Tajikistan's land is arable, and the U.S. government estimated that the country's 2007 oil production was a paltry 280 barrels per day, and in 2006 Tajikistan produced only one billion cubic feet (bcf) of natural gas, forcing it to import 44 bcf to meet demand. The energy situation is equally dire in neighboring Kyrgyzstan, whose 15 hydroelectric stations generate 92.5 percent of domestically consumed electricity.
Farther west, downstream Uzbekistan overall consumes more than 50 percent of the two rivers' flow for its cotton production, which currently produces more than 60% of the country’s foreign currency earnings, inhibiting the country’s ability to diversify its economy.
In Turkmenistan, the Amu Darya's waters are used exclusively for agriculture as it flows onward through Uzbekistan to the Aral Sea, but rising natural gas revenues are ameliorating somewhat the country’s dependence on its agrarian sector.
The equitable division of these waters remains at the heart of the regional contentions, with the downstream agrarian states both seeking regular water discharges for irrigation even as in the brave new post-Soviet capitalist world they maintain that water is not a resource for which they should be charged even as they charge Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan for oil and natural gas deliveries, whose prices are slowly drifting to world levels.
In turn, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan maintain that if fiscal or energy assistance is not received to tide them over through the bitter winter months, they will continue to release the water during the autumn and winter to generate electricity as they have no other power options, whatever the agrarian concerns of their downstream neighbors.
These policies have broader regional political consequences, to which even Washington is not immune. Many Russian and European analysts believe the Kyrgyz government's January decision month to expel the United States from its Manas airbase was heavily influenced by Moscow's decision to grant Kyrgyzstan more than $2 billion in loans, nearly 75 percent of which was earmarked for completing the Karambara-1 hydroelectric cascade, for which Kyrgyzstan for years unsuccessfully sought funding on the international market. As things currently stand, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan want to at the very least maintain their aging Soviet hydroelectric facilities, while their downstream neighbors want to improve their agriculture and if possible, lessen their water dependency.
Despite fervent necon denunciations of global warming “fuzzy science,” it seems unlikely that Allah will see fit to increase the snowmass of the Tien Shan and Pamir glaciers. Accordingly, in the cornucopia of Central Asian water needs, there is something for everyone, from energy companies skilled in renovating hydroelectric cascades (Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan) through water purification (all), conservation and plant genetic engineering (Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan) to saltwater distillation (Turkmenistan) and erosion control (Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan.)
Given the rising population’s increasing demands on a finite resource, any and all propositions will receive a most careful hearing along the Silk Road.
Originally published at: http://oilprice.com/article-central-asias-most-precious-resource-water-not-oil.html
This article was written by Dr. John C.K. Daly for Oilprice.com who focus on Fossil Fuels, Alternative Energy, Metals, Oil Prices and Geopolitics. To find out more visit their website at: http://www.oilprice.com
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a couple of years ago a prof suggested that by 2025 water will be the issue facing the world
Global warming scam has failed , now they attempt a new gig.
You are right about global warming being a scam.Water being used stupidly and being polluted is another matter.An example of stupid use: golf courses in Arizona.Draining the aquifer for grass is patently insane.But the real fun happens when the trichloroethane and other banned solvents, as well as insecticides and their breakdown products start showing up in wells.Apparently drugs which are poorly metabolized by the body are showing up in water supplies as well.
Since the people who control congress might have to spend money because of this, we hear little of it while AGW is hyped to the moon.Estrogen mimicking plastics?Another real concern.And as the background chemicals rise what happens with disease rates?Who knows.Actual sane stewardship of the worlds fresh water would be great....if it did not harm profits.
Don't get me wrong...I am no tree hugging lunatic.But degrading the fresh water supply is an Epic survival Fail.I live in an area where the watershed is pretty clean.But some of my neighbors that use wells near an old industrial site are not too lucky.They cannot use their wells anymore from solvent incursion.And cleaning that mess up will be ultra expensive....big surprise nothing is being done as the plume spreads in the aquifer.But who wants to pay for the turbo-pumps and reverse osmotic filtering to clean it up?Apparently no one.
+1 Trillion
Good news is, there is opportunity to benefit from all those vitamin supplements that that somebody else's body did not absorb.
If pot does not become legal soon, "Medicine" recycling will be mandatory.
California and Arizona are growing cotton and rice, the most water thirsty crops in the world and the federal government subsidizes this. It takes 25% more water to grow an acre of cotton than an acre of wheat. To grow an acre of rice uses twice the water needed to grow an acre of wheat. Who thought it would be a good idea to grow rice and pima cotton on the deserts of Arizona? There's no water crisis, just a stupidity crisis.
http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/business/stories/2009/05/02/thirsty...
I still can't figure out, for the life of me, why anyone would want to gamble that climate change isn't real...
A lot of these people, not claiming you are one of them, are obsessed with the potential of terrorist attacks under the misguided notion of Cheney's ridiculous one percent doctrine.
To me, I'm not a scientist, I'd rather not gamble on any worst case scenarios happening seeing as how we only have the one planet and all. But then again, I am a pussy.
Register an account... Marla will make a man out of you.
You may or may not be a pussy, but you are one of the many usefull idiots that algores of the world require to perpetuate the BIG LIE.
Simple game, really. Invent some scare ( global cooling; global warming; Y2K; H1N1; forced sex with Rosie O'Donnell, whatever ), control the media, squash reasonable peer review, especially data access ( and of course tweak data or outright lie ), and there ya go.
There seems to be no limit of useful idiots who will say, "Well, sure, the theory may well have been thoroughly debunked, but why take a chance, even if the BIG LIE has only 1% probability of being accurate, golly gosh, have you seen any of those incredible Hollywood disaster movies? Why chance it?"
But, you're right, you are a pussy, so stick your ass up in the air so algore can rape you. When TPTB have 10 inches of dick up your ass, what's another inch or two?
Your comment hardly merits a response, but all one needs to do is track the level of the Ogallala aquifer to know that America is in serious shit. Water to grow food is falling rapidly. No water, no food. Instead of calling other people names, look it up, learn what you're talking about and then comment. Of course, people who call other people idiots are unlikely to do even basic research. You'll find out. When you do, it's your problem. You've been warned.
What does any level of water, anywhere, have to do with the failed theory of man-made, even man-influenced, global warming?
Nobody I know of believes climate change "isn't real". A great many people, however - myself included - are skeptical as to whether man's influence on it is terribly significant, and whether we are even close to understanding the factors involved well enough to make predictions about it. Investing reasonable amounts of money in preparing to cope with the effects of future climate change, be it warming or cooling, is eminently sensible. Failure to do so would indeed be a foolish gamble that climate change "isn't real". Investing colossal sums that we can't afford in trying to prevent warming that may or may not be happening and is almost certainly not preventable even if it is, on the other hand, strikes me as grossly irresponsible and apt to cause human suffering on a colossal scale.
Climate is changing, we have experienced 10 years of global cooling,
data hidden by climategate.
Miami just experienced its first hypothermia death....
iced melts, water freezes, but all we see is ice melting.....
The Central Valley of California is the largest agricultural source for America. 850,000 acres remained unplanted in 2009 because there was no water. The drought there has devastated agricultural production and jobs. Global warming may or may not be phoney. Ground water pollution and drought are very serious. However the good news is the world uses water rather inefficiently. You can recycle household water from showers, sinks and washing machines and reduce your water use by up to 50%. This resultant grey water is used for landscaping, which consumes most household water use in the west. Such an installation only costs $5,000. Aerated shower heads and faucets can reduce household water use by 50% and reduce the energy to heat that hot water by 50%. Water is a serious issue around the world but the solutions are often very cheap.
wtf then al gore does not testify... shld have emprison all these global warming fags..
Very nice article on a part of the world not well understood by most of us. The "stans" are going to provide a lot of theater over the coming years. Lots of ethnic rivalries, big nosy neighbors, unstable places like Iran & Afghanistan...
Your comment also reminds me of another -stan mentioned here at ZH. Beltawayistan. While this report and your comment to it make for great reading I just had to add this observation ....
Beltwayastan is part of a different theater
http://www.radioactivefuture.com/images/marco/kabuki-lrg.gif
Thanks for the spelling correction. I happen to think ultimately it is all part of the same theater.
pawns, on the global chessboard, ripe for sophisticated exploitation.
don't have time to read the long article now, too late....but you can live without oil. You will die without water. I have been personally buying water for myself since 1995, in and out as the market for it ebbed and flowed. I now hold it in all my accounts for the melt up.
A very interesting article about a little know part of the world. Thanks for the info and analysis.
Once small quibble. Did you have to conflate being skeptical about global warming with political views? Many scientists (myself included) think the trying to simplify a system more complex than can be imagined (much less modeled) to one controlled by the concentration of a trace gas (CO2) is religion, not science.
Climate change, a constant process since our planet coalesced from galactic junk, will continue. The 'Stans will be drier, wetter, warmer and colder in the future than they are now. This isn't a political position, it is a scientific fact and it is independent of man's existence, much less the use of fossil fuels.
All human societies must nuture their resources and avoid stupid, politically driven mistakes (such as the environmental disaster that is the only real monument to the failed, communist ideology of the USSR).
None of us can afford to live so close to the edge that a bad year (or even a succession of bad years) cannot be tolerated. A common human weakness is to assume that "what is, is." Climate changes, not because of humanity but because it a chaotic system with an enormous number of inputs, feedbacks, and stable (and unstable) states.
The climate may (and will) be more, or less, hospitible in the future. Prepare and have a survival margin or don't prepare and die.
Well said. Not particularly well spelled, but well said.
I'm long water. I just bought a case this morning.
Speaking of Asia, Im interesting in comments on China's press release today stating that the US dollar has hit bottom?
Check out:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/crash-and-recovery/dol...
Lunatic Fringe
Yes, our most precious newly rare commodity.....
THE SHIT THAT FALLS FROM THE SKY
Pay up America
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention - who needs renewable energy sources when we have oil that we suck out of the ground and burn until it climbs into the sky.
Fucktards.
Enough with the commodities doom and gloom already. There is more than enough water on this planet, be it in liquid or solid form. Also there are unknown quantities of untapped water reservoirs some 3-5 miles below Earths surface. The technology to extract the water is there (i point you to look at the technology used by some of the major bottled water producers). No water will NEVER be THE problem. Hell, given some minor investments you can drill for water on every single piece of land on this planet, and chances are pretty high that you will hit a big fucking reservoir of it. Also we have Antarctica and other major regions which either "float" on big reservoirs of the stuff (10-xx times larger than the largest known oil field). The problem is distribution, marketing techniques, rationalization of consumption, and lack of any investments in the drilling and extraction technologies, and also the reluctance of governments worldwide to allow extraction of water. Just look at the situation in Peru with Bechtel in the 1990s and what happens when the water is privatized.
Supplying water in the Stans (and most places) require the extractive industries (energy and minerals). Try building a hydroelectric dam without vast amounts of oil, diesel, concrete, steel, copper, etc. etc.
Want to drill for water? Get that fossil-fuel powered multi-ton drill rig with hundreds of feet of steel drill rods.
Want to deliver and distribute water, then mine and industrially-process a whole lot more minerals to build delivery and distribution infrastructure.
Want to purify water, then mine and industrially-process a whole lot more minerals for water purification.
Want to provide the faucets and plumbing for domestic water, then mine and industrially-process a whole lot more minerals for domestic use.
Want to supply water for farm irrigation? Want the water to run along bare-earth ditches where the water sinks into the ground or evaporates into the air? or want the water to run in plastic or metal tubes to the fields?
Want to treat waste water, then mine and industrially-process a whole lot more minerals for water purification.
In today's world, gathering and distributing water depends more and more on energy and minerals. The solar and wind energy industry also require fossil fuel energy and a vast array of mined and industrially-processed minerals.
So, water is precious, but so is oil and minerals because most populations require oil and minerals to develop, distribute, and safely use water supplies.
One can distill water with the sun. The earth can treat the wastewater. Wetlands are earth's kidneys. The earth was built to handle natural processes, including the shitting and pissing of all it's inhabitants. Just perhaps not 6 bln Human Doings.
Permaculture looks promising. The idea is a whole-istic view of our existence.
Yes, if world population were much smaller, we could use less technology. Unfortunately, the pressing needs of billions of people is the reality of 2010. A whole-istic view of our existence requires consideration for lives of billions of humans in existence.
Speaking of Asia, interested to hear what ZH makes of China's statement that US Dollar has it bottom?
Article: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/crash-and-recovery/dol...
Curious,
Lunatic Fringe
"Surfeit"? Don't you mean a shortage of water?
"surfeit" means excess, not shortage.
Anybody else actually READ this article, or are y'all more interested in weighing in with your irrelevant and ignorant observations re climate change or the other wingnut denials du jour?
No one is denying climate change. However it seems that the AGW crowd actually consists of the largest block of natural global warming deniers.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=aqe1Kh.dEMd8&pos=5
the toy story part 4:
we can't use the lead, let's use cadmium; we can't use cadmium ... polonium anyone?
(what goes in China stays in China ? , at least WM was smart enough to run some tests this time around. )
Despite fervent necon denunciations of global warming “fuzzy science,” it seems unlikely that Allah will see fit to increase the snowmass of the Tien Shan and Pamir glaciers.
In fact, the Himalayas are set to receive more precip, not less, due to their height and airflow patterns. Tadjik's glaciers (that's Fedchenko, not Fedenko) at the west end of the Himalayan plateau.
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=tajikistan&t=p&hl=en&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=Taj...
As to climate change & evolution deniers: only in America are highly intelligent and educated people so goddam stupid.
The only 'deniers' would be the natural global warming deniers in the AGW crowd.
great piece; excellent work.
in october I was 4 weeks on vacation in Laos, en there I saw the effects of a chinese dam being build to use water from the mekong river that starts in china.
China indeed needs that water, but if the dam will be completed, estimates are that Laos, Cambodja and even Vietnam (mekong delta) will be devestated is the mekong water levels drom much more.
Also a nice note: because of the pumping of water from the mekong in china, the water level is already down 2 meters.
Anotherone in India: there China is in dispute for himalaya teretory, and nobody wonders why. This is actually because they want regions where the water from the himalaya goes down to later form the ganges. These water levels are also down a few meters!
The key here is not the resource scarcity, it is a lack of infrastructure development. We learn in the article that the western republics are plagued in the winter by extra water discharges from the hydroelectric stations in the east. The solution to this is for dams, reservoirs and canals to be built in the western countries to store up this extra largesse when the east is giving it away for free. The eastern countries need Liquid Flouride Thorium Reactors, or at least more light water reactors to get their energy situation stabilized. Of course, LFTR technology was supressed in the USA after 1970, and it is outside the reach of poor countries to develop it.
These are micro-states/mini-states that are going to have a great deal of trouble surviving and being independent. If they were great nations they could generate internal credit because they would have nuclear power industries and engineering capability. But since they must supplicate themselves at the alter of the market, they are impoverished. Their best bet for long term prosperity is to undo the damage of ethno-liguistic nationalism and form larger states, possibly rejoining a federal system with Russia. This will take them out of the Anglo-American financial control grid and restart their development with development loans from the Bank of Russia. All other solutions lead to peonage.
You assume as if Russia is innocent in all of this. It was Russia/the Soviet union which inefficiently invested into the region and diverted resources from establishing independent infrastructures to begin with. While the anglo-americans may not be too kind, neither are the russians. The same KGB/military/communist party leaders are still in place along with their internal policies. This is throughout the russian csto and satellite states such as ukraine. The only difference is that they now extend trade to the west and maintain a facade of liberalization subject to change at anytime, a la China and under lenin's NEP during the 20s.
Percy Pedantic here,
hasn't the arid region got a dearth of it........... ?
Only water and food count, the rest are luxuries we can live wthout if we had to.
Surely the Soviets can build great big Desalination plants and melt the artic ice for the tea.
Nothing is impossible in USSR. Just whistle up the Gulag and make it happen on a massive scale.
Then lay 60 inch pipe from these new plants all around the shores into the interior, presto water problem solved.
For those who think China is the future need to realize that 80% of their ground water is polluted. Why do you think they are buying Farm land in Brazil? Because Brazil is the most water rich place on earth. The U.S. has a nice supply of water and our soil is better than Brazil's. So it is very expensive to grow in Brazil without Potash. AMerica has at least 5-10 years of hell to go through byt we will land on top again beacuse we are uniquely situated in the world.
http://americanprofligacy.com/2009/12/15/control-water-and-you-will-cont...
Take a look at water levels in the Ogallala and you won't be so smug. We are uniquely situated, but we are squandering our advantages through ignorance and waste. Such is the history of the world.
Wow very interesting article. As a hydrogeologist, I do groundwater modeling for municipal clients to improve their water resource management. We are currently conducting cost benefit/modeling analyses for design of a wastewater recharge facility to rebuild/maintain the aquifer system in part of my client's service area. This is now the strategy out here in Arizona, recharge to rebuild aquifers depleted by "groundwater mining" and store excess surface water. As we say out here, "whiskey is for drinkin', water is for fightin'". Lots of wrangling over water here. And crazy laws which do not reflect hydrologic reality. But the funny thing, as crazy as golf courses in the desert sounds, it actually is a better use of water economically, if some studies I have read are true. The economic impact of the tourism/golf industry is very large relative to the volume of water use. And many of the courses use wastewater for irrigation use. Farming still uses about 60%-70% of the water here (down from 90% 30 years ago), and the fights between the rural and urban areas are quite serious.
Ultimately, the politically acceptable solution is to better manage and more efficiently distribute water, since no one likes shutting it off even if the situation is unsustainable. This is probably the path central asia will have to take as well.
"No water will NEVER be THE problem. Hell, given some minor investments you can drill for water on every single piece of land on this planet, and chances are pretty high that you will hit a big fucking reservoir of it."
Cheeky, your funny sometimes, other times you are just plain scary...
World Water Resources
97.0% Salt Water
2.00% Frozen fresh water
0.63% Underground fresh water
0.37% Usable fresh water
There is no substitute for water.
The most significant economic and political aspect regarding the earth's fresh water supply is it non uniform distribution.The struggle for the control of scarce water resources has had a siginificant impact on the course of of human economic and political history. (Think "hydraulic empires"). It will continue to do so. Continued population growth and ongoing economic development have lead to a steadily increasing demand for new fresh water supplies and an incresingly energy intensive infrastructure to deliver it. The global demand for fresh water has tripled over the past 50 years. The largest use for fresh water is agriculture, which accounts for approximately 75% of total use. In the U.S. this accounts for approximately 40%. In Africa almost 90%.
In 2000 it was estimated that global withdrawal was 1,000 cubic miles, or about 30% of the total acessible fresh water supply. It is estimated that by 2025 that number will reach 70%.
Given that water shortages plague almost every country in North Africa and the Middle East, it is not unreasonable to expect that future conflicts in these regions will be fought over the access to water, not oil. Lest we forget, one of the triggers to 1967 Arab Israeli war was who was going to control the Jordan River.
"Water, thou hast no taste, no color, no odor; canst not be defined, art relished while ever mysterious. Not necessary to life, but rather life itself ... Of the riches that exist in the world, thou art the rarest and also the most delicate thou so pure within the bowels of the earth!"
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
surfeit means an excess supply dude
Since the caspian has lower salt content would
it be easier to desal there? Time for them to get
their act together and set their priorities. Make
pipelines to dump LNG in the USA or produce
water for their people.