> If the article is correct that water will become more valuable than oil... Yep, your skepticism is warranted. This is unlikely in the US for common infrastru

> If the article is correct that water will become more valuable than oil... Yep, your skepticism is warranted. This is unlikely in the US for common infrastructures, in the large scale, over a long (next generation) period, for standard municipal water (still an under-recognized engineering achievement IMHO). Potable and crop/livestock waters (the kinds that civilizations rely upon) are to a first approximation a derivative of energy. Whether to purify it, or move it, water relies heavily upon energy to enter the market. To postulate that a barrel of American-municipal-standard potable water will cost more than a barrel of oil is to hypothesize a situation where it takes more than a barrel of oil to create a barrel of that kind of water. Now note I put in the qualifier "for common infrastructures". That's key. If you have a large enough logistical tail behind creating that barrel of potable water, then it absolutely will cost more than a barrel of oil. For example, that will easily be the case when comparing a barrel of WTI pulled from a stripper well against a barrel of potable water created on a US Navy ballistic missile submarine, including all decomm costs amortized in on both the well and the submarine. On a slightly less fantastical plane, that qualifier can likely be breached (pun intended) if sea levels do actually rise faster than we can revamp our coastal infrastructures. Major metro water processing plants and the supply chains feeding them are complex beasts, and they are multi-year projects even when money is no object and working shifts 24x7. If, as I predict based upon human nature, politicians kick the can on the sea level rise problem until dikes catastrophically fail in major metro areas, then yes, municipal potable water's disaster relief equivalent may indeed cost more than an equivalent quantity of oil for at least a few years if only because it all has to be trucked in as bottles or tankers during a disaster relief operation. Leaving on a couple articles about water becoming more expensive than petroleum or gasoline (note it is generally about retailed bottled water): [1] https://phys.org/news/2018-03-worth-oil.html https://phys.org/news/2018-03-worth-oil.html [2] https://www.cnbc.com/2016/01/15/gas-cheaper-than-water-not-so-fast.html https://www.cnbc.com/2016/01/15/gas-cheaper-than-water-not-s...