3 ms·

Yeah, its almost as annoying as when people talk about "using" water. The cycle time is 9 days, in 9 days it comes back down as rain, very little water ever get

by _3u10 5y ago

Yeah, its almost as annoying as when people talk about "using" water. The cycle time is 9 days, in 9 days it comes back down as rain, very little water ever gets "used".

yetihehe 5y ago
Because they typically omit "easily available". There's lot's of water in the ocean, why do people die from lack of water in the middle of big body of water?
- _3u10 5y ago
  Honestly, because they don’t drink it soon enough / slow enough. There’s a pretty cool study on how you can drink seawater and remain hydrated if you do it right. I meant freshwater cycle time. Yes there are certainly places that run out of water, I meant more places like Vancouver where the city just doesn’t build a bigger reservoir and instead bemoans an annual water shortage.
dredmorbius 5y ago
Economic and market discussions do a very poor job of distinguishing stocks and flows. At the risk of a major digression, one sees this constantly in discussions of inequality where net personal wealth or market capitalisation (both stocks) are compared to income or GDP (both flows). (And at the risk of digressing my own digression, economists aren't even settled on whether wealth is a stock or a flow. Adam Smith's definition is the latter.) With water, there is is a throughput in a given region. That flow is not uniformly available, and varies with time (further complications). It serves processes and consumers (in both economic and ecological senses), and changes to those flows and availability do have major impacts (whether surpluses or shortages). There are times when the critical need is getting rid of excess water (via dikes, pumps, and other control structures), others when the critical need is obtaining or preserving water (again: via pumps, reservoirs, cisterns, etc.). The total demand, flow, and impact are high enough that even modest deviations from normal experience or expectations are often devastating --- floods, droughts, and the like. Transporting water more than a few km / miles is tremendously expensive and typically requires major public infrastructure. It's best moved under gravity flow alone. If the litre of water you have used comes from an excess, there is no issue. If it won't be replaced for a year, it's the last litre available, and the nearest additional litre is 100km away ... you may be having a problem.
- _3u10 5y ago
  That hasn’t really been my experience with water. As far as I know it costs about the same as any other good to transport in small volumes and is incredibly cheap to transport in larger volumes, on par with oil. I do tend to agree with you tho that if you want government to transport it, it gets ridiculous as one would expect from tasking government to do something nature does for free, and the private sector does extremely efficiently.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    And how much water is needed? It's not the unit volume cost, it's the total cost. The United States consumes about 20 million barrels of oil per day. That's about 840 million gallons. Water consumption is 322 billion gallons/day, 380 times more. That's about a thousand gallons per person per day. Note that this isn't individual direct consumption (drinking, cleaning, bathing), but the net total use. If you're looking at replacing all city consumption (residential, commercial, industrial) plus agrigulture, you'd be moving these volumes of water. Even at pennies per gallon, the costs add up. Keep in mind that the watershed for major Western US cities already extends over hundreds to thousands of miles. A chief reason that the Western US looks far more like an island archipelligo than the richly-settled East is because of water scarcity and prior claims. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/48/Earthlights_dmsp_US.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/48/Earthlights_d... San Francisco (and much of the Penninsula) draws water from the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, 180 miles east. Los Angeles draws much of its water from the California Aqueduct, streching over 500 miles north, and the Colorado River, whose watershed extends to the eastern front of the Rocky Mountains, 1,500 miles to the east. Both delivery systems operate virtually entirely under gravity flow. The California aqueduct has exceptions --- there are pumping stations in the Delta which provide a few metres of lift, and the Edmunston Pumping Plant which lifts water over the Tehachapi mountains utilises 14 * 80,000 horsepower pumps (835 combined MW) to provide 600m (1,926 feet) of lift to 2 million gallons/minute (7.5 million litres/minute), 7,500 tonnes of water per minute --- roughly the capacity of the Oroville Dam spillway at peak capacity, for comparison. It has its own dedicated 1 GW capacity generating plant. Note that when the Oroville reservoir is discharging water it is generating electricity. What you gain in shipping Oroville water you lose shipping Tehachapi water. The opportunity cost is not 835 MW, but 1,670 MW. At retail California rates, that's nearly $200,000 per hour of operation, $4.6 million per day, $1.7 billion/year, to move water 750 km across land and 600 m high ... and that's only considering the Edmunston plant itself (there are numerous other pump stations in the system as a whole). The California Department of Water Resources annual budget is about a billon dollars (there's considerable variation). So long as you want to use / access water where it's flowing already, costs are low. Major river systems (the Mississippi-Missouri-Ohio-Red river system in the US is among the largest in the world) provide just that. But when you start wanting to move water laterally, or worse, through or over mountains, costs increase tremendously. ________________________________ References: US petroleum use: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=44556 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=44556 US water use: https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources/science/water-use-united-states https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources/science/w... Edmunston Plant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmonston_Pumping_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmonston_Pumping_Plant Oroville Dam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oroville_Dam_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oroville_Dam_crisis California Aqueduct: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Aqueduct https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Aqueduct CA DWR budget: https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4103 https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4103

by _3u10 5y ago

Yeah, its almost as annoying as when people talk about "using" water. The cycle time is 9 days, in 9 days it comes back down as rain, very little water ever gets "used".

yetihehe 5y ago

Because they typically omit "easily available". There's lot's of water in the ocean, why do people die from lack of water in the middle of big body of water?

_3u10 5y ago
Honestly, because they don’t drink it soon enough / slow enough. There’s a pretty cool study on how you can drink seawater and remain hydrated if you do it right. I meant freshwater cycle time. Yes there are certainly places that run out of water, I meant more places like Vancouver where the city just doesn’t build a bigger reservoir and instead bemoans an annual water shortage.

dredmorbius 5y ago

Economic and market discussions do a very poor job of distinguishing stocks and flows. At the risk of a major digression, one sees this constantly in discussions of inequality where net personal wealth or market capitalisation (both stocks) are compared to income or GDP (both flows). (And at the risk of digressing my own digression, economists aren't even settled on whether wealth is a stock or a flow. Adam Smith's definition is the latter.) With water, there is is a throughput in a given region. That flow is not uniformly available, and varies with time (further complications). It serves processes and consumers (in both economic and ecological senses), and changes to those flows and availability do have major impacts (whether surpluses or shortages). There are times when the critical need is getting rid of excess water (via dikes, pumps, and other control structures), others when the critical need is obtaining or preserving water (again: via pumps, reservoirs, cisterns, etc.). The total demand, flow, and impact are high enough that even modest deviations from normal experience or expectations are often devastating --- floods, droughts, and the like. Transporting water more than a few km / miles is tremendously expensive and typically requires major public infrastructure. It's best moved under gravity flow alone. If the litre of water you have used comes from an excess, there is no issue. If it won't be replaced for a year, it's the last litre available, and the nearest additional litre is 100km away ... you may be having a problem.

_3u10 5y ago
That hasn’t really been my experience with water. As far as I know it costs about the same as any other good to transport in small volumes and is incredibly cheap to transport in larger volumes, on par with oil. I do tend to agree with you tho that if you want government to transport it, it gets ridiculous as one would expect from tasking government to do something nature does for free, and the private sector does extremely efficiently.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  And how much water is needed? It's not the unit volume cost, it's the total cost. The United States consumes about 20 million barrels of oil per day. That's about 840 million gallons. Water consumption is 322 billion gallons/day, 380 times more. That's about a thousand gallons per person per day. Note that this isn't individual direct consumption (drinking, cleaning, bathing), but the net total use. If you're looking at replacing all city consumption (residential, commercial, industrial) plus agrigulture, you'd be moving these volumes of water. Even at pennies per gallon, the costs add up. Keep in mind that the watershed for major Western US cities already extends over hundreds to thousands of miles. A chief reason that the Western US looks far more like an island archipelligo than the richly-settled East is because of water scarcity and prior claims. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/48/Earthlights_dmsp_US.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/48/Earthlights_d... San Francisco (and much of the Penninsula) draws water from the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir, 180 miles east. Los Angeles draws much of its water from the California Aqueduct, streching over 500 miles north, and the Colorado River, whose watershed extends to the eastern front of the Rocky Mountains, 1,500 miles to the east. Both delivery systems operate virtually entirely under gravity flow. The California aqueduct has exceptions --- there are pumping stations in the Delta which provide a few metres of lift, and the Edmunston Pumping Plant which lifts water over the Tehachapi mountains utilises 14 * 80,000 horsepower pumps (835 combined MW) to provide 600m (1,926 feet) of lift to 2 million gallons/minute (7.5 million litres/minute), 7,500 tonnes of water per minute --- roughly the capacity of the Oroville Dam spillway at peak capacity, for comparison. It has its own dedicated 1 GW capacity generating plant. Note that when the Oroville reservoir is discharging water it is generating electricity. What you gain in shipping Oroville water you lose shipping Tehachapi water. The opportunity cost is not 835 MW, but 1,670 MW. At retail California rates, that's nearly $200,000 per hour of operation, $4.6 million per day, $1.7 billion/year, to move water 750 km across land and 600 m high ... and that's only considering the Edmunston plant itself (there are numerous other pump stations in the system as a whole). The California Department of Water Resources annual budget is about a billon dollars (there's considerable variation). So long as you want to use / access water where it's flowing already, costs are low. Major river systems (the Mississippi-Missouri-Ohio-Red river system in the US is among the largest in the world) provide just that. But when you start wanting to move water laterally, or worse, through or over mountains, costs increase tremendously. ________________________________ References: US petroleum use: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=44556 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=44556 US water use: https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources/science/water-use-united-states https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources/science/w... Edmunston Plant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmonston_Pumping_Plant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmonston_Pumping_Plant Oroville Dam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oroville_Dam_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oroville_Dam_crisis California Aqueduct: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Aqueduct https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Aqueduct CA DWR budget: https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4103 https://lao.ca.gov/Publications/Report/4103