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I decided to check how much water a plant would use a plant used 4 million gallons of water a day (according to https://www.theverge.com/22628925/water-semicon
by buryat 5y ago
I decided to check how much water a plant would use
a plant used 4 million gallons of water a day (according to https://www.theverge.com/22628925/water-semiconductor-shortage-arizona-drought https://www.theverge.com/22628925/water-semiconductor-shorta...) which is about 126000 metric tons a day
arizona used 7 million acre-foot of water in 2017 (https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-environment/2019/02/12/arizona-water-usage-state-uses-less-now-than-1957/2806899002/ https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-environme...) which is about 19000 acre-feet a day == 23014434 metric ton a day (using http://www.conversion-website.com/volume/acre-foot-to-ton-water.html http://www.conversion-website.com/volume/acre-foot-to-ton-wa...)
so a chip plant would be responsible for about 0.55% of overall water usage
- lovemenot 5y agoThanks for doing a fact-check. Might there be other other downstream states in USA or Mexico that would push that 0.55% ratio higher?
- Buttons840 5y agoSo one business / structure will use 1/200th of all water? That does sound like a lot.
- bottled_poe 5y agoThat’s one metric for impact. Perhaps you can think of some other metrics to compare it to before influencing the reader’s opinion?
- baron_harkonnen 5y agoNot to mention that industry itself only accounts for 6% of Arizona's water usage [0] so we're talking about one single structure increasing the industrial usage by ~10%. [0]
- PragmaticPulp 5y agoIndustry is a surprisingly small portion of water consumption in many places. In many states, household water use (including lawns) can handily exceed the water used by industry. Using this water for domestic chip making is arguably a very reasonable use of water. If we’re going to start cutting water usage, let’s start with things like golf courses in the desert instead of critical chip-making infrastructure.
- throwaway894345 5y agoI feel a bit of tension. I'm not a big fan of people using water to grow grass in the desert, but I'm also not a big fan of making tens or hundreds of thousands of people sacrifice so that one large corporation can profit. Yeah, I know that chip manufacturing helps everyone by improving our economic independence, and that's not a small thing, but we're already writing Intel a big check and they obviously benefit from the profits of the chips they will manufacture (assuming they manage it correctly and it doesn't just get left behind for cheaper foreign manufacturing the moment the market economics change). Maybe chip manufacture really benefits from being somewhere arid, and that's probably just pretty incompatible with water conservation?
- selectodude 5y agoChip manufacturing benefits from somewhere that has very predictable weather and low/no seismic activity.
- NikolaeVarius 5y agoIts fucking lawn grass. Its one of the most worthless things in the world and a complete waste of resources. At least chips do something other than sit there wasting water.
- throwaway894345 5y agoI agree. But the idea of asking tens or hundreds of thousands to give up their frivolities so a single corporation can profit strikes a nerve in me, however irrational it may be. I'm not reflexively anti-corporation--corporations are economically necessary--but I guess I'm touchy about the question of whether people exist for corporations or corporations for people.
- kspacewalk2 5y agoDefinitely sounds like a lot. Perhaps conservation efforts are in order, to reduce water waste by ~1% to allow for this strategically important, high value added industry to develop further. Thankfully, water waste is so rife in Arizona that it shouldn't be all that difficult to do so.
- Nbox9 5y agoMaybe, if there are important reasons why this factory should be in a desert state. I think everyone agrees that chips are vitally important now, but chip shortages aren’t nearly as bad as a water shortage is.
- apocalyptic0n3 5y agoNot exactly. Fabs use a lot of water to run, but it's mostly self-contained with very little loss. I can't remember the exact number, but the fabs Intel already have in Phoenix only lose around 4-5% of the water. The rest is reclaimed and recirculated. I believe the two breaking ground today will be even more efficient, possibly even net producers once rain water and other sources are taken into account. It's been a few months since I read into it, though, so I may be misremembering
- mistrial9 5y agonet producers of water? check this please
- kiklion 5y agoWhat is ‘using water’ in this context? Is it boiled off? Contaminated and needs to be cleaned?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- brianbreslin 5y agoIn chip making they remove all the impurities making it PURE h20, which is in fact too pure to be just dumped back in the ground, needs to be re-mineralized before it can be dumped.
- LgWoodenBadger 5y agoIf that's all that it needs, why would they not recycle it back into the water supply?
- jhpankow 5y agoClean, pure, delicious semiconductor wastewater.
- mentos 5y ago"It's got what plants crave"
- throwaway946513 5y ago"It's got electrolytes!"
- NikolaeVarius 5y agoYou do understand that literal sewage is treated and returned to the water supply just fine
- sgc 5y ago
- dralley 5y agoOne single factory using 0.55% of the entire state's water consumption is pretty massive.
- iamgopal 5y agoOn the other hand, there are very standard technologies for water recycling. UHF, RO, ZLD, MEE etc. Water is quite easy to recycle given intention to do it.
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- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- BurningFrog 5y agoNote that the Verge quote is > It’ll guzzle between 2 to 4 million gallons of water a day by some estimates
- spaetzleesser 5y agoSorry, can’t resist but you gotta love the units. Gallons, acre foot. Thank god the US isn’t socialist metric where one unit can easily be converted to another :)
- tzs 5y agoWe can easily convert just fine in the US: > "Alexa, how much does 4 million gallons of water weigh in metric tons?" > "4 million gallons of water weighs about 15 thousand metric tons" :-) Not that this actually makes it easy to deal with unit conversion, because we still have to find the right gizmo to ask and phrase the question right. "Hey Google" for instance when I ask it the above question just tells me how much a million gallons of water weighs in pounds. Not being sure if Google was right on that, I asked Alexa how much 1 million gallons of water weighs in pounds. It told me that 5000 gallons of water weighs 41726.320547 pounds. If I ask without saying I want the answer in pounds it then does tell me the answer for the requested 1 million gallons in pounds. But if we happen to ask the right gizmo, and happen to phrase it just right...unit conversion is no problem for Americans. (Of course I still had to do it by hand, because Alexa's answer disagreed with the answer at the top of this thread, and I am not confident that when Alexa disagrees with an HN commenter that Alexa is right).
- rrss 5y agoWhy does this metric matter, when 95% of the water Intel uses is already returned to the water supply? From the same verge article as the 4 million gallons a day figure: > Last year, the company pledged that by 2030 it will restore and return more freshwater than it uses. It’s nearing that benchmark in Arizona, where Intel says it cleaned up and returned 95 percent of the freshwater it used in 2020
- spiderice 5y agoHow is it possible to return more fresh water than you use? Where does the surplus come from?
- jjoonathan 5y agoBecause water that isn't fresh can become fresh. We have the technology. They're already purifying a staggering amount of water, might as well purify a bit more while they're at it.
- BurningFrog 5y agoThat still doesn't explain where this unfresh water comes from.
- tedivm 5y agoThey can take wastewater (which is no longer fresh), clean it up for use, and return it back to the system. While Arizona is landlocked there's also not a ton of distance between it and the Gulf of California so they could do desalinization, although I imagine that's too costly to consider at the moment. > It has its own water treatment plant at its Ocotillo campus in Chandler that’s similar to a municipal plant. There’s also a “brine reduction facility,” a public-private partnership with the city of Chandler, that brings 2.5 million gallons of Intel’s wastewater a day back to drinking standard. Intel uses some of the treated water again, and the rest is sent to replenish groundwater sources or be used by surrounding communities.
- 5y ago
- tzs 5y ago4 million gallons X 3.785 kg/gallon X 1 metric ton / 1000 kg = 15140 metric tons, not 126000 metric tons. The calculation for Arizona is correct. That gives 0.066%, no 0.55%.
- buryat 5y agoyeah, you’re right, I accidentally used “US short ton” smh that one of the online calculators gave me, very embarrassing