But many water providers still have a long way to go
May 20th 2010 | From The Economist print edition
ALTHOUGH water is a universal human requirement, the use people make of it varies hugely. The average Malian draws 4 cubic metres a year for domestic use, the average American 215. Include all uses, and the figures range from 20 cubic metres for the average Ugandan to over 5,000 for his Turkmenistani counterpart. The statistics can be misleading: in places where rain falls copiously and evenly from the skies, withdrawals will be small. Moreover, water-blessed countries have much less reason to be careful with their resources than the water-starved. Yet high use of water is not necessarily bad. It depends how it is employed, and whether it is naturally replaced.
However essential, farming is not the most lucrative use of water. Industry generates about 70 times as much value from a litre of water as agriculture, which helps to explain why industry takes the lion’s share in most rich countries. Yet the ratio of water use to GDP has declined dramatically in many rich and middle-income countries in recent decades, which suggests that industry can use water much more productively if it tries.
Unilever, a seller of soaps to soups in 170 countries, boasts that its Medusa project, formulated in Brazil in 2003, cut its total water use by 8% and reduced the load per tonne of production by 15%. SABMiller, which brews all over the world, has embarked on a programme to save a quarter of the water needed to make a litre of beer by 2015. Nestlé, which aims to be the most efficient water user among food manufacturers, has cut water withdrawals by a third since 2000 even though the volume of the foods and drinks it makes has risen by 60%. Cisco, which supplies internet routers, switches and the like, uses recycled water in its gardens and fountains in California and has installed waterless urinals and low-flow showers in its buildings.
Such measures make good financial sense and good public relations. Some of the companies at the forefront of water-saving campaigns are also acutely aware of their vulnerability to the growing scarcity of water, and to charges that they are guzzlers. Coca-Cola, for example, has been fiercely attacked in India for its dependence on groundwater and the effects on the water table. Yet even if it takes two litres of groundwater to produce a litre of bottled water, companies like Coca-Cola and PepsiCo are hardly significant users compared with farmers and even many industrial producers
PepsiCo has nevertheless become the first big company to declare its support for the human right to water. For its part, Coca-Cola is one of a consortium of companies that in 2008 formed the 2030 Water Resources Group, which strives to deal with the issue of water scarcity. Last year it commissioned a consultancy, McKinsey, to produce a report on the economics of a range of solutions.
In China, where pollution rivals scarcity as a pressing problem, large foreign companies now regularly consult a website run by the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs, an NGO that collects government facts and statistics and publishes them online. Its maps reveal details of thousands of incidents in which companies have broken the pollution codes. Multinationals like Adidas, General Electric, Nike and Wal-Mart can now see which of their suppliers are repeat offenders, and may put pressure on them to clean up.
Not all big companies are water-conscious, though, even if they are big users. A report issued this year by Ceres, a coalition of American investors, found that “the vast majority of leading companies in water-intensive industries have weak management and disclosure of water-related risks and opportunities.” Less than half the electric-power companies surveyed even provided data on total water withdrawals.
Still, companies like Coca-Cola and Nestlé are being joined by others who are worried about being cast as villains. At the same time more and more companies are bringing forward new products and technologies designed to save water. These vary from genetically modified crop varieties that are drought-resistant to technologies that replace chemicals with eco-friendly enzymes in the making of knitwear; from low-lather detergents (which use less water) to dual-flush lavatories; from lasers that detect the amount of moisture in the air above crops to wireless devices that help reduce the water needed on golf courses (which account for 0.5% of America’s annual water use, though some must help recharge aquifers).
Desalination is the great hope. The conventional method involves boiling and then distilling water. An alternative works by reverse osmosis, in which water is forced through a semi-permeable membrane. Both methods use quite a lot of energy. New membranes now being developed need less power, and new techniques require neither evaporation nor membranes nor futuristic nanotubes (undesirable in your drinking water).
Reverse osmosis is the most favoured method, though, and in Israel and Algeria contracts have been signed for salt-free water at about 55 cents a cubic metre. Even lower prices have been cited elsewhere, but they do not usually reflect current energy costs or, increasingly, the non-energy costs of desalination. When it was mainly rich Gulf states and ocean liners that removed salt from sea water, ecological and financing concerns were generally overlooked. With desalination now favoured in places like Australia, California and Spain, those considerations have become more important. The city of Sydney, for instance, has had to install elaborate disposal systems for the briny waste of its desalination plant and use wind power in order to reduce CO2. All this is expensive.
A no-briner?
Even so, several countries are going ahead, and Spain, the European Union’s driest country, uses some desalinated seawater to irrigate high-value crops in its driest province, Almería. But its choice of desalination goes back to 2004, when it abandoned a hugely expensive and controversial scheme to divert water from the Ebro river in the north to the arid south. In general, people go for desalination when they have few other options and are able to bear the costs. That explains why both new capacity and investment in desalination plants have actually fallen since 2007, though Christopher Gasson of Global Water Intelligence expects them to rise this year. The hope is that, in the long run, solar power will make desalination economic.
In parts of Australia and America irrigation is becoming a sophisticated business in other ways. The gadgets involved may be computerised gates that control canal water, fancy flow meters or huge machines that sprinkle water sparingly from rotating pipes. And in time farmers and others everywhere should be able to take advantage of technology that measures evapotranspiration field by field.
This is already used by water-management agencies in the American West, thanks to a system developed by the Idaho state water department and the University of Idaho, which calculates the consumption of water from two Landsat satellites orbiting the Earth. Indeed, the use of sensors to take measurements from space is developing apace. The information they provide, perhaps conveyed straight to a farmer’s mobile phone, should before long enable him to take intelligent decisions about how, when and where to grow his crops, even if he is scarcely literate.
His urban counterparts, and the utilities that serve them, may seem unimportant in terms of the amounts of water they use and lose. But domestic water supplies, though relatively small in volume, are expensive both to treat and to deliver. Water losses therefore matter, even if they help to replenish aquifers. And financial losses matter, too, because they discourage investment and encourage subsidies, which tend to benefit the better off, not the poor.
The utilities’ reaction to water scarcity has been mixed. Many, including the World Bank, once believed that privatisation was the solution to the inefficient provision of water, but the new consensus, certainly in the bank, is that the crucial feature of any system is that it should be sensitive to its customers’ needs. Thus, in Africa, both Senegal and Uganda are judged to have well-run utilities, but Senegal’s is private-sector whereas Uganda’s is public. In general, Africa’s utilities work better than, say, India’s, largely because in Africa central governments are ready to give autonomy to professionals. In India water power lies with the states, often in huge, torpid, overstaffed and underfinanced bureaucracies. Vast quantities of water escape through leaking pipes; prices are unrelated to costs; meters are broken; and no effort is made to collect revenues. Accordingly, no money is available for repairs.
China has brought in private water companies on a large scale, many of them foreign, and they have prospered there. In other places they have not always been a success. Some have suffered because the incoming company has accepted responsibility for the utility’s foreign-currency debt, and then suffered exchange-rate losses that it had little choice but to pass on to customers. This happened in Cochabamba, a Bolivian town riven by water riots in 2000. It also happened to a company that took on one of two concessions in Manila, which duly foundered. The company that won the other concession, however, was largely free of exchange-rate liabilities and has proved expansively successful.
Often the provision of water ranks too low among politicians’ interests to make them do much. They would rather keep charges low or, in some places, non-existent than spend money on new pipes or treatment plants. They also see no votes in cutting the ribbon outside a new public lavatory. The result is that many utilities, especially in India, have spent so little on maintenance and new investment that the provision of water is, faute de mieux, privatised. Thus the better off sink wells or fill their cisterns with deliveries from tankers, and the poor drink water bought in bottles and wash with whatever they can find.
Luckily, there are exceptions in places like Brazil, where simple sewers built cheaply in some favelas are proving highly effective. Entrepreneurs are also coming into the market with low-tech products. In Tanzania, masons will provide a concrete slab to install above a pit latrine for $5. In Cambodia $30 should buy you a flush lavatory of sorts; and in Indonesia a range of sanitary fixtures sell for $18-90, and may even come with a warranty.
To get service from bad utilities, though, it is sometimes necessary to shame them. One way of doing this is to publicise their position in the rankings of the International Benchmarking Network for Water and Sanitation, published online. This is now causing several city governments some embarrassment—and at the same time giving hope to their ill-served customers.
Tuesday, June 1, 2010
For want of a drink
Finite, vital, much wanted, little understood, water looks unmanageable. But it needn’t be, argues John Grimond (interviewed here)
May 20th 2010 | From The Economist print edition
WHEN the word water appears in print these days, crisis is rarely far behind. Water, it is said, is the new oil: a resource long squandered, now growing expensive and soon to be overwhelmed by insatiable demand. Aquifers are falling, glaciers vanishing, reservoirs drying up and rivers no longer flowing to the sea. Climate change threatens to make the problems worse. Everyone must use less water if famine, pestilence and mass migration are not to sweep the globe. As it is, wars are about to break out between countries squabbling over dams and rivers. If the apocalypse is still a little way off, it is only because the four horsemen and their steeds have stopped to search for something to drink.
The language is often overblown, and the remedies sometimes ill conceived, but the basic message is not wrong. Water is indeed scarce in many places, and will grow scarcer. Bringing supply and demand into equilibrium will be painful, and political disputes may increase in number and intensify in their capacity to cause trouble. To carry on with present practices would indeed be to invite disaster.
Why? The difficulties start with the sheer number of people using the stuff. When, 60years ago, the world’s population was about 2.5 billion, worries about water supply affected relatively few people. Both drought and hunger existed, as they have throughout history, but most people could be fed without irrigated farming. Then the green revolution, in an inspired combination of new crop breeds, fertilisers and water, made possible a huge rise in the population. The number of people on Earth rose to 6 billion in 2000, nearly 7 billion today, and is heading for 9 billion in 2050. The area under irrigation has doubled and the amount of water drawn for farming has tripled. The proportion of people living in countries chronically short of water, which stood at 8% (500m) at the turn of the 21st century, is set to rise to 45% (4 billion) by 2050. And already 1 billion people go to bed hungry each night, partly for lack of water to grow food.
People in temperate climates where the rain falls moderately all the year round may not realise how much water is needed for farming. In Britain, for example, farming takes only 3% of all water withdrawals. In the United States, by contrast, 41% goes for agriculture, almost all of it for irrigation. In China farming takes nearly 70%, and in India nearer 90%. For the world as a whole, agriculture accounts for almost 70%.
Farmers’ increasing demand for water is caused not only by the growing number of mouths to be fed but also by people’s desire for better-tasting, more interesting food. Unfortunately, it takes nearly twice as much water to grow a kilo of peanuts as a kilo of soyabeans, nearly four times as much to produce a kilo of beef as a kilo of chicken, and nearly five times as much to produce a glass of orange juice as a cup of tea. With 2 billion people around the world about to enter the middle class, the agricultural demands on water would increase even if the population stood still.
Industry, too, needs water. It takes about 22% of the world’s withdrawals. Domestic activities take the other 8%. Together, the demands of these two categories quadrupled in the second half of the 20th century, growing twice as fast as those of farming, and forecasters see nothing but further increases in demand on all fronts.
That’s your lot
Meeting that demand is a different task from meeting the demand for almost any other commodity. One reason is that the supply of water is finite. The world will have no more of it in 2025, or 2050, or when the cows come home, than it has today, or when it lapped at the sides of Noah’s ark. This is because the law of conservation of mass says, broadly, that however you use it, you cannot destroy the stuff. Neither can you readily make it. If some of it seems to come from the skies, that is because it has evaporated from the Earth’s surface, condensed and returned.
Most of this surface is sea, and the water below it—over 97% of the total on Earth—is salty. In principle the salt can be removed to increase the supply of fresh water, but at present desalination is expensive and uses lots of energy. Although costs have come down, no one expects it to provide wide-scale irrigation soon.
Of the 2½% of water that is not salty, about 70% is frozen, either at the poles, in glaciers or in permafrost. So all living things, except those in the sea, have about 0.75% of the total to survive on. Most of this available water is underground, in aquifers or similar formations. The rest is falling as rain, sitting in lakes and reservoirs or flowing in rivers where it is, with luck, replaced by rainfall and melting snow and ice. There is also, take note, water vapour in the atmosphere.
These geophysical facts affect the use of language in discussions about water, and the ways in which to think about the problems of scarcity. As Julia Bucknall, the World Bank’s water supremo, points out, demand and supply are economic concepts, which the matchmakers of the dismal science are constantly trying to bring into balance. In the context of water, though, supply is also a physical concept and its maximum is fixed.
Use is another awkward word. If your car runs out of petrol, you have used a tankful. The petrol has been broken down and will not soon be reconstituted. But if you drain a tank of water for your shower, have you used it? Yes, in a sense. But could it not be collected to invigorate the plants in your garden? And will some of it not then seep into the ground to refill an aquifer, or perhaps run into a river, from either of which someone else may draw it? This water has been used, but not in the sense of rendered incapable of further use. Water is not the new oil.
However, there are some “uses” that leave it unusable for anyone else. That is either when it evaporates, from fields, swimming pools, reservoirs or cooling towers, or when it transpires, in the photosynthetic process whereby water vapour passes from the leaves of growing plants into the atmosphere. These two processes, known in combination as evapotranspiration (ET), tend to be overlooked by water policymakers. Yet over 60% of all the rain and snow that hits the ground cannot be captured because it evaporates from the soil or transpires through plants. Like water that cannot be recovered for a specific use because it has run into the sea or perhaps a saline aquifer, water lost through ET is, at least until nature recycles it, well and truly used—or, in the language of the water world, “consumed”, ie, not returned to the system for possible reuse.
The problems caused by inexact terminology do not end here. Concepts like efficiency, productivity and saving attract woolly thinking. Chris Perry, an irrigation economist widely considered the high priest of water accounting, points out that “efficient” domestic systems involve virtually no escape of water through evaporation or irrecoverable seepage. “Efficient” irrigation, though, is often used to describe systems that result in 85% of the water disappearing in vapour. Similarly, water is not saved by merely using less of it for a purpose such as washing or irrigation; it is saved only if less is rendered irrecoverable.
Soaked, parched, poached
Many of these conceptual difficulties arise from other unusual aspects of water. It is a commodity whose value varies according to locality, purpose and circumstance. Take locality first. Water is not evenly distributed—just nine countries account for 60% of all available fresh supplies—and among them only Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Congo, Indonesia and Russia have an abundance. America is relatively well off, but China and India, with over a third of the world’s population between them, have less than 10% of its water.
Even within countries the variations may be huge. The average annual rainfall in India’s north-east is 110 times that in its western desert. And many places have plenty of water, or even far too much, at some times of year, but not nearly enough at others. Most of India’s crucial rain is brought by the summer monsoon, which falls, with luck, in just a few weeks between June and September. Flooding is routine, and may become more frequent and damaging with climate change.
Scarce or plentiful, water is above all local. It is heavy—one cubic metre weighs a tonne—so expensive to move. If you are trying to manage it, you must first divide your area of concern into drainage basins. Surface water—mostly rivers, lakes and reservoirs—will not flow from one basin into another without artificial diversion, and usually only with pumping. Within a basin, the water upstream may be useful for irrigation, industrial or domestic use. As it nears the sea, though, the opportunities diminish to the point where it has no uses except to sustain deltas, wetlands and the estuarial ecology, and to carry silt out to sea.
These should not be overlooked. If rivers do not flow, nothing can live in them. Over a fifth of the world’s freshwater fish species of a century ago are now endangered or extinct. Half the world’s wetlands have also disappeared over the past 100 years. The point is, though, that even within a basin water is more valuable in some places than in others.
Almost anywhere arid, the water underground, once largely ignored, has come to be seen as especially valuable as the demands of farmers have outgrown their supplies of rain and surface water. Groundwater has come to the rescue, and for a while it seemed a miraculous solution: drill a borehole, pump the stuff up from below and in due course it will be replaced. In some places it is indeed replenished quite quickly if rain or surface water is available and the geological and soil conditions are favourable. In many places, however, from the United States to India and China, the quantities being withdrawn exceed the annual recharge. This is serious for millions of people not just in the country but also in many of the world’s biggest cities, which often depend on aquifers for their drinking water.
The 20m inhabitants of Mexico City and its surrounding area, for example, draw over 70% of their water from an aquifer that will run dry, at current extraction rates, within 200 years, maybe much sooner. Already the city is sinking as a result. In Bangkok, Buenos Aires and Jakarta, the aquifers are similarly overdrawn, polluted or contaminated by salt. Just as serious is the depletion of the aquifers on which farmers depend. In the Hai river basin in China, for example, deep-groundwater tables have dropped by up to 90 metres.
Part of the beauty of the borehole is that it requires no elaborate apparatus; a single farmer may be able to sink his own tubewell and start pumping. That is why India and China are now perforated with millions of irrigation wells, each drawing on a common resource. Sometimes this resource will be huge: the High Plains aquifer, for example, covers 450,000 square kilometres below eight American states and the Guaraní aquifer extends across 1.2m square kilometres below parts of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. But even big aquifers are not immune to the laws of physics. Parts of the High Plains are seriously overdrawn. In the United States, China and many other places, farmers probably have to pay something for the right to draw groundwater. But almost nowhere will the price reflect scarcity, and often there is no charge at all and no one measures how much water is being taken.
Liquid asset or human right?
Priced or not, water is certainly valued, and that value depends on the use to which it is harnessed. Water is used not just to grow food but to make every kind of product, from microchips to steel girders. The largest industrial purpose to which it is put is cooling in thermal power generation, but it is also used in drilling for and extracting oil, the making of petroleum products and ethanol, and the production of hydro-electricity. Some of the processes involved, such as hydro power generation, consume little water (after driving the turbines, most is returned to the river), but some, such as the techniques used to extract oil from sands, are big consumers.
Industrial use takes about 60% of water in rich countries and 10% in the rest. The difference in domestic use is much smaller, 11% and 8% respectively. Some of the variation is explained by capacious baths, power showers and flush lavatories in the rich world. All humans, however, need a basic minimum of two litres of water in food or drink each day, and for this there is no substitute. No one survived in the ruins of Port-au-Prince for more than a few days after January’s earthquake unless they had access to some water-based food or drink. That is why many people in poor and arid countries—usually women or children—set off early each morning to trudge to the nearest well and return five or six hours later burdened with precious supplies. That is why many people believe water to be a human right, a necessity more basic than bread or a roof over the head.
From this much follows. One consequence is a widespread belief that no one should have to pay for water. The Byzantine emperor Justinian declared in the sixth century that “by natural law” air, running water, the sea and seashore were “common to all”. Many Indians agree, seeing groundwater in particular as a “democratic resource”. In Africa it is said that “even the jackal deserves to drink”.
A second consequence is that water often has a sacred or mystical quality that is invested in deities like Gong Gong and Osiris and rivers like the Jordan and the Ganges. Throughout history, man’s dependence on water has made him live near it or organise access to it. Water is in his body—it makes up about 60%—and in his soul. It has provided not just life and food but a means of transport, a way of keeping clean, a mechanism for removing sewage, a home for fish and other animals, a medium with which to cook, in which to swim, on which to skate and sail, a thing of beauty to provide inspiration, to gaze upon and to enjoy. No wonder a commodity with so many qualities, uses and associations has proved so difficult to organise.
May 20th 2010 | From The Economist print edition
WHEN the word water appears in print these days, crisis is rarely far behind. Water, it is said, is the new oil: a resource long squandered, now growing expensive and soon to be overwhelmed by insatiable demand. Aquifers are falling, glaciers vanishing, reservoirs drying up and rivers no longer flowing to the sea. Climate change threatens to make the problems worse. Everyone must use less water if famine, pestilence and mass migration are not to sweep the globe. As it is, wars are about to break out between countries squabbling over dams and rivers. If the apocalypse is still a little way off, it is only because the four horsemen and their steeds have stopped to search for something to drink.
The language is often overblown, and the remedies sometimes ill conceived, but the basic message is not wrong. Water is indeed scarce in many places, and will grow scarcer. Bringing supply and demand into equilibrium will be painful, and political disputes may increase in number and intensify in their capacity to cause trouble. To carry on with present practices would indeed be to invite disaster.
Why? The difficulties start with the sheer number of people using the stuff. When, 60years ago, the world’s population was about 2.5 billion, worries about water supply affected relatively few people. Both drought and hunger existed, as they have throughout history, but most people could be fed without irrigated farming. Then the green revolution, in an inspired combination of new crop breeds, fertilisers and water, made possible a huge rise in the population. The number of people on Earth rose to 6 billion in 2000, nearly 7 billion today, and is heading for 9 billion in 2050. The area under irrigation has doubled and the amount of water drawn for farming has tripled. The proportion of people living in countries chronically short of water, which stood at 8% (500m) at the turn of the 21st century, is set to rise to 45% (4 billion) by 2050. And already 1 billion people go to bed hungry each night, partly for lack of water to grow food.
People in temperate climates where the rain falls moderately all the year round may not realise how much water is needed for farming. In Britain, for example, farming takes only 3% of all water withdrawals. In the United States, by contrast, 41% goes for agriculture, almost all of it for irrigation. In China farming takes nearly 70%, and in India nearer 90%. For the world as a whole, agriculture accounts for almost 70%.
Farmers’ increasing demand for water is caused not only by the growing number of mouths to be fed but also by people’s desire for better-tasting, more interesting food. Unfortunately, it takes nearly twice as much water to grow a kilo of peanuts as a kilo of soyabeans, nearly four times as much to produce a kilo of beef as a kilo of chicken, and nearly five times as much to produce a glass of orange juice as a cup of tea. With 2 billion people around the world about to enter the middle class, the agricultural demands on water would increase even if the population stood still.
Industry, too, needs water. It takes about 22% of the world’s withdrawals. Domestic activities take the other 8%. Together, the demands of these two categories quadrupled in the second half of the 20th century, growing twice as fast as those of farming, and forecasters see nothing but further increases in demand on all fronts.
That’s your lot
Meeting that demand is a different task from meeting the demand for almost any other commodity. One reason is that the supply of water is finite. The world will have no more of it in 2025, or 2050, or when the cows come home, than it has today, or when it lapped at the sides of Noah’s ark. This is because the law of conservation of mass says, broadly, that however you use it, you cannot destroy the stuff. Neither can you readily make it. If some of it seems to come from the skies, that is because it has evaporated from the Earth’s surface, condensed and returned.
Most of this surface is sea, and the water below it—over 97% of the total on Earth—is salty. In principle the salt can be removed to increase the supply of fresh water, but at present desalination is expensive and uses lots of energy. Although costs have come down, no one expects it to provide wide-scale irrigation soon.
Of the 2½% of water that is not salty, about 70% is frozen, either at the poles, in glaciers or in permafrost. So all living things, except those in the sea, have about 0.75% of the total to survive on. Most of this available water is underground, in aquifers or similar formations. The rest is falling as rain, sitting in lakes and reservoirs or flowing in rivers where it is, with luck, replaced by rainfall and melting snow and ice. There is also, take note, water vapour in the atmosphere.
These geophysical facts affect the use of language in discussions about water, and the ways in which to think about the problems of scarcity. As Julia Bucknall, the World Bank’s water supremo, points out, demand and supply are economic concepts, which the matchmakers of the dismal science are constantly trying to bring into balance. In the context of water, though, supply is also a physical concept and its maximum is fixed.
Use is another awkward word. If your car runs out of petrol, you have used a tankful. The petrol has been broken down and will not soon be reconstituted. But if you drain a tank of water for your shower, have you used it? Yes, in a sense. But could it not be collected to invigorate the plants in your garden? And will some of it not then seep into the ground to refill an aquifer, or perhaps run into a river, from either of which someone else may draw it? This water has been used, but not in the sense of rendered incapable of further use. Water is not the new oil.
However, there are some “uses” that leave it unusable for anyone else. That is either when it evaporates, from fields, swimming pools, reservoirs or cooling towers, or when it transpires, in the photosynthetic process whereby water vapour passes from the leaves of growing plants into the atmosphere. These two processes, known in combination as evapotranspiration (ET), tend to be overlooked by water policymakers. Yet over 60% of all the rain and snow that hits the ground cannot be captured because it evaporates from the soil or transpires through plants. Like water that cannot be recovered for a specific use because it has run into the sea or perhaps a saline aquifer, water lost through ET is, at least until nature recycles it, well and truly used—or, in the language of the water world, “consumed”, ie, not returned to the system for possible reuse.
The problems caused by inexact terminology do not end here. Concepts like efficiency, productivity and saving attract woolly thinking. Chris Perry, an irrigation economist widely considered the high priest of water accounting, points out that “efficient” domestic systems involve virtually no escape of water through evaporation or irrecoverable seepage. “Efficient” irrigation, though, is often used to describe systems that result in 85% of the water disappearing in vapour. Similarly, water is not saved by merely using less of it for a purpose such as washing or irrigation; it is saved only if less is rendered irrecoverable.
Soaked, parched, poached
Many of these conceptual difficulties arise from other unusual aspects of water. It is a commodity whose value varies according to locality, purpose and circumstance. Take locality first. Water is not evenly distributed—just nine countries account for 60% of all available fresh supplies—and among them only Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Congo, Indonesia and Russia have an abundance. America is relatively well off, but China and India, with over a third of the world’s population between them, have less than 10% of its water.
Even within countries the variations may be huge. The average annual rainfall in India’s north-east is 110 times that in its western desert. And many places have plenty of water, or even far too much, at some times of year, but not nearly enough at others. Most of India’s crucial rain is brought by the summer monsoon, which falls, with luck, in just a few weeks between June and September. Flooding is routine, and may become more frequent and damaging with climate change.
Scarce or plentiful, water is above all local. It is heavy—one cubic metre weighs a tonne—so expensive to move. If you are trying to manage it, you must first divide your area of concern into drainage basins. Surface water—mostly rivers, lakes and reservoirs—will not flow from one basin into another without artificial diversion, and usually only with pumping. Within a basin, the water upstream may be useful for irrigation, industrial or domestic use. As it nears the sea, though, the opportunities diminish to the point where it has no uses except to sustain deltas, wetlands and the estuarial ecology, and to carry silt out to sea.
These should not be overlooked. If rivers do not flow, nothing can live in them. Over a fifth of the world’s freshwater fish species of a century ago are now endangered or extinct. Half the world’s wetlands have also disappeared over the past 100 years. The point is, though, that even within a basin water is more valuable in some places than in others.
Almost anywhere arid, the water underground, once largely ignored, has come to be seen as especially valuable as the demands of farmers have outgrown their supplies of rain and surface water. Groundwater has come to the rescue, and for a while it seemed a miraculous solution: drill a borehole, pump the stuff up from below and in due course it will be replaced. In some places it is indeed replenished quite quickly if rain or surface water is available and the geological and soil conditions are favourable. In many places, however, from the United States to India and China, the quantities being withdrawn exceed the annual recharge. This is serious for millions of people not just in the country but also in many of the world’s biggest cities, which often depend on aquifers for their drinking water.
The 20m inhabitants of Mexico City and its surrounding area, for example, draw over 70% of their water from an aquifer that will run dry, at current extraction rates, within 200 years, maybe much sooner. Already the city is sinking as a result. In Bangkok, Buenos Aires and Jakarta, the aquifers are similarly overdrawn, polluted or contaminated by salt. Just as serious is the depletion of the aquifers on which farmers depend. In the Hai river basin in China, for example, deep-groundwater tables have dropped by up to 90 metres.
Part of the beauty of the borehole is that it requires no elaborate apparatus; a single farmer may be able to sink his own tubewell and start pumping. That is why India and China are now perforated with millions of irrigation wells, each drawing on a common resource. Sometimes this resource will be huge: the High Plains aquifer, for example, covers 450,000 square kilometres below eight American states and the Guaraní aquifer extends across 1.2m square kilometres below parts of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. But even big aquifers are not immune to the laws of physics. Parts of the High Plains are seriously overdrawn. In the United States, China and many other places, farmers probably have to pay something for the right to draw groundwater. But almost nowhere will the price reflect scarcity, and often there is no charge at all and no one measures how much water is being taken.
Liquid asset or human right?
Priced or not, water is certainly valued, and that value depends on the use to which it is harnessed. Water is used not just to grow food but to make every kind of product, from microchips to steel girders. The largest industrial purpose to which it is put is cooling in thermal power generation, but it is also used in drilling for and extracting oil, the making of petroleum products and ethanol, and the production of hydro-electricity. Some of the processes involved, such as hydro power generation, consume little water (after driving the turbines, most is returned to the river), but some, such as the techniques used to extract oil from sands, are big consumers.
Industrial use takes about 60% of water in rich countries and 10% in the rest. The difference in domestic use is much smaller, 11% and 8% respectively. Some of the variation is explained by capacious baths, power showers and flush lavatories in the rich world. All humans, however, need a basic minimum of two litres of water in food or drink each day, and for this there is no substitute. No one survived in the ruins of Port-au-Prince for more than a few days after January’s earthquake unless they had access to some water-based food or drink. That is why many people in poor and arid countries—usually women or children—set off early each morning to trudge to the nearest well and return five or six hours later burdened with precious supplies. That is why many people believe water to be a human right, a necessity more basic than bread or a roof over the head.
From this much follows. One consequence is a widespread belief that no one should have to pay for water. The Byzantine emperor Justinian declared in the sixth century that “by natural law” air, running water, the sea and seashore were “common to all”. Many Indians agree, seeing groundwater in particular as a “democratic resource”. In Africa it is said that “even the jackal deserves to drink”.
A second consequence is that water often has a sacred or mystical quality that is invested in deities like Gong Gong and Osiris and rivers like the Jordan and the Ganges. Throughout history, man’s dependence on water has made him live near it or organise access to it. Water is in his body—it makes up about 60%—and in his soul. It has provided not just life and food but a means of transport, a way of keeping clean, a mechanism for removing sewage, a home for fish and other animals, a medium with which to cook, in which to swim, on which to skate and sail, a thing of beauty to provide inspiration, to gaze upon and to enjoy. No wonder a commodity with so many qualities, uses and associations has proved so difficult to organise.
Friday, May 28, 2010
New Mexico puts old mine to solar use
May 13, 2010 10:26 AM PDT
by Candace Lombardi
Goat Hill North at Questa Mine in Taos County, New Mexico.
(Credit: Mining and Minerals Division of the New Mexico Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department)
Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico in conjunction with Chevron is breaking ground Thursday on a 1-megawatt solar farm on land owned by Chevron Mining near Questa, N.M.
The concentrator photovoltaic systems (CPVs) are being provided by Concentrix Solar. The solar farm, which was originally announced in February, will provide power to the Kit Carson Electric Cooperative through a power purchase agreement it signed with Chevron. Kit Carson is an electricity cooperative that supplies power to rural New Mexico communities in Taos, Colfax, and Rio Arriba counties. The solar farm is scheduled to be up and running by the end of 2010.
But this is not the typical corporate-sponsored solar project. The solar farm actually represents a classic tale of mining, pollution, and the next generation's attempt to clean up for past sins, only with an added green tech twist. The solar farm project is actually the result of decades of complaints, investigations, community meetings, and lawsuits concerning serious water and soil pollution from the mine, according to The Taos News.
The mine, a significant source of employment for the area since the 1920s, is currently owned by Chevron Mining, a subsidiary of Chevron. Chevron inherited the mine in 2005 after a merger with Unocal, which already owned Molycorp, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
The mine consists of an underground mine for the steel alloy molybdenum, which still operates today, as well as an open-pit mine that was in use between 1965 and 1983. After being accused by residents of polluting area soil and water, the mine eventually caught the notice of the EPA, which conducted a years-long investigation. The open-pit mining, which resulted in the "excavation and dumping of approximately 328 million tons of acid generating and potentially acid generating waste rock" into the environment, is thought to have contributed to the bulk of the pollution in the area, though insufficiently treated waste water from the molybdenum mine also contributed, according to the EPA.
The EPA issued a risk assessment report on "the Molycorp site" in August 2007 (PDF), and declared the area a Superfund site with a 122-page EPA plan for cleanup issued in December 2009 (PDF). The plan proposes a new water treatment plant for the existing molybdenum mine, as well as the removal of PCB-contaminated soil and collection of seepage-impacted ground water from the mine site; its tailing sites (land where the mine's slurry pipeline was laid and eventually leaked); and affected areas which include the Red River, a tributary of the Rio Grande.
As part of the cleanup effort proposed by the EPA, Chevron is installing a solar farm consisting of 175 solar panels across 20 acres on the tailing lands where contaminated soil and water is to be removed
by Candace Lombardi
Goat Hill North at Questa Mine in Taos County, New Mexico.
(Credit: Mining and Minerals Division of the New Mexico Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department)
Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico in conjunction with Chevron is breaking ground Thursday on a 1-megawatt solar farm on land owned by Chevron Mining near Questa, N.M.
The concentrator photovoltaic systems (CPVs) are being provided by Concentrix Solar. The solar farm, which was originally announced in February, will provide power to the Kit Carson Electric Cooperative through a power purchase agreement it signed with Chevron. Kit Carson is an electricity cooperative that supplies power to rural New Mexico communities in Taos, Colfax, and Rio Arriba counties. The solar farm is scheduled to be up and running by the end of 2010.
But this is not the typical corporate-sponsored solar project. The solar farm actually represents a classic tale of mining, pollution, and the next generation's attempt to clean up for past sins, only with an added green tech twist. The solar farm project is actually the result of decades of complaints, investigations, community meetings, and lawsuits concerning serious water and soil pollution from the mine, according to The Taos News.
The mine, a significant source of employment for the area since the 1920s, is currently owned by Chevron Mining, a subsidiary of Chevron. Chevron inherited the mine in 2005 after a merger with Unocal, which already owned Molycorp, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
The mine consists of an underground mine for the steel alloy molybdenum, which still operates today, as well as an open-pit mine that was in use between 1965 and 1983. After being accused by residents of polluting area soil and water, the mine eventually caught the notice of the EPA, which conducted a years-long investigation. The open-pit mining, which resulted in the "excavation and dumping of approximately 328 million tons of acid generating and potentially acid generating waste rock" into the environment, is thought to have contributed to the bulk of the pollution in the area, though insufficiently treated waste water from the molybdenum mine also contributed, according to the EPA.
The EPA issued a risk assessment report on "the Molycorp site" in August 2007 (PDF), and declared the area a Superfund site with a 122-page EPA plan for cleanup issued in December 2009 (PDF). The plan proposes a new water treatment plant for the existing molybdenum mine, as well as the removal of PCB-contaminated soil and collection of seepage-impacted ground water from the mine site; its tailing sites (land where the mine's slurry pipeline was laid and eventually leaked); and affected areas which include the Red River, a tributary of the Rio Grande.
As part of the cleanup effort proposed by the EPA, Chevron is installing a solar farm consisting of 175 solar panels across 20 acres on the tailing lands where contaminated soil and water is to be removed
Using a dairy farm to power your server farm
May 18, 2010 6:00 PM PDT
by Erica Ogg
What do 10,000 cows and diesel generators have in common?
Both have the ability to power a 1-megawatt data center. Diesel generators are already used for this purpose at some data center sites, though the energy source is not very environmentally friendly. On the other hand, 10,000 cows grazing a dairy farm produce 20,000 metric tons of manure each year that can be turned into methane gas and eventually electrical power.
That's according to researchers from HP Labs, who are presenting a paper on these findings at the ASME International Conference on Energy Sustainability in Phoenix on Wednesday.
The idea is this: As our demand grows for computing power and data storage, the capacity to power data centers is not keeping up properly. HP's goal is to use sustainable processes to build data centers that are self-sufficient. That is, build data centers whose power sources are from sustainable energy sources and whose heat output can be recycled and reused within that same data center.
(Credit: HP Labs)
As odd as it may sound, that's where the cows come in. The average dairy cow produces 55 kilograms of manure per day, or 20 metric tons per year. An individual cow's manure can generate 3 kilowatt-hours of electrical energy per day. (That alone could power television usage in three U.S. households on a daily basis.)
And on a farm with 10,000 cows, that amounts to enough energy to power a 1-megawatt data center, according to HP researchers.
"These farms already exist. Some already use the methane and (distribute) it elsewhere for local use," said Chandrakant Patel, one of the HP Labs researchers on the project. "We are suggesting that if you are starting to (look for a place to locate) a data center, now that high-speed networking is starting to extend into other areas, why not look at this opportunity where you cannot only use manure, but capture the energy right at the source?"
The process would work like this: farms already have a manure collection system. The biomass goes into an anaerobic digester, which breaks down the waste like a sewage treatment plant would. At this point in the process, methane gas is released. But in HP's vision, instead of a farm burning off that gas--one of the most dangerous greenhouse gases--the chemical energy in that methane could be converted into electrical energy to power the data center.
To complete the circle, the heat that the data center gives off is then reused as part of the energy needed to break down the biomass.
In India, for example, they are running out of power to keep the data centers that are being built there up and running. "In India they need diesel generators because the power grid can't keep up with the growth," said Patel, and there lies a golden opportunity for a dairy farmer. Patel points out, there could be some money to be made for the enterprising farmer who wants to recycle and use his cows' daily output for this purpose.
The cost to build a 1-megawatt data center is around $5 million. But it could generate around $2 million in revenue per year. So after two or three years, the builder would already make the investment back
by Erica Ogg
What do 10,000 cows and diesel generators have in common?
Both have the ability to power a 1-megawatt data center. Diesel generators are already used for this purpose at some data center sites, though the energy source is not very environmentally friendly. On the other hand, 10,000 cows grazing a dairy farm produce 20,000 metric tons of manure each year that can be turned into methane gas and eventually electrical power.
That's according to researchers from HP Labs, who are presenting a paper on these findings at the ASME International Conference on Energy Sustainability in Phoenix on Wednesday.
The idea is this: As our demand grows for computing power and data storage, the capacity to power data centers is not keeping up properly. HP's goal is to use sustainable processes to build data centers that are self-sufficient. That is, build data centers whose power sources are from sustainable energy sources and whose heat output can be recycled and reused within that same data center.
(Credit: HP Labs)
As odd as it may sound, that's where the cows come in. The average dairy cow produces 55 kilograms of manure per day, or 20 metric tons per year. An individual cow's manure can generate 3 kilowatt-hours of electrical energy per day. (That alone could power television usage in three U.S. households on a daily basis.)
And on a farm with 10,000 cows, that amounts to enough energy to power a 1-megawatt data center, according to HP researchers.
"These farms already exist. Some already use the methane and (distribute) it elsewhere for local use," said Chandrakant Patel, one of the HP Labs researchers on the project. "We are suggesting that if you are starting to (look for a place to locate) a data center, now that high-speed networking is starting to extend into other areas, why not look at this opportunity where you cannot only use manure, but capture the energy right at the source?"
The process would work like this: farms already have a manure collection system. The biomass goes into an anaerobic digester, which breaks down the waste like a sewage treatment plant would. At this point in the process, methane gas is released. But in HP's vision, instead of a farm burning off that gas--one of the most dangerous greenhouse gases--the chemical energy in that methane could be converted into electrical energy to power the data center.
To complete the circle, the heat that the data center gives off is then reused as part of the energy needed to break down the biomass.
In India, for example, they are running out of power to keep the data centers that are being built there up and running. "In India they need diesel generators because the power grid can't keep up with the growth," said Patel, and there lies a golden opportunity for a dairy farmer. Patel points out, there could be some money to be made for the enterprising farmer who wants to recycle and use his cows' daily output for this purpose.
The cost to build a 1-megawatt data center is around $5 million. But it could generate around $2 million in revenue per year. So after two or three years, the builder would already make the investment back
Wastewater-to-fertilizer plant captures nutrients
May 23, 2010 6:00 AM PDT
by Martin LaMonica
Ostara Nutrient Recovery Technologies later this week will dedicate a system that converts wastewater from sewage-treatment plants into fertilizer while recycling valuable phosphorus and nitrogen.
On Thursday, the Hampton Roads Sanitation District (HRSD) in Suffolk, Va., will host the official opening of the facility, the second commercial-scale plant to use Ostara's technology. Long-time clean water advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is an investor in the company through his involvement with VantagePoint Venture Partners, will be a speaker at the event.
Ostara's reactors isolates nutrients from wastewater at sewage treatment plants to make fertilizer. Because of environmental regulations, some wastewater treatment plants separate nutrients using bacteria to prevent them from being discharged into waterways. Ostara's technology can be added to these plants to convert the separated wastewater into a sellable product called Crystal Green, explained Ostara CEO Phillip Abrary.
Instead of treating that wastewater with chemicals and disposing of the solids, the HRSD facility has installed three vessels that take in wastewater and mix it with the salt magnesium chloride. Water moves upward into the cone-shaped tank, called a fluidized bed reactor, which prevents the solid material from settling and causes crystals to form through a chemical reaction.
The white crystals are ammonium magnesium phosphate, which is sold as high-phosphate fertilizer pellets to nurseries, turf, and specialty agricultural companies. The technology, which can capture about 85 percent of the available nutrients, can also be used in plants where nutrient build-up is a problem, said Abrary.
In Virginia, these reactors will replace a process that relies on adding chemicals to the wastewater. The sale of fertilizer, handled by Ostara, will finance the sale of equipment and operations. Ostara's first facility in Oregon also purchased the equipment and projects a payback in five years, Abrary said.
The key to the technology, which was originally developed at the University of British Columbia, is the shape of the reactor, which allows the company to make crystals that can be sold as slow-release fertilizer, he said.
In addition to dealing with nutrient run-off, the technology helps preserve phosphorus, which is mined from Morocco, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and China, where the majority of reserves are found.
"Discharging nutrients is not a good thing and there are more and more regulations coming," Abrary said. "Phosphorus is a nonrenewable resource that's absolutely necessary. If you don't have phosphorus, you can't grow things."
The facility in Virginia will be able to produce about 500 tons of fertilizer product a year, which is a sliver of the 35 million tons of phosphates sold every year. Because the company's technology is a relatively efficient way to capture the nutrients in waste, Abrary said the company has a significant pipeline of projects under discussion, including one in Pennsylvania where Ostara would own and operate the facility itself.
"The technology is proven, the market believes that it works because it's a chemical process," he said. "The biggest barrier is that many customers are municipal organizations that just don't react as quickly as the private sector."
by Martin LaMonica
Ostara Nutrient Recovery Technologies later this week will dedicate a system that converts wastewater from sewage-treatment plants into fertilizer while recycling valuable phosphorus and nitrogen.
On Thursday, the Hampton Roads Sanitation District (HRSD) in Suffolk, Va., will host the official opening of the facility, the second commercial-scale plant to use Ostara's technology. Long-time clean water advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is an investor in the company through his involvement with VantagePoint Venture Partners, will be a speaker at the event.
Ostara's reactors isolates nutrients from wastewater at sewage treatment plants to make fertilizer. Because of environmental regulations, some wastewater treatment plants separate nutrients using bacteria to prevent them from being discharged into waterways. Ostara's technology can be added to these plants to convert the separated wastewater into a sellable product called Crystal Green, explained Ostara CEO Phillip Abrary.
Instead of treating that wastewater with chemicals and disposing of the solids, the HRSD facility has installed three vessels that take in wastewater and mix it with the salt magnesium chloride. Water moves upward into the cone-shaped tank, called a fluidized bed reactor, which prevents the solid material from settling and causes crystals to form through a chemical reaction.
The white crystals are ammonium magnesium phosphate, which is sold as high-phosphate fertilizer pellets to nurseries, turf, and specialty agricultural companies. The technology, which can capture about 85 percent of the available nutrients, can also be used in plants where nutrient build-up is a problem, said Abrary.
In Virginia, these reactors will replace a process that relies on adding chemicals to the wastewater. The sale of fertilizer, handled by Ostara, will finance the sale of equipment and operations. Ostara's first facility in Oregon also purchased the equipment and projects a payback in five years, Abrary said.
The key to the technology, which was originally developed at the University of British Columbia, is the shape of the reactor, which allows the company to make crystals that can be sold as slow-release fertilizer, he said.
In addition to dealing with nutrient run-off, the technology helps preserve phosphorus, which is mined from Morocco, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and China, where the majority of reserves are found.
"Discharging nutrients is not a good thing and there are more and more regulations coming," Abrary said. "Phosphorus is a nonrenewable resource that's absolutely necessary. If you don't have phosphorus, you can't grow things."
The facility in Virginia will be able to produce about 500 tons of fertilizer product a year, which is a sliver of the 35 million tons of phosphates sold every year. Because the company's technology is a relatively efficient way to capture the nutrients in waste, Abrary said the company has a significant pipeline of projects under discussion, including one in Pennsylvania where Ostara would own and operate the facility itself.
"The technology is proven, the market believes that it works because it's a chemical process," he said. "The biggest barrier is that many customers are municipal organizations that just don't react as quickly as the private sector."
Micromidas to test sludge-to-plastic tech
May 27, 2010 7:58 AM PDT
by Martin LaMonica
Later this year, start-up Micromidas plans to test how well an army of microbes can convert sludge from wastewater treatment plants into a biodegradable plastic.
The Sacramento, Calif.-based company, which raised $3.6 million last month in series A venture funding, expects to start pilot testing a waste-to-plastic machine at its labs within a month. Then in about five months it hopes to take that biorefinery, which can fit in a shipping container, to a wastewater treatment plant, said CEO and founder John Bissell.
(Credit: Micromidas) Because it's still early in development, the company doesn't know how much the system will cost compared to making the plastic polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA) from glucose or fructose. But if successful, the system will be valuable to wastewater treatment facilities where as much as 40 percent of operating costs stem from handling sewage sludge, Bissell said.
Micromidas is one of a number of companies trying to create something valuable from waste. In another example, Ostara Nutrient Recovery Technologies on Thursday is opening a facility to convert wastewater into a fertilizer, which reduces the amount of nutrient run-off to waterways.
In the case of Micromidas, the company is using the carbon in sewage sludge as a feedstock to make plastic. "There are a bunch of nutrients available, which we feed to our microbes which consume it and then aggregate it," Bissell explained. "They eat it, they get fat, we kill them, and then we harvest the material."
Rather than genetically engineering one "superbug," the company uses a combination of microbes to essentially eat and digest portions of the sludge, Bissell said. The population can be adjusted for different facilities, which vary significantly, he said.
Micromidas is taking advantage of Autodesk's Clean Tech Partner program, in which the design and engineering software company makes its products available for free to qualifying clean-tech start-ups.
Using simulation software Algor, Micromidas' chemical engineers can "digitally experiment" with how different processes will work with a different population of microbes, Bissell said.
by Martin LaMonica
Later this year, start-up Micromidas plans to test how well an army of microbes can convert sludge from wastewater treatment plants into a biodegradable plastic.
The Sacramento, Calif.-based company, which raised $3.6 million last month in series A venture funding, expects to start pilot testing a waste-to-plastic machine at its labs within a month. Then in about five months it hopes to take that biorefinery, which can fit in a shipping container, to a wastewater treatment plant, said CEO and founder John Bissell.
(Credit: Micromidas) Because it's still early in development, the company doesn't know how much the system will cost compared to making the plastic polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA) from glucose or fructose. But if successful, the system will be valuable to wastewater treatment facilities where as much as 40 percent of operating costs stem from handling sewage sludge, Bissell said.
Micromidas is one of a number of companies trying to create something valuable from waste. In another example, Ostara Nutrient Recovery Technologies on Thursday is opening a facility to convert wastewater into a fertilizer, which reduces the amount of nutrient run-off to waterways.
In the case of Micromidas, the company is using the carbon in sewage sludge as a feedstock to make plastic. "There are a bunch of nutrients available, which we feed to our microbes which consume it and then aggregate it," Bissell explained. "They eat it, they get fat, we kill them, and then we harvest the material."
Rather than genetically engineering one "superbug," the company uses a combination of microbes to essentially eat and digest portions of the sludge, Bissell said. The population can be adjusted for different facilities, which vary significantly, he said.
Micromidas is taking advantage of Autodesk's Clean Tech Partner program, in which the design and engineering software company makes its products available for free to qualifying clean-tech start-ups.
Using simulation software Algor, Micromidas' chemical engineers can "digitally experiment" with how different processes will work with a different population of microbes, Bissell said.
Nissan: Electric cars could shed government aid in four years
May 27, 2010 12:03 AM PDT
by Reuters
Nissan Motor and alliance partner Renault could market electric vehicles without government incentives within four years as global sales reach 500,000 to 1 million vehicles per year, executives said on Wednesday.
Nissan, which is introducing a mass-market Leaf electric car later this year, needs government incentives to spark initial demand but understands those incentives will not be permanent, Nissan-Renault Chief Executive Carlos Ghosn said.
(Credit: Josh Miller/CNET) "You need to jump-start electric cars at a certain level so that we can get scale, and the scale will allow us to reduce costs," Ghosn told reporters after a groundbreaking at a plant in Tennessee that will produce the Leaf and its battery.
"We think that scale for us is between 500,000 and 1 million cars a year," he said. "When you get between 500,000 and 1 million cars per year, we don't need government support."
Nissan-Renault could have as many as eight electric vehicles between them within a few years, allowing the companies to reach the scale that would make the government incentives unnecessary, executives said.
"We believe we will need two to four years of incentives and supports to reach the level of volume that will free up the cost reductions that we need to implement," said Carlos Tavares, Nissan's chief of the Americas.
Tavares expects the cost of batteries used in the Leaf and other electric vehicles to come down sharply within four years for Nissan and Renault.
Nissan broke ground on a $1.7 billion project to expand its assembly plant in Smyrna and build an adjacent lithium-ion battery plant that will be one of the biggest in North America. The facilities are expected to create 1,300 jobs.
Tavares said Nissan has an edge in battery development by being first in the industry to introduce a mass-market electric vehicle in late 2010 in Japan, the United States, and Europe.
The first Leaf vehicles and their lithium-ion batteries are being built in Japan.
When it is fully functioning, the Smyrna plant will be able to produce 150,000 Leaf electric cars per year. The new battery plant will have the capacity to produce 200,000 battery packs.
Nissan has not said yet whether the additional battery capacity would be used for a different electric vehicle within the Nissan or Renault family. Nissan has said it would be open to selling the batteries to other automakers.
The Nissan plant investment was supported with $1.4 billion of U.S. Energy Department loans.
Nissan started taking orders for the Leaf in April. It had about 13,000 fully refundable orders in the United States as of Tuesday and 6,000 in Japan.
"We have enough capacity to start the mass marketing of electric cars, but if we see when December comes that the hand-raising and pre-orderings transform fully to sales, we are going to have to make a decision about adding additional capacity," Ghosn said.
by Reuters
Nissan Motor and alliance partner Renault could market electric vehicles without government incentives within four years as global sales reach 500,000 to 1 million vehicles per year, executives said on Wednesday.
Nissan, which is introducing a mass-market Leaf electric car later this year, needs government incentives to spark initial demand but understands those incentives will not be permanent, Nissan-Renault Chief Executive Carlos Ghosn said.
(Credit: Josh Miller/CNET) "You need to jump-start electric cars at a certain level so that we can get scale, and the scale will allow us to reduce costs," Ghosn told reporters after a groundbreaking at a plant in Tennessee that will produce the Leaf and its battery.
"We think that scale for us is between 500,000 and 1 million cars a year," he said. "When you get between 500,000 and 1 million cars per year, we don't need government support."
Nissan-Renault could have as many as eight electric vehicles between them within a few years, allowing the companies to reach the scale that would make the government incentives unnecessary, executives said.
"We believe we will need two to four years of incentives and supports to reach the level of volume that will free up the cost reductions that we need to implement," said Carlos Tavares, Nissan's chief of the Americas.
Tavares expects the cost of batteries used in the Leaf and other electric vehicles to come down sharply within four years for Nissan and Renault.
Nissan broke ground on a $1.7 billion project to expand its assembly plant in Smyrna and build an adjacent lithium-ion battery plant that will be one of the biggest in North America. The facilities are expected to create 1,300 jobs.
Tavares said Nissan has an edge in battery development by being first in the industry to introduce a mass-market electric vehicle in late 2010 in Japan, the United States, and Europe.
The first Leaf vehicles and their lithium-ion batteries are being built in Japan.
When it is fully functioning, the Smyrna plant will be able to produce 150,000 Leaf electric cars per year. The new battery plant will have the capacity to produce 200,000 battery packs.
Nissan has not said yet whether the additional battery capacity would be used for a different electric vehicle within the Nissan or Renault family. Nissan has said it would be open to selling the batteries to other automakers.
The Nissan plant investment was supported with $1.4 billion of U.S. Energy Department loans.
Nissan started taking orders for the Leaf in April. It had about 13,000 fully refundable orders in the United States as of Tuesday and 6,000 in Japan.
"We have enough capacity to start the mass marketing of electric cars, but if we see when December comes that the hand-raising and pre-orderings transform fully to sales, we are going to have to make a decision about adding additional capacity," Ghosn said.
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