Coal Isn’t Just Bad For The Air. It’s A Huge Water Waster - Greenpeace report
Burning coal doesn’t
just pollute the environment and harm people’s health — it’s a huge drain on
the world’s increasingly strained supply of freshwater.
The world’s coal-fired
power plants use enough water to meet the basic water requirements of 1 billion
people, according to a Greenpeace report released late Monday. Making matters
worse, 25 percent of the world’s coal-fired power plants — there are about
8,400 already, and an additional 2,700 planned — are in areas where
freshwater is being used faster than it is replenished.
“Governments must
recognize that replacing coal with renewable energy will not only help them
deliver on their climate agreements, but also deliver huge water savings,” Iris
Cheng, an author of the report, said in a statement. Water is a crucial
part of coal-fired power at every stage, from mining to burning to waste
treatment. In total, the coal industry consumes 7 percent of the world’s water,
according to the report. That amount could double over the next 20 years
if every proposed coal-fired power plant ends up getting built.
An average coal
plant “can withdraw enough water to suck dry an Olympic-sized swimming
pool roughly every three minutes,” the report says. In some places, coal’s
water use is particularly intense. For instance, the coal industry in China
consumes about 20 percent of the country’s water, according to Jennifer Turner,
director of the China Environment Forum at the Woodrow Wilson Center. Turner is
unaffiliated with the Greenpeace report, but has written extensively on water
and energy issues in China.
Turner told HuffPost
that China’s Ministry of Water Resources has produced long, data-heavy reports
that back up the anecdotal evidence that environmentalists have been preaching. And China’s not alone.
In the U.S., 38 percent of all freshwater use goes to power plants.
The vast majority of that water is returned to rivers and lakes, after it has
been used to cool power generators. (China and the U.S. are now working
together to study ways to reduce the energy sector’s water use.)
Eventually, some
places in the world may have to stop building coal-fired power plants because
they don’t have enough water. People usually talk
about China’s coal problem in terms of the horrendous air pollution, said
Turner. But “the air pollution is infinitely more solvable. ... It appears when
you look at the numbers, [coal development is] impossible in the long
run. Northern China just does not have the water to continue the coal
development that they’ve had in the books.”
Coal’s massive water
use is gaining attention as an under-appreciated reason renewable energy
sources like wind and solar are becoming more competitive with fossil fuels.
Renewable energy is not just lower carbon. It also uses far less water than
non-renewable sources. Wind power barely uses
any water. Solar panels use some — during the manufacturing process,
and to clean the panels once they have been installed — but far less than for
coal or other fossil fuels, according to David Rodgers, an energy efficiency
and renewable energy researcher at the Global Environment Facility.
A shift to renewables
would allow much more of the planet’s water to be used for agriculture to feed
the growing population, rather than energy. “Around the globe
there is a recognition that energy, water, and food are inextricably linked,”
Rodgers said.
