So, this is just a map of
the United States showing water requirements for irrigation.
I don't think it should come as a shock to anybody.
Out here in the west where you get
much less rainfall during the summer growing season, obviously
you have a much higher requirement for mined water,
for irrigation water, or for taking out of streams.
And then, over here is simply the amount of gallons per bushel of corn consumed.
And as you can see, that's a much higher consumption of water to produce a
bushel of corn in California, than to produce a bushel of corn in, in Illinois.
But, water is also used for other parts of the process as well.
Alright, so a big impact is the agriculture production that can
come in from rain fall that can come in through irrigation.
Some of the water used to grow the plants, some of this run off,
some of this goes for erosion or loss of in other forms of water loss.
Then after you produce the corn, you have
to go through the industrial process of turning
that corn into ethanol And so again, you
have water consumption in the industrial process as well.
So, what does that look like?
You get it in a couple of different places.
One, you have fresh water makeup to bring into the ethanol plant.
You then distill, after you've taken the corn, fermented it into ethanol.
It's a relatively small percent of ethanol in the water,
and you actually have to boil all the water off.
So, all of that water goes off as evaporation.
So, you lose a fair amount from that.
And you also have to put in, a fair amount of water into the process.
Just to get the entire thing going.
Because obviously the yeast that do the
fermentation, have to be in a water environment.
So total water demand, for a 50 million gallon per year plant, in terms of
gallons per hour you can see these numbers are pretty big, 5,280 gallons per hour.
The bottom line being the specific water demand comes up
to be 3.6 gallons of water for every gallon of ethanol.
In the pilot plant, in the, in the actual production.
Add on top of that, all the water that was required to grow it.
'Kay?
So, there's a fair amount of water that
is going to be used in any bio fuel production.
But, don't think that bio fuels are the
only energy, source that we have that requires water.
Every single one of them requires water.
A gallon of diesel requires about five gallons.
Or, or gasoline requires five gallons of
water, to produce one gallon of, of gasoline.
Natural gas, it's about five gallons per thousand cubic feet.
Coal, about 50 gallons per ton of coal process, and
electricity, as we showed before, is an enormous consumer of water.
Okay?
Water is also used in a new process called
fracking, and we'll talk about that in other lectures.
In, in, in fracking technology what you do is drill a, a gas or oil well,
and then you take water and under high
pressure squeeze it underground to frack the ground open.
This consumes a huge amount of water.
There are a 180, 000 wells in Texas alone.