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WATER POLITICS

Via the Wilson Center’s China Environment series, an extensive report on what some have long considered the “black box” of China’s energy-water nexus challenge, namely the energy footprint of cleaning, treating, and transporting water to quench the thirst of cities in China’s dry north:

China’s dramatic urbanization over the past four decades has fundamentally reshaped the country, generating considerable wealth, as well as significant environmental damage. Air pollution is the more visible negative impact of the unchecked urbanization, but the intensifying water scarcity in northern China represents perhaps the greatest threat to decelerating economic growth in megacities like Beijing. As water stress intensifies across the urban north, the demand for energy to transport, pump, clean, recycle, and desalinate water for these cities is on the rise. This is especially true because huge growth in northern China’s urban population since 1980—a time period in which Beijing’s population roughly doubled—have not been offset by corresponding gains in water-use efficiency. Leaving no stone unturned, Chinese cities are desalinating the oceans, withdrawing groundwater supplies for ever-deeper reaches several thousand feet beneath the earth, and transporting water from river basins more than 1,000 kilometers to the south to meet demand. The overall energy requirements needed to support these water-supply practices for China’s urban north are almost impossible to estimate due to insufficient data availability, yet the trend appears clear—water’s energy footprint in China’s urban north is expanding with each passing year, especially as massive infrastructure projects like the eastern arm of the South-North Water Transfer Project come online. While Chinese policymakers and scholars have started to examine the expanding water footprint of China’s energy industry, they have paid comparatively little attention to the growing energy footprint of water transfer projects and desalination plants in supplying water to the parched cities and industries in the north. This water currently accounts for a small slice of the overall energy pie, but its share in energy consumption grows steadily. Most problematic is that these energy-intensive water projects offer only short-term solutions to the water shortages, thereby delaying more sustainable urban wastewater treatment and water recycling efforts and reforms in water pricing that could better ensure future water security for northern cities.

A THIRSTY TIGER

With 70 percent of China’s population expected to live in cities within 15 years and a growing middle class sporting a more water- intensive lifestyle, water infrastructure in Chinese cities are being burdened like never before. China’s ability to meet rising urban water demand while maintaining some degree of environmental sustainability will likely prove to be one of the country’s principal challenges in the 21st century.

The intensifying water scarcity in northern China represents the hefty bill now due to pay for the past 40+ years of unchecked seismic economic growth that has reshaped the region from the ground up. Water wastage and overuse by the energy, industrial, and agricultural sectors, have grown exponentially since the late 1970s, driven by the intertwined forces of economic modernization, population growth, and urbanization (Xie et al., 1993). Aging and leaking water distribution infrastructure, unclear water rights, and low water fees are also part of the equation that discourage water conservation. Falling levels of water availability have also periodically threatened the region’s food production and pose ever increasing risks to the megacities in the north.

Cities are also part of the problem. While agriculture and coal development use the lion’s share of north China’s water, the water footprint of cities is growing, as is the energy needed to provide and clean this water for these urban centers. (See Box 1). Two to three percent of worldwide energy use goes to transfer, pump, treat, distribute, and heat water for urban households, industries, and non-agricultural businesses every year. Across northern China the energy footprint of urban water services is significantly higher than global averages and continues to grow. According to one recent study of Changzhou in Jiangsu Province, the city’s water infrastructure used roughly 10 percent of the Changzhou’s overall energy supply, with industrial use of water accounting for some 70 percent of water-related energy use, while the household sector accounted for less than 25 percent (Zhou, et al., 2013).

There is something of a “Catch 22” at work as China works to combat its perpetual urban water supply problems. With a few notable exceptions, the Chinese government has chosen to prioritize water supply augmentation over demand management and conservation. As a result, water-use inefficiency—particularly in urban areas—has been largely tolerated, and continues generally unabated. The Chinese government recognizes that if urbanization in the arid north is to prove sustainable, a wide net must be cast to bring in as many new water supplies to the region as possible—whatever the cost. These approaches include everything from desalination and aggressive wastewater treatment and recycling to dropping deeper groundwater wells and replumbing parts of the Tibetan plateau to transfer massive volumes of water via the South-North Water Transfer Project.

The energy to power these processes— whether it be desalination, groundwater pumping, or long-distance bulk-water transfers—is primarily provided by fossil fuels. In turn, the burning of fossil fuels contributes to both localized air pollution and contributes to broader global warming, exacerbating ongoing climate change impacts that have made precipitation patterns across northern China more erratic over the years. In this mutually reinforcing cycle, urbanization, water-use inefficiency, fossil fuel consumption, and climate change combine to place the water security of China’s urban north in something of a downward spiral.

In a country perpetually concerned about meeting soaring domestic demand for energy, it is puzzling that policymakers and researchers are overlooking the growing energy costs of bringing new water supplies online for China’s northern cities. In China, data on the energy footprint of urban water services is not often compiled and what data exists is rarely made publicly available. Nevertheless, this paper reviews public documents and examines economic, environmental, and demographic trends to assess the amount of energy China will require to ensure a reliable water supply for its northern cities as the region’s water crunch intensifies in the years and decades ahead.

SUPPLY SIDE, DEMAND SIDE, OR BOTH?

China’s megacity capital embodies the greatest urban water security challenges facing the country today. Over the past 35 years, Beijing’s metropolitan area has become home to some 20 million people—vastly overwhelming the capacity of the city’s water infrastructure and natural resource base. Some hydrological experts, such as Xu Xinyi of Beijing Normal University’s College of Water Sciences, estimate that available water in the region could provide Beijing 2.1 billion cubic meters of water annually to sustainably support a population of roughly 12 million. With nearly twice the population, it is thus not surprising that Beijing’s annual water consumption has reached slightly over four billion cubic meters.

In terms of water, city officials wrestle with frequent droughts, plummeting groundwater tables, and inefficient wastewater treatment that contaminates public water supplies. Yet even in the face of such daunting water challenges, Beijing has managed some elements of its urban water supply impressively—particularly water recycling in its industrial sector. For this reason, Beijing provides a complex case study that is alternatively worrisome and promising, and illustrates the many push-and-pull factors shaping urban water management in an era of increasing scarcity across northern China.

With China’s total aggregate water demand expected to reach a whopping 818 billion cubic meters by 2030, the government appears to be prioritizing energy-intensive efforts to bolster supply—such as desalination and long-distance water transfers—over campaigns to incentivize greater water-use efficiency (“Charting our water future,” 2009). Indeed, ambitious efforts to make up for the supply shortfall — regardless of the energy required to build and operate this infrastructure—reveal the Chinese government’s faith in big-ticket, supply-side interventions over demand-side measures such as improved efficiency standards and intensified water recycling.

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With Beijing roughly doubling in size since 1980, the city has struggled to keep up with growing water demand. Some experts have suggested the metropolitan area could sustainably support a population of 12 million given its locally available natural resource allotment; it is now home to 20 million, and poised to grow significantly in the years ahead. Beijing’s per capita water availability – 120 cubic meters — is far below the international threshold for “absolute water scarcity.”

 

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The Chinese government has not altogether ignored the potential gains that can be made from better demand side management of water:

• Ramping up Water Conservation Investment: In 2015, the Ministry of Water Resources announced a 488 billion RMB ($79 billion) investment into water protection—half of which will be spent on major water conservation projects with the rest used to supply drinking water in rural areas (“China plans increased investment,” 2015). ?
• Advocating Public-Private Partnerships: In May 2015, China’s National Development and Reform Commission also released a list of more than 1,000 proposed projects to be funded via public-private partnerships, some of which include projects focused squarely on improving water conservation (“China invites private investors,” 2015). ?• Pushing Water Recycling: Over the past 40 years, Beijing municipality has made some notable gains in key areas of water-use efficiency— gains that hint at significant potential for continued progress in the years ahead. For example, between 1978 and 1984, the rate of recycled industrial water in Beijing jumped from less than 50 percent to more than 70 percent. Many of today’s key economic players in China, including textile manufacturers and the coal industry, were among the parties driving this early improvement in water efficiency. The increased usage of reclaimed industrial water supply was all the more impressive because during that time period, overall water consumption saw a modest drop, while overall industrial production rose by more than 75 percent (Xie et al., 1993). ?

Water management officials have to walk a tightrope in the years ahead as they look to keep Beijing, Tianjin, and other northern Chinese cities afloat with sufficient water. They will not only have to balance supply-side interventions against demand-side efforts, but also balance the water demands of growing urban populations against the competing water needs of the agricultural, industrial, and power sectors. Complicating matters further, these allocation challenges are surfacing as worsening environmental degradation and evolving climate change impacts are making the quality and quantity of water available in northern China ever more unpredictable. Given the severity and uncertain nature of northern China’s water stress, it perhaps comes as little surprise that officials are willing to invest whatever energy resources are needed to mitigate this worsening crisis.

FROM THE SEA TO THE CITY: ENERGY IMPLICATIONS OF CHINA’S DESALINATION PUSH

One of the principal drivers behind the expanding energy footprint of urban water services in China has been the desalination industry. Already, desalination plants dot the coast from Dalian to Tianjin to YuHuan, and between 2015 and 2018, China will be building several more facilities along its coastline as part of a multi-billion dollar desalination construction push. While some of the earliest opened plants have been hemorrhaging money, water planners are confident that in time, the country’s investment into desalination will pay off and bolster water security for coastal industries and urban households.

The energy required to desalinate seawater has dropped over the decades as the technology has become more sophisticated—particularly owing to the development of reverse osmosis membranes—but the process remains an energy-intensive undertaking. Physics dictates that at least one kilowatt hour (kWh) per cubic meter must be used to desalinate seawater (Elimelech, 2012). To date, however, the most efficient energy usage for desalination has been two kWh per cubic meter, using reverse osmosis. Currently, energy expenditures of three to four kWh per cubic meter of desalinated seawater are more common, making desalination far more energy-intensive than groundwater extraction or surface water withdrawals (Dashtpour & Al-Zubaidy, 2012). (See Box 2).

As China’s desalination industry expands, the country has taken steps to reduce the sector’s energy footprint as much as possible. For example, at the YuHuan Desalination Plant in Zheijang Province—one of China’s largest plants that opened in 2006—designers have used pressure exchanger technology to make operations more energy-efficient as the plant produces 36,000 cubic meters of desalinated water per day. This technology boasts the potential to cut energy consumption at desalination plants by more than 65 percent, and by 2008, 8 out of every 10 desalination facilities in China were employing similar pressure exchanger technology (“YuHuan desalination,” 2008).

NO SILVER BULLET

Desalination operations farther north in Tianjin are also seeking to reduce the amount of energy needed for saltwater conversion. In this water-stressed city, the state-of-the-art Beijing Desalination Plant on the Bohai Sea was built at a cost of more than 12 billion yuan. As a hybrid facility, it both desalinates water and produces 4,000 megawatts (MW)of coal- generated electricity. The plant has sought to set new standards for energy efficiency in the desalination sector, by repurposing the steam generated from its thermal power operations into the desalination process. Despite the high expectations for the facility, it has underperformed. Built to purify 200,000 cubic meters of potable water every day, the plant did not produce even 25 percent of that amount after opening in April 2010, owing to infrastructure issues and problems with utility companies in the area (Watts, 2011). The comparatively high cost of the plant’s desalinated water—some 30 percent higher than non-desalinated water in Tianjin—has dissuaded some potential industrial buyers (Hatton, 2013). 

Still, expectations remain high for desalination to help Tianjin and Beijing make up their water shortfalls. The energy footprint of desalination is not measured solely by the volume of seawater processed at the plant, but also by the energy needed to transport the desalinated water to the end consumer. With Beijing 90 miles from the sea and Tianjin on the coast, neither city will require distant overland shipments of desalinated water which helps lower the sector’s energy footprint. Costs of transport could raise, however, if coastal cities opt to pump and desalinate offshore fresh water reserves. (See Box 3).

Despite desalination’s energy-intensive nature and the technology’s significant environmental impacts on coastal waters, the sector is projected to grow significantly in China in the decades ahead. Tariffs may help offset some of the financial costs associated with the practice and the Chinese government is funding research and development to lower the energy costs of saltwater conversion and use this technology as one to eventually export.

Even assuming Beijing’s water needs remained static and that its entire desalinated water supply used current state-of-the-art practices to convert saltwater using two kWh per cubic meter, the energy costs of desalinating 1.4 billion cubic meters annually would be staggering—roughly the equivalent of powering the state of California for one year (California Energy Commission, 2010).

Desalination is no silver bullet and cannot fully meet the growing annual demand for fresh water in China’s urban north. Even if the energy costs of desalination drop below two kWh per cubic meter in the future, it is unlikely that desalinated water could eventually meet even 50 percent of Beijing’s overall water needs (Watts, 2011).

One promising solution to energy- intensive water supply lies in harnessing the potential for renewable-powered desalination. Using green energy sources such as solar

or wind to power the notoriously energy- intensive process of purifying seawater is the focus of research efforts throughout the world, and China is an active participant. In late 2013, it opened the country’s first windpower desalination plant in Dafeng. With a 2.5-MW wind turbine powering operations, the plant is expected to generate 10,000 tons of desalinated water every day (“China looks,” 2013). If successful this project could be replicated in many other coastal locations, reducing the fossil fuel footprint of China’s expanding desalination efforts and decreasing the sector’s greenhouse gas emissions.

MOVING EARTH, MOVING WATER: THE SOUTH-NORTH WATER TRANSFER PROJECT

Since construction officially broke ground in 2002, the South-North Water Transfer Project (SNWTP) has proven an enormously ambitious and controversial undertaking. Slated to eventually channel roughly 45 billion cubic meters of water from China’s water-abundant south to Beijing and other water-scarce cities in the north via three main branches, this bulk water transfer project—with an estimated price of $62 billion that could go much higher—has been beset by problems from the beginning (Moore, 2013). In December 2013 the SNWTP started supplying Beijing with water, bringing 100 million cubic meters of water in the first year (“China plans,” 2015).

Water pollution along the SNWTP’s central branch has emerged as a major concern, while criticisms of the project’s environmental impacts and its displacement of populations along its route have simmered for years. The project has even triggered rare public opposition from some government officials, such as Qiu Baoxing, vice minister of China’s Ministry of Housing and Urban- Rural Development, who argued in February 2014 that northern cities should focus more on water conservation, rather than depend on outside supplies (Wang, 2014).

Lost in the shuffle of the broader SNWTP debate over water pollution, however, has been discussion of the expenditure of energy required to construct and operate the SNWTP infrastructure upon its completion. Long- distance bulk water transfers on the scale of the SNWTP have never before been attempted anywhere else. The three main branches of the project cover large distances and the central and eastern branches are being routed undertheYellowRiver.Inthecaseofthestill- unrealized western branch that is scheduled to be completed in 2050, water would need to be transported at elevations in excess of 4,500 meters above sea level (Moore, 2013).

Portions of the eastern branch, which will help carry fresh water northward to Tianjin among other coastal locations, became operational in December 2013. Operations along this 1,150-kilometer branch will likely leave a substantial energy footprint, due to elevation changes along its route and water contamination concerns in the branch’s

waterways. To move water over such varied terrain—projected to require more than 0.1 kWh per cubic meter (Jaffe & Schneider, 2011)—23 pumping stations with an installed capacity of more than 450 MW are being built to support seven existing stations (“South- to-North Water,” 2014). Some estimates have placed the total annual electricity requirements to move water supplies northward along the eastern arm at roughly 2.8 billion kWh as a result (Jaffe & Schneider, 2011).

In comparison, the SNWTP’s 1,260-kilometer central branch may fare comparatively better from an energy use standpoint. Once fully operational—test shipments of water began moving through the central branch’s infrastructure in late 2014 to much fanfare—the central branch is projected to bring Beijing one billion cubic meters annually while also slaking the thirst of Tianjin and 18 other northern Chinese cities (Li, 2014). In all, planners project the central branch will pump 6.5 billion cubic meters of new water supplies from the south to be used by industry and municipal water systems in the north. Unlike the eastern branch, the central branch is designed to rely primarily upon gravity to transfer huge volumes of water from the south to consumers in the north (Office of the SNWDP Commission, 2014). Energy requirements for pumping supplies with the earth’s natural forces along the central branch should be reduced considerably.

The component of the central branch that may likely leave the greatest energy footprint will be wastewater treatment. In November 2013, China’s Ministry of Environmental Protection conceded that Hubei Province’s Danjiangkou Reservoir—an important component of the central branch’s overall waterworks, with a capacity of 1.7 trillion cubic meters—had been receiving raw sewage from industries along five nearby rivers, forcing the government to shut down operations of some of the suspected polluters (Larson,

2013). Consequently, the reservoir’s waters mayrequiremoreenergy-intensivewastewater treatment than earlier anticipated to ensure water supplies transported north are of acceptable quality.

It is possible that regardless of the fate of the project’s western branch, the SNWTP’s central and eastern branches may in time prove critics wrong and help mitigate water supply concerns in Beijing, Tianjin, and other northern cities. However, there exists a third approach to bolstering urban water security in the north that may prove even more effective than any long-distance bulk water transfers or desalination construction boom. It is urban wastewater treatment and water recycling that may give northern Chinese cities a far heftier bang for its yuan in terms of enhancing their present and future water security.

?GREY WATERS RUN DEEP: MAKING THE MOST OF WASTEWATER

Agriculture, industry, and households all draw upon China’s water resources for their own purposes. After water supplies have been used within those sectors, whatever water has not been fully consumed is returned to the hydrological system. Insufficient treatment of returned water from these sectors heightens the risk of chemical pollution from agricultural fertilizers, heavy metal contamination from industrial processes or biological contamination from untreated sewage—all of which degrade surface and groundwater supplies and pose significant public health threats.

Insufficient wastewater treatment and the subsequent contamination of water resources are matters of growing public concern nationwide.1 In terms of total domestic wastewater discharge, six provinces—Guangdong, Jiangsu, Shandong, Zhejiang, Henan and Fujian—generate roughly 45 percent of the country’s wastewater (“Wastewater treatment,” 2013). To ease worries over water quality in these provinces and elsewhere, wastewater treatment is becoming big business and represents a major growth industry in China. The government has gotten behind the effort in recent years, investing heavily in the wastewater treatment industry during the 11th Five-Year Plan (2006- 2010) and pushing to raise the country’s urban wastewater treatment rate during that period to 70 percent (“Opportunities,” 2009). The country has also announced plans to construct a centralized sewage treatment plant for each individual industrial park by the close of 2017 (“Cabinet officials,” 2015).

Wastewater treatment requires significant energy inputs, but still produces a major economic and environmental benefit: a variety of sectors can reuse treated wastewater—in some cases multiple times—for purposes ranging from irrigation to energy production. Recycled water supplies do not necessarily need to achieve drinking level quality either, meaning they can be treated less intensively and therefore require less energy per cubic meter treated. Recycled water for flushing toilets or supplying fire departments, for example, does not need to meet health standards concerning human consumption (Zhou et al., 2013). From an environmental impact perspective, meanwhile, treated wastewater poses less of a hazard to local ecosystems once it is reintroduced back into the hydrologic cycle.

A DISMAL FUTURE?

Despite its many benefits, wastewater treatment has not been widely implemented across China to date. Average water reclamation utilization rates at the national level sit at roughly eight to nine percent, far beneath theaverage70percentwaterreclamationrate of many developed countries (“Wastewater treatment,” 2013). Encouragingly, Chinese cities have been making serious strides in terms of municipal wastewater treatment and water recycling.

As urban areas have grown, there has been an attendant rise in the volume of wastewater they generate. However, wastewater volumes have not increased equally across all sectors:

• Between 2002 and 2012, the amount of municipal wastewater produced throughout the country (excluding agricultural wastewater) increased at a faster rate than industrial wastewater.

•In 2011, municipal wastewater constituted 62 percent of a total 68 billion tons of wastewater produced nationwide, while industrial wastewater—contributed primarily by the steel, chemicals, paper manufacture, leather, and pharmaceutical sectors— constituted 38 percent (“Wastewater treatment,” 2013).

•A 1997 law mandating that industrial plant owners curtail water usage is one of the mainreasonsmunicipal wastewater generation has outpaced industrial wastewater generation. ?

• In the Inner Mongolian city of Baotou the massive Baotou Iron and Steel Company plant now repurposes?nearly 100 percent of its water supplies (Schneider, 2011). ?State-directed water conservation and recycling efforts could play an important role in helping shore up urban water security in the north. Even if the country chooses this course, however, the energy costs of treating and repurposing municipal and industrial wastewater will likely remain high in aggregate for the foreseeable future as China’s cities will continue to grow significantly through mid- century. Even if the volume of municipal ?wastewater generated nationally in 2012 held steady over the coming years at roughly 42 billion cubic meters, the energy needed to treat wastewater from that sector alone would remain substantial. Given that it requires approximately between 0.2 and 0.4 kWh to treat a cubic meter of wastewater (Ivanova, 2011), treating China’s municipal wastewater at 2012 levels would require between 8.5 billion and 16.8 billion kWh annually—which is between two and four percent of the power China consumed as a nation in November 2012 (Hua & Chen, 2013).

BEIJING MUNICIPALITY AS RECYCLING LEADER

Beijing hopes to lead the way in terms of water treatment and recycling initiatives. With nine wastewater recycling facilities already, Beijing is pledging it will continue with its ambitious steps to enhance water reuse.

According to the deputy general manager Hui Li of Beijing’s Qinghe Regenerated Water Plant, the central part of the city has made significant progress in reaching its 2015 objective of repurposing nearly all of its wastewater as grey water. City officials now even mandate that new office and residential buildings be constructed with two sets of plumbing infrastructure—one for ordinary fresh water supplies and one for repurposed grey water. The Qinghe facility is also seeking to set an example by making its wastewater processing more energy efficient. The plant has upgraded its processing potential by more than 500 percent in recent years, from 80,000 cubic meters per day to 450,000 cubic meters, and has lowered its energy requirements per cubic meter of recycled wastewater to 0.4 kWh. This feat is significant because the energy needed to treat and recycle local wastewater in this instance is far less than the energy needed to import water supplies from beyond the city’s limits (Ivanova, 2011).

These promising developments in Beijing are consistent with trends at the national level in wastewater treatment. Between 2011 and 2012, the number of wastewater plants in China grew by six percent, reaching nearly 4,000, and treatment capacity across China grew more than four percent to 142 million tons. Also by 2012, municipal wastewater treatment rates had risen to 85 percent, while industrial wastewater treatment had reached 95 percent. It merits mention, however, that only 20 percent of the wastewater sludge produced by these plants gets treated. Expanding sludge treatment is hindered in part by the energy it would require (Li & Han, 2015).

As a sector, wastewater treatment can make further gains in energy efficiency as well as coverage, but indicators are pointing in the right direction. Under the 12th Five-Year Plan (2011-2015), China aimed to increase investment in the wastewater treatment sector by more than 15 percent. The current plan also dictates that 57 percent

of treatment-related investment be earmarked for wastewater pipeline construction, while 43 percent be earmarked for facilities themselves (“Wastewater treatment,” 2013).

LESS IS MORE

As in the past, growing urban water demand will likely continue to outpace energy efficiency gains in the water services sector. What can be done to ease both the country’s energy crunch and its water crunch? The only tested and proven means to kill both birds with one stone involves a substantial shift toward demand-side water management in the years ahead. While supply side management strategies dominate, demand-side policy interventions are slowly making progress in addressing China’s urban water issues.

Institutionalized water recycling in the municipal and industrial sectors can decelerate growth of urban water demand over time, helping reduce overall energy consumption in the water sector and easing reliance on energy- intensive bulk water transfers and desalination.

One recent study by researchers from Nanjing University analyzed the water- energy nexus under a wide variety of water- use scenarios and suggested that lowering household water demand by 10 percent could reduce energy requirements for the overall water system by between two and three percent. While the study found reusing 20 percent of wastewater could help drop overall water system energy usage by only a very small amount (an estimated 0.06 percent, since wastewater treatment is itself a relatively energy-intensive undertaking), harvest and distribution of rainwater promised the biggest impact in energy savings, potentially reducing the overall water sector’s energy usage by some six percent (Zhou et al., 2013).

Conservation—another significantly underutilized demand-side management approach—can also play a major role in easing China’s urban water stress. To enhance conservation efforts, public education campaigns targeting urban areas should be considered to raise awareness and induce behavioral change regarding water usage.

Government financial assistance could also be extended to businesses and households willing to invest in retrofitting factories, offices, and homes with conservation-minded items like low-flow toilets. Businesses and households could be offered tax breaks for using recycled water, and current or future water pricing schemes could favor those water consumers who cut down on overall usage. However, it is important to note that water pricing reform remains a thorny and complicated topic in China, as in much of the rest of the world. In order to most effectively incentivize conservation, the Chinese will have to work out a water pricing plan that is acceptable to the public and private sectors alike—a daunting task (Zhou et al., 2013).

Despite the challenges, conservation and recycling measures implemented in concert with one another have the potential to fundamentally reshape public perceptions and behaviors toward water use not just in northern Chinese cities, but in water-stressed cities in other corners of the country as well. In recent years decision-makers in the Chinese water sector are opening up to demand management as a key tool in combatting the country’s urban and overall water challenges (Freeman, 2011). If the trend continues, China’s cities can only stand to benefit.

AS GOES BEIJING, SO GOES THE COUNTRY?

To achieve a more sustainable energy and water future for Beijing and other urban spaces across the north a more thorough understanding of the energy footprint of urban water services is needed. Beijing will remain a compelling indicator of the evolving successes or failures of water stewardship in the urban north.

The city’s about-face regarding the emerging severity of its water problems may have come late, but late is better than never. Beijing has in recent years ushered in a slew of new standards and practices for wastewater recycling. The city’s growing embrace of water recycling is undoubtedly a positive development, and represents one of the most promising long-term approaches to bolstering urban water-use sustainability and lowering the water-use energy footprint to other Chinese cities.

Beijing and other water-stressed cities following its lead are recognizing the strategic importance of investing significant funds into shoring up water-treatment and water-delivery infrastructure. Ensuring these investments are sustained—and, just as importantly, coupled with mandatory water conservation and recycling efforts—could go a long way toward bringing urban China back into the realm of environmental and economic sustainability. 

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BOX 1. Chinese Cities and Water By Numbers

BOOMING URBANIZATION

• More than half of China’s 1.3 billion people live in cities. ?
• By 2020, as China’s population approaches 1.4 billion the percentage of urban residents is slated to rise to 60 percent. By 2030 the urbanites will make up 70 percent of the population. ?
• 15 Chinese cities have a population over ten million. ?

INCREASING URBAN THIRST ?

• 70 percent of China’s population relies on groundwater for drinking water. ?
• Out of China’s 655 cities, 400 rely solely on groundwater for drinking water. ?
• 110 trillion m3 groundwater is pumped out annually for cities and agriculture, accounting for 20 percent of the China’s total water supply. ?
• In China, most cities depend on a single source of water. In 314 prefecture-level cities, only 69 percent of them have a back-up water supply plan. ?

DROPPING WATER QUALITY ?

• Only 70 percent of urban water meets the national quality standards. If towns and counties are counted, the number is likely less than 50 percent. ?
• 50 million people in cities do not have access to clean drinking water due to non-point pollution sources. ?
• The wastewater treatment rate in Chinese cities increased from 34.3 percent in 2000 to 87.3 percent in 2012 and is expected to reach 95 percent in 2020. However, few cities are treating wastewater sludge. ?Sources: Zhang, 2014 and Du, 2016 ?

BOX 2. Rising Energy Costs of Drilling Deeper for Chinese Groundwater

• In northern China, California, and many other regions of the world facing droughts, industries, farming communities, and local governments have looked not to the skies but to the ground to supplement water supplies. In many of these places, unsustainable rates of groundwater withdrawals have catalyzed serious land subsidence—with the weight of urban centers such as Las Vegas, Beijing, and countless others, pushing downward on depleted groundwater tables and compacting aquifers. Once aquifers are crushed the ground cannot hold as much water as it once did, greatly lessening long-term water security for cities.
• To be fair, in China and most other countries around the world, the agricultural sector consumes the vast majority of groundwater withdrawals and overall water usage. In northern China, groundwater irrigates some 70 percent of all agricultural land (Li et al., 2012). While accounting for a comparatively small percentage of groundwater pumping in the north, cities are contributing to the groundwater depletion trend.
• As recent as 30 years ago, those seeking groundwater from the once-vast aquifers beneath the North China Plain only needed to drill about three meters underground. Today the average depth to reach groundwater in northern China is 60 meters. Pollution from agriculture, industry and energy production have been contaminating vast swaths of the remaining groundwater supplies closer to the surface, forcing some cities to drill more than 150 meters into the earth for drinking-quality water. In the suburbs of Beijing, the situation has become worse and some wells must now be dug more than 750 meters deep (Solomon, 2010). With each additional meter that must be drilled downward, the energy needed to pump these dwindling groundwater supplies to the surface increases, although the exact amount of increased energy required depends upon the specific hydrology and geology of a particular aquifer. In 2010, groundwater pumping at the national level made up almost one percent of total China’s energy usage (“Water energy nexus,” 2015). As Chinese policymakers shift more coal production for power, chemicals and gas to western China so as to reduce air pollution in east coast cities, the water tables are likely to drop even more drastically. (Editor’s Note: See Chang and Shuo feature article in this issue for more on this trend).
• With China’s total urban population possibly on pace to reach one billion by 2030, groundwater pumping will remain an important—if unsustainable—means of modestly augmenting urban water supply, particularly in the north (Boyd, 2012). Yet some cities in the region have taken steps toward more sustainable stewardship of their local groundwater resources. In Tianjin, where the urban area’s elevation dropped more than two meters between the early 20th and early 21st centuries, groundwater-pumping restrictions have been imposed to stave offff further aquifer compaction (“Cities sinking,” 2003). Other northern cities will need to follow suit before it is too late to meaningfully recharge groundwater stocks.
• Some studies estimate that nonrenewable, accessible groundwater supplies under the North China Plain may dry up by 2035, if not sooner, in some areas like Beijing (Solomon, 2010). The writing is on the wall: groundwater can no longer be relied upon to provide such a large portion northern China’s water demand.

BOX 3. Prospects for Pumping China’s Offshore Fresh Water Reserves

• In late 2013, a report published in Nature (Post et al., 2013) broke new ground by confirming that “vast meteoric groundwater reserves” (VMGRs) were actually quite common in coastal waters throughout the world. Collectively, these seabed aquifers may hold an estimated 500,000 cubic kilometers of groundwater. For some sense of scale, “the volume of this water resource is a hundred times greater than the amount we’ve extracted from the Earth’s sub-surface in the past century since 1900,” according to Dr. Vincent Post, lead author of the study.

• One of these large continental shelf aquifers sits off China’s coast under the East China Sea. At least some of these local offshore groundwater stocks had been known previously. In Zhejiang Province’s Shengsi Island, for example, the provincial government has already begun operations to pump seabed groundwater. With the increasing sophistication of offshore drilling technology associated with the energy industry, harvesting seabed groundwater in even hard-to-access areas of the continental shelf under the East China Sea appears within the realm of technological possibility in the not-so-distant future. The prospects of pumping offshore groundwater are appealing for eastern Chinese cities because in addition to diversifying supply streams for urban fresh water, it may reduce burden on aquifers sitting under dry land, easing groundwater compaction problems in Shanghai, Beijing, and other major cities.

• Lost in the hubbub to date has been discussion of how much energy would be required to successfully extract and desalinate deep-lying seabed groundwater supplies and move them to where they are needed. VMGR water supplies can be harvested using offshore platform drilling into the continental shelf below or by drilling from nearby islands. While not as saline as regular saltwater—and therefore possibly only 20 percent as energy- intensive to desalinate as regular seawater—VMGR water will nevertheless require some degree of energy to purify for human use (Chen, 2014).

• While these groundwater stocks could help provide water to some large coastal cities for decades, centuries, or even longer, such projections are far from certain and more research is needed as to the volume of the water and economical ways to extract it. Regardless of where the truth actually lies, these offshore supplies will in time likely emerge as part of a patchwork approach to meet growing water demand in China’s thirstiest cities, as well as in other water-stressed coastal areas of the world. As China’s issues with urban water scarcity grow more severe, it may be that any water supplies within Chinese territory—onshore or offshore—must be harvested at any cost, making the energy resources needed to obtain these supplies a distant second consideration.