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WATER POLITICS

Via MarketWatch, a report on China’s water issues:

Water shortages could be China’s own version of the perfect storm, potentially blowing a hole in carefully laid plans of an incoming generation of leaders.

Targets for moderately fast economic development, seen as crucial for the Communist Party to maintain its grip on power, no longer seem so easy to achieve as China is running shy of the water needed to leverage up the electrical-power generation it requires to meet those targets.

Switching the energy mix between nuclear, hydro-power, coal or even the exploitation of promising shale-gas deposits, doesn’t really add up because of a shrinking water supply.

HSBC highlighted China’s economic Achilles’ heel in a recent report, looking at the relationship between the growing electrical-power needs of industry and strained water resources.

ReutersWorkers install a high voltage electricity pylon in China’s Anhui province
In fact, ambitious plans to expand power capacity, as currently sketched out, might be unachievable owing to what HSBC says are “real water constraints.”

Take, for example, coal-fired power plants, which form the front line of China’s short-term plans to boost electrical output. By 2020, plans are to bring an additional 453 gigawatts of output online — equivalent to adding Russia’s annual electricity output from all sources — on top of the current capacity of about 630 GW.

As can be imagined, the process of using coal-heated steam to drive massive turbines consumes a huge amount of water, as do cooling and other power-plant functions.

Lesser known, however, is how the very production of coal needed to fuel these plants also requires huge amounts of water. An estimated 1.2 billion tons of coal will be needed annually to power planned and existing utilities by the 2020.

Keep in mind that coal-fired power plants are just one aspect of China’s plan. Other power sources, such as nuclear and hydro-power, when added into the picture, are set to collectively boost the nation’s electricity capacity by a mind-boggling amount by 2030.

In spite of the ramp up, China’s future electricity sources don’t look much less intensive in terms of reliance on water than they are now. About 87% of electricity output will have a heavy component of water usage, compared to around 97% at present, according to HSBC.

HSBC points out that 80% of the electricity currently produced in China is consumed by industry, which raises questions about the status quo of how water resources are divided.

The research house offers a partial answer in “fiercer” competition between industry and agriculture over water, especially as food security concerns move up the agenda