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Water, Water Everywhere…?

Via The Land Desk, commentary on the recent USGS water assessment as well as data center water usage:

In the closing days of the Biden administration, the U.S. Geologic Survey released its National Water Availability Assessment Report, which is a whopper of a study not only on how much water Americans use and for what, but also on the quality of that water and whether and by how much demand is exceeding supply.

Most of what it says won’t be too surprising to Land Desk readers. Demand exceeds supply in swaths of the Southwest, and climate change threatens to exacerbate the imbalance. Irrigated agriculture is by far the biggest water guzzler nationwide, with Western farms consuming more than those in any other region. Municipal water consumption is staying fairly flat, even as populations increase. Thermoelectric power plants withdraw massive amounts of water, but then return much of it to the water body, keeping consumptive use relatively low.

I’m not going to try to sum up the report for you, though. Rather, I’ll give you a few of the more interesting morsels of data and maps and charts from the assessment, in no particular order, and you can make of them what you will.

This little chart sums up most of the consumption part of the report. The most surprising thing to me about this was that, in the West, groundwater withdrawals in equal or exceed surface water withdrawals for irrigation and public supplies. That means that for every gallon sucked out of the Colorado River or its tributaries, there’s roughly another gallon being pumped up from wells — and in a lot of places, like parts of Arizona, groundwater use isn’t monitored or regulated. Note that these are withdrawals, not consumptive use (which is the difference between withdrawals and water that is returned to its source). Source: USGS

This is a more detailed breakdown of agricultural water use in the West. The top number in each area is millions of gallons per day; the bottom number is millions of cubic meters per month. Notice that about 60-70% of total withdrawals are counted as consumptive use, with the remainder being returned to the water system as runoff. Source: USGS

This is a good one because it clearly shows the effects of drought on water consumption, i.e. we tend to use more water when there’s less of it available.

In this assessment, the USGS looked at how much water is used for coal and uranium mining and hydraulic fracturing oil and gas wells. They found that in 2020, fracking used about 317 million gallons per day. Since then drilling has increased, especially in the arid Permian Basin, so those numbers have likely shot up as well.

This is a striking one from the climate change chapter, showing how the number of extreme and very extreme fires has grown over time.

And this one shows areas where the water supply is stressed in four realms: surface water quality; groundwater quality; supply-demand imbalance; and ecological flow alterations.

This is just a small sampling of what’s in the assessment. If you want to read more, check it out here.


The USGS assessment doesn’t break out data centers’ water use, but I imagine if the agency survives the current administration intact, it may get there in a decade or so. The computer processing centers suck up massive amounts of electricity to process those Google searches, Facebook posts, Twitter rants, and, especially, AI queries — not to mention for “mining” cryptocurrency. Less known is that they also can use large quantities of water to keep the processors cool.

A new report out of the Berkeley Lab is mostly focused on quantifying current and forecasting future energy use by data centers. But it also talks water. And the numbers are alarming: In 2023, U.S. data centers directly1 consumed about 66 billion liters (or 17.4 billion gallons) of water. The report’s authors expect that figure to double — at least — by 2028.

Hyperscale data centers are the type that power AI. Source: 2024 United States Data Center Energy Usage Report, by Arman Shehabi et al, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, December 2024.

That is a crap-ton of water, for sure, especially given the large number of data centers located in the Phoenix and Las Vegas areas, neither of which has a lot of liquid to spare. But some perspective is warranted here. As Len Necefer points out in an All At Once By Dr. Len dispatch warning against AI-alarmism, data centers still use a heck of a lot less water than, say, growing hay or fracking oil and gas wells.

66 billion liters is 53,507 acre-feet (sounds a lot less alarming, yeah?). For some context, alfalfa and other hay growing in the Great Salt Lake Basin alone consumes about 900,000 acre-feet per year, and hydraulic fracturing gulps up about 353,000 acre-feet (a little over Nevada’s total allotment of Colorado River water) annually.

I’m still frightened by the invasion of the data centers, however. In his last days in office, Biden signed an executive order opening up federal sites and public land to new AI data centers and accompanying “clean” energy installations (which includes nuclear and even natural gas and coal, so long as they capture carbon). And Trump is now encouraging data center developers — i.e. tech-broligarchs like Musk and Bezos — to burn coal to power their AI bots (and Trump and Melania both issued their own cryptocoins).



This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 29th, 2025 at 11:35 am and is filed under United States.  You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.  Both comments and pings are currently closed. 

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