Geographic Footprint of Electricity Use for Water Services in the Western U.S.

Abstract

A significant fraction of our nation's electricity use goes to lift, convey, and treat water, while the resulting expenditures on electricity represent a key budgetary consideration for water service providers. To improve understanding of the electricity-for-water interdependency, electricity used in providing water services is mapped at the regional, state and county level for the 17-conterminous states in the Western U.S. This study is unique in estimating electricity use for large-scale conveyance and agricultural pumping as well as mapping these electricity uses along with that for drinking and wastewater services at a state and county level. Results indicate that drinking and wastewater account for roughly 2% of total West-wide electricity use, while an additional 1.2% is consumed by large-scale conveyance projects and 2.6% is consumed by agricultural pumping. The percent of electricity used for water services varies strongly by state with some as high as 34%, while other states expend less than 1%. Every county in the West uses some electricity for water services; however, there is a large disparity in use ranging from 10 MWh/yr to 5.8 TWh/yr. These results support long-term transmission planning in the Western U.S. by characterizing an important component of the electric load.

Mapping the energy footprint of produced water management in New Mexico

“…Fresh water for O&G development in NM is primarily obtained through leases from agricultural enterprises [43] by temporary permit through the Office of the State Engineer (OSE).Wells in the OSE database [44] were filtered to include only wells identified for either agricultural or O&G use. 5 The energy required for fresh water pumping is based on dynamic head [23], flow rate (annual diversion specified by NM OSE [44]), and pump efficiency.…”

“…Water management decisions in the O&G industry are based primarily on freshwater availability, PW volumes, and costs [6,[8][9][10]15]; energy requirements for these activities as a whole are seldom considered. Energy is required for extraction, treatment, and conveyance of water; however, most studies have focused on use of high quality fresh water [1,[20][21][22][23]. Increasingly the O&G industry is turning to low-quality (i.e.…”

“…This work adds to the growing body of PW literature by characterizing tradeoffs between energy requirements for alternative PW management strategies and considers how these requirements vary geographically based on access to fresh water and opportunities for disposal and reuse. A distributed spatial approach to quantifying and comparing energy requirements highlights variability and allows for comparison over large geographic regions [4,23,[31][32]. Although demonstrated in New Mexico, the general method for characterizing energy required to manage PW using GIS analysis, processing and interpretation of large databases, and incorporation of energy metrics to facilitate this comparison has broad applicability in other settings.…”

Evaluating the electricity intensity of evolving water supply mixes: the case of California’s water network

“…Researchers have published a series of spatially-explicit studies to determine where energy production is needed to meet water demand in the western United States and globally [13][14][15]. These studies relied on top-down aggregated estimates of water use from the US Geological Survey and do not calculate energy embedded in water consumed in a particular location.…”

“…Electricity intensity for the federal, state, and local aqueducts as well as average estimates of treatment EIs for different water sources and ranges of distribution EI were obtained from [5,12,14,[30][31][32][33][34] as described in the SI. Tables S2-S4 summarize the EI data used for this study.…”