06/26/2003
Water - High and Low
Water - there’s either too much or too little. Today, in contrast with last year’s dry-as-a-bone conditions, I bring you greetings from the rain forests of New Jersey. As I begin this column on the first day of summer, it’s only in the mid 60s and pouring rain. By day’s end we will break the century-old record for rainfall in the month of June. At the same time, major wildfires are raging in the drought-stricken Southwest. While owners there mourn the loss of their homes at the hands of these fires, the unusually gloomy spring weather here in the East has caused a mass state of depression. Though the loss of a home certainly trumps bad weather, those who suffer from SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) reportedly have been particularly hard hit by the lack of sunshine. SAD is typically associated with lower levels of sunshine in the winter but this spring has been unusually dark.
In spite of the scarcity of water in the Southwestern desert areas, when I’ve visited the Palm Springs area in California, I’ve marveled at the lush golf courses, the bubbling fountains and the lakes that adorn the resort areas. Where does the water come from? The same question can be asked about virtually all of Southern California and other Southwestern desert locales. Locals in the Palm Desert area might answer that the water comes from drilling wells into the huge underground aquifer that underlies the region. But there’s a catch; aquifers have to be replenished.
How does the replenishment take place? Rain won’t do the job in the desert. The answer is politics and the Colorado River. The waters of this river have been dammed, massaged and diverted over the years in an attempt to satisfy all the demands of a growing population in seven different states. There’s been a continual battle among farmers, developers, residents and resort owners for their share of the Colorado. It’s a portion of that water from the Colorado poured onto the land that trickles down and helps to fill the aquifer. But now crunch time seems to have arrived, according to an article by Seth Hettena in our newspaper The Star-Ledger.
The population explosion in the Southwest has combined with the drought to force the government to finally take drastic action, cutting by 15 percent cut the Colorado River water allotted to the state of California. Especially affected is the Coachella Valley which, sports fans, harbors La Quinta and its new Trilogy Golf Club, scheduled to be the site of the Skins Game this fall. If you notice the greens and fairways are brown, it will mean that the developer hasn’t been able to extract enough water from the aquifer to irrigate the course. Also threatened in the Coachella Valley are many other golf courses and even a lake built for water skiing. (In the spirit of fair disclosure, my wife and I met friends for dinner at La Quinta many years ago but never played golf there, unfortunately. More unfortunately, we’ve also lunched at Pebble Beach twice and no golf there either.)
But let’s not be parochial. It’s not just the Southwest but also the world that needs more fresh water to satisfy a growing population. It seems clear that the production of more fresh water from the oceans is going to be required. But this requires energy, be it wind, solar, electrical or whatever. As gasoline and natural gas prices rise, we all know that energy is up there with water as a top priority environmental issue. Of all the obstacles to our energy future, the NIMBY (“Not in my backyard”) syndrome is right up there near the top.
I’ve mentioned before that I once visited the engineer in charge of maintaining the wind turbine field bordering Palm Springs. To me, wind is the ultimate in alternate energy sources. Wind turbines are nonpolluting and use the natural wind currents in that desert region. Yet, the engineer said many residents complained about them as being noisy and unsightly. Along these lines, the New York Times magazine section of June 15 had an interesting article titled “A Mighty Wind” by Elinor Burkett.
A Boston-based company proposes to build the United States’ first offshore wind farm, which would provide 75 percent of the electricity for Cape Cod. You would expect that the residents of Cape Cod, especially those with a liberal bias, would welcome such a clean source of energy, wouldn’t you? Oh, I forgot to mention that the wind farm of 130 turbines, each taller than the Statue of Liberty, would be located less than 7 miles off the coast of Hyannis in Nantucket Sound? Suddenly, NIMBY comes to the fore. Wind energy is great but all those wind turbines are going to spoil my view! Even Walter Cronkite, who has a second home on Martha’s Vineyard, finds himself in the uncomfortable position of opposing the project. Surely there is some other location? The only problem is that you’ve got to install wind turbines where the wind blows!
Nothing is simple when it comes to the environment. Let’s take another possibly important use of wind power or other alternate energy sources. President Bush has proposed a major monetary commitment to advance the development of fuel cells to power our cars and other vehicles. Fuel cells use hydrogen as the fuel. Again, it takes energy to make hydrogen. The cleanest approach would be to electrolyze water. When the hydrogen is used in the fuel cells, the byproduct is water. If wind energy or solar energy were used to electrolyze the water, wouldn’t that be the ultimate in an environmentally friendly approach? Maybe not.
At least that’s the view of Tracey Tromp and coworkers at the California Institute of Technology and at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In an article in the June 13 issue of Science, Tromp and his colleagues ask the question, “What if there are hydrogen leaks?” The hydrogen has to be generated and then transported to the station where you fill up your tank. Based on the experience of the gas-handling industry, they expect that 10 to 20 percent of the hydrogen will be lost to the atmosphere due to leakage. (The September 2002 Materials Research Bulletin devotes the issue to hydrogen storage and transport.)
What happens to the leaked hydrogen? Tromp et al say that a lot of it will end up in the stratosphere. The stratosphere is where all that ozone is found. According to their model a lot of the hydrogen will react to form water. At first blush, this sounds great – nothing wrong with water, right? I would have thought so, but this is water way up in the stratosphere. Tromp and colleagues calculate that, if fuel cells were to replace all the gasoline or oil powered engines, the additional water would lower the temperature of the stratosphere and significantly widen the hole in the ozone layer. They also note that hydrogen is a nutrient for certain types of microbes and that unanticipated disturbances in the microbial balances might occur. Also, they’re concerned about other reactions of the hydrogen with trace gases in the atmosphere.
Personally, I don’t expect fuel cell technology will be close to replacing our gasoline-powered cars anytime soon. On the other hand, in the June 16 issue of Chemical and Engineering News, an article by Jeff Johnson describes plans by General Motors and Dow Chemical to jointly set up the biggest installation of fuel cells in the world at a Dow plant in Texas. The hope is that the experience gained will lead to lower cost fuel cells. To be competitive with today’s internal combustion engines, the cost of fuel cells has to be about ten times lower than it is today.
As I finish this column, it’s another day; the sun is shining brightly and the temperature is headed into the mid 90s. I don’t think anyone will complain about the heat – at least until tomorrow.
Allen F. Bortrum
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