The water consumption of energy production: an international comparison
By E S Spang, W. Moomaw, K S Gallagher, P H Kirshen, D H Marks. 2014
266 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Producing energy resources requires significant quantities of fresh water. As an energy sector changes or expands, the mix of technologies deployed to produce fuels and electricity determines the associated burden on regional water resources. Many reports have identified the water consumption of various energy production technologies. This paper synthesizes and expands upon this previous work by exploring the geographic distribution of water use by national energy portfolios. By defining and calculating an indicator to compare the water consumption of energy production for over 150 countries, we estimate that approximately 52 billion cubic meters of fresh water is consumed annually for global energy production. Further, in consolidating the data, it became clear that both the quality of the data and global reporting standards should be improved to track this important variable at the global scale. By introducing a consistent indicator to empirically assess coupled water–energy systems, it is hoped that this research will provide greater visibility into the magnitude of water use for energy production at the national and global scales.
Subfields: Energy Engineering and Power Technology, Pollution, Water Science and Technology
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/795fbd15cfb4df7c13c29bf7a370a24516a7d4e9
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In Energy Engineering and Power Technology
In Pollution
In Water Science and Technology
Citations in the corpus
- Energy–water nexus under energy mix scenarios using input–output and ecological network analyses (2019, methodology): “investigated the water used by solar power infrastructure by employing a water-use-intensity database in IOA, and compared this with both withdrawal and consumption amounts by conventional power plants [18].”