The American West is running out of water – and Big Oil, of all things,
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By Steven Bingler and Martin C. Pedersen 5 minutes Read
Eventually we will stop burning fossil fuels. The question is not whether the oil and gas are disappearing, but whether it can happen quickly enough to avert an environmental catastrophe. Here in Louisiana, with our huge investments in pipelines and tank farms fueled by Gulf oil rigs, this is a more than passing problem. Now is the time to start thinking about how we can reuse these potentially huge assets.
Last month, the UN released its terrible report on climate change: Secretary General António Guterres declared the crisis a âcode red for humanityâ. As if to underline the urgency of this message, Western cities and forests were consumed by drought and raging wildfires, while in the southeast and then northeast, Hurricane Ida flooded the mid-Atlantic with unprecedented precipitation and flash floods.
We live in a world of water imbalances, but this is a problem that could be corrected by reusing existing infrastructure in radically new ways. It is not a magical thought. The transition to renewable energies is now underway around the world. The cost of solar and wind power continues to fall, as investors pull out of oil and gas. (Even Norway’s trillion-dollar investment fund, created from the proceeds of oil exploration and extraction, recently sold off the last of its fossil fuel investments.) The pressure on l The industry – from governments imposing electric cars to a possible carbon tax – will continue. At some point, even Big Oil will succumb to the laws of economic gravity (or find new business models).
All of this will have immense consequences for our economy and the built environment. While we don’t need to shed tears for business leaders and private investors enriched by fossil fuels at its peak, the industry employs around 150,000 workers and contributes nearly 8% of U.S. GDP ( a tiny percentage, we would say, given its immense hidden costs). The eventual demise of the oil and gas industry will also leave a vast array of unused refineries, tank farms, and abandoned offshore drilling rigs (there are about 1900 operating only in the Gulf of Mexico). We believe that much of this vast system, the continent-wide distribution system, holds great promise for our warming and water-scarce future, especially for drought-stricken Western states.
We know that extreme weather conditions will intensify in the years to come. Severe drought in parts of the southwest and western United States is expected to persist and intensify. But a solution lies just underground, not in dried-up aquifers, but in the pipes that have channeled fossil fuels for decades now certified as accomplices to lead us to the brink of the abyss. A staggering 2.3 million miles of oil and gas pipelines crisscross the United States, most with routes that terminate or depart from two states, Texas and Louisiana.
We are a current and former resident of Louisiana, an oil-dependent state that has been beholden to fossil fuel companies for a century and has paid a heavy price for it. Pelican State is said to be rich in other ways: music, food, culture, wildlife. But our greatest resource for the foreseeable future could be our access to fresh water. In fact, we spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year to keep excess water (some potentially drinkable) from flooding us. Considering the water shortages in the rest of the country, this seems like a very broken paradigm.
Existing oil and gas pipelines connect the rest of the continent to the Gulf of Mexico, a source of water that should be desalinated, at serious environmental cost. (At present, much of this infrastructure, after Ida, is in ruins, creating a huge toxic soup.) Louisiana is also bathed by the outfall of the mighty Mississippi River, one of the greatest sources of fresh water in the country. Add to that annual precipitation of over 60 inches, with much more forecast for the future. The state is actually on track to set a record for precipitation this year (a mark that is not expected to last long). We are swimming in excess water, rich in potentially drinkable water. So why not reuse the piping system that currently distributes fossil fuels and use it to distribute the fresh water needed to support life elsewhere in the country? What if oil storage tanks were converted to rainwater tanks and their capture became an industry? What if Louisiana switched from oil production (a dying industry, linked to high cancer rates) to water distribution (linked to life itself)? What if the Great Lakes were also connected to this transformational water supply system?
Long before the value of water reaches parity with the value of a barrel of oil, incentives exist to start converting our existing oil and gas infrastructure. We don’t have time for the federal government to design, plan and approve a national water line, as some have proposed. Our recent track record with these major projects, when a decade is considered rapid, remains patchy at best. Do we really think that a nationwide pipeline, licensed by Congress and built by the Army Corps of Engineers, could be completed in 10 years, let alone in time to prevent California, Arizona, Nevada and New Brunswick? Mexico running out of water? Using the existing infrastructure is the only approach that meets the urgency of the moment. For those worried about the use of water from old means of transporting petroleum, fear not, pipelines are regularly reversed and reused for new uses.
Even if the water delivered by the pipelines was not immediately drinkable, this almost infinite volume of new water could be used as gray water, which is still a very healthy percentage of total water use. In addition, the science needed to make all of this transported drinking water is surely shorter in time and exponentially less expensive than building an entirely new distribution system.
We are long past the time when we can âsoftenâ our return from the bottomless pit with incremental measures. The impacts of our climate emergency are here; they are immediate, and they rush us. Responding to them will require daring, creativity and a willingness to find unconventional solutions to seemingly intractable problems. The reallocation of our oil and gas infrastructure, that vast tangle of pipes, is such an opportunity – an elegant solution to an increasingly pernicious problem.
Steven bingler is the Founder and CEO of Concordia: Community Centered Planning and Design, headquartered in New Orleans, Louisiana. Concordia was responsible for planning and managing New Orleans’ Unified Plan for New Orleans Recovery from Hurricane Katrina and recently completed a two-year report on climate change, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. , on planning for the impacts of climate change.
Martin C. Pedersen is a New York-based writer, editor, and critic. He is the Executive Director of Common Edge Collaborative, a website dedicated to architecture, design, urbanism and public engagement.
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