Energy Companies Focus on Competing Water Needs

Energy companies are becoming increasingly conscious of the competing demands for water from their industry and agriculture, speakers said in early January at a conference in Houston.

Food consumption is projected to increase 50 percent by 2030, straining the already delicate relationship among water, food and energy, said Marvin Odum, president of Shell Oil, the Houston-based U.S. arm of Royal Dutch Shell. Odum spoke at the company's Innovation Summit.

“They are so inextricably linked, that if you don't work on them together, you don't get to the best long-term solution,” said Odum. “It is important to us in terms of how we build this company's long-term strategy.”

Shell calls this interconnection the stress nexus: Water requires energy for treatment and transportation; energy requires water for production; agriculture requires water and energy.

More than 40 percent of irrigated crops in the United States are grown in areas with serious water shortages, said Charles Iceland, senior associate for markets and enterprise for the World Resources Institute, who estimates the same patterns hold true globally.

The stress nexus is especially critical in countries with higher population density, he said. India and Ethiopia, for example, could be hard-hit by the competing pressures, especially because of the importance of water in most electric power generation.

And energy demand that's expected to double by 2050 will create water stress issues for 55 percent of power plants in Asia.

“We are going to have to undertake large-scale adaptation to be able to manage our energy production in a quickly deteriorating water landscape,” Iceland said.

Shell executives said the company is taking conservation steps, including measures to recycle water used in hydraulic fracturing, in which a mixture of water, sand and other substances are pumped into formations under high pressure to free oil and gas from tight rocks.

The company also is researching waterless fracturing, considered the next frontier in the technology, said Matthias Bichsel, the company's director of Projects and Technology. It is exploring alternative solvents as well as electric currents as potentially suitable alternatives to water.

Shell has established water purification facilities at a pilot plant that produces natural gas liquids in Qatar, and uses recycled sewage for a plant in British Columbia, said Ed Daniels, Shell's executive vice president of Global Solutions.