Water in the media and Microsoft Bathroom 2015

By Timothy Allinson, P.E.,
Murray Co., Long Beach, Calif.

For a long time I have repeated the phrase that water will be the oil of future generations. Well, reflections of this sentiment are appearing in the media with growing frequency.

First, on July 13, the House passed a bill called the Clean Water Cooperative Federalism Act (H.R. 2018) giving each state the authority to set its own drinking water standards, taking this power away from the EPA under the federal Clean Water Act. Is this a good thing? That depends. Clearly, different states have different issues when it comes to water. Some, like my home state of California, have too little water, while others are plagued with floods. A state with plentiful water might have reason to have stricter drinking water standards than one with little water to spare.

The EPA also has some ridiculous requirements for groundwater discharge. Here in Calif., when site dewatering is required, it has to be treated to better-than-drinking-water quality before it can be discharged to the storm sewer. This is ridiculous, since it is groundwater being returned to nature; this is an example of how the EPA often oversteps its bounds. The point is moot, however, since the bill is expected to fail in the Senate. Even if it were to pass, Obama has already said he will veto it, since it removes the safeguards put in place by the CWA 40 years ago.

In other news, the Senate wrote a bill on July 11 called the Energy and Water Integration Act of 2011 (S. 1343). This bill is intended “to provide for the conduct of an analysis of the impact of energy development and production on the water resources of the United States and for other purposes.” Huh? Apparently, the bill calls for the Academy of Sciences to produce a lifecycle assessment of the quantity of water withdrawn and consumed in the production of transportation fuels, or electricity used as a fuel source. The fuels being evaluated include crude oil (domestic and imported), natural gas (domestic and imported), oil shale, tar sands, corn-based ethanol (domestic and imported), biofuels, coal to liquids, electricity consumed in fully electric vehicles, plug-in hybrids and hydrogen. Wow, that’s quite an undertaking!

That’s only the beginning. The bill goes on to require a lifecycle analysis of the water consumed in producing electricity from coal, natural gas, oil, nuclear energy, solar energy, wind energy, geothermal energy, biomass and the beneficial use of waste heat. The bill also provides for studies of desalination and other information.

All of this is reminiscent of an article I wrote back in May of 2008 titled “The Greening of America and the World Chicken Crisis.” The tongue-in-cheek message of that article was that the advent of ethanol-fueled cars could create a grain shortage and hence a chicken feed crisis; i.e., solving one environmental problem can create another. This bill, wisely so, addresses that issue, in part by trying to anticipate how energy production could affect water supply. Having read the bill, however, it seems that the bureaucracy involved in getting there, or anywhere close, could prove overwhelming.

In August, the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) released a 120-page publication titled Thirsty for Answers: Preparing for the Water-related Impacts of Climate Change. Being a climate change agnostic, I take such reports with a very large grain of salt. In fact, I found parts of this report laughable. “For instance, saltwater intrusion could affect the quality of New York City’s water supply because rising sea levels would send saltwater farther up the Hudson River and Delaware River estuaries during high tides.”

Newsflash: New Yorkers don’t get their drinking water from these rivers. NYC drinking water is sourced from watersheds 100 miles away in the Catskill Mountains — watersheds that are fed into, not supplied by, the aforementioned rivers. With such obvious errors made in a stretch to create an issue of controversy, how can anyone take such a report seriously? And how much do tax payers pay for them to produce such drivel? Ironically, the NRDC is based in Manhattan.

Also in August, Bangor University announced that, together with Trinity College, Dublin, they had received a grant of over $800K to develop small hydropower turbines to capture energy from existing water supply systems. It seems that the water supply systems in Ireland and Wales have widespread break pressure tanks (BPTs) to dissipate the pressure at various points in the system. The project aims to capture the potential energy upstream of these BPTs with hydropower turbines to reduce the energy consumption and CO2 emissions of the water supply system — a practical and commendable idea.
Back in March, Robert Glennon, author of Unquenchable: America’s Water Crisis and What to Do about It, was the keynote speaker at the Design-Build Institute’s Water/Wastewater conference in Kansas City. Mr. Glennon has some remarkable anecdotes about water, one of the more memorable being a quote by Theodore Roosevelt in 1910, when flush toilets were still only available to a small fraction of the population. Roosevelt noted, “Civilized people should be able to dispose of sewage in a better way than by putting it in drinking water.” He was indeed an insightful man.

When commenting on the water/wastewater infrastructure, Mr. Glennon stated, “It makes no sense to simply rebuild the existing wastewater infrastructure. The water industry delivers exclusively potable quality water to peoples’ homes. But people only use 10 percent of that for drinking and cooking. That does not compute. We should be supporting the industry of alternative waste removal. We squander enormous amounts of energy and water treating to drinking quality standards 90 percent of water that we don’t use for drinking and cooking. Design-Build can solve that. Instead of one massive plant, we need smaller decentralized treatment plants so that we can reuse smaller quantities of water locally.”

Mr. Glennon is of the same mindset as none other than Bill Gates. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has launched an effort to reinvent the toilet to bring safe, clean sanitation services to millions of people in the developing world. Sylvia Mathews Burwell, president of the foundation’s Global Development Program, said in her keynote address to the 2011 AfricaSan Conference, “No invention in the past 200 years has done more to save lives and improve health than the sanitation revolution triggered by invention of the toilet. But it did not go far enough. It only reached one-third of the world.”

The goal of the Foundation, with $42 million in grants to this end, is to develop a toilet room by 2015 that can operate off the grid and produce no waste other than fuel, fertilizer and potable water. It must be easy to install and maintain and operate for no more than 5 cents per person per day. Wow! That would be a remarkable achievement. I wonder if Mr. Gates and his Foundation can work wonders in the plumbing world as he did with the computer. Keep your eyes open for Microsoft Bathroom 2015, coming soon to a plumbing distributor near you. Many thanks to Gretchen Pienta of ASPE and her excellent Pipeline eNewsletter that inspired portions of this article.

Timothy Allinson is a senior professional engineer with Murray Co., Mechanical Contractors, in Long Beach, Calif. He holds a bsme from Tufts University and an mba from New York University. He is a professional engineer licensed in both mechanical and fire protection engineering in various states, and is a leed accredited professional. Allinson is a past-president of aspe, both the New York and Orange County Chapters. He can be reached at laguna_tim@yahoo.com.