I can assure you there is plenty of water. There are floods in lots of places every year. The oceans are full of water that for just 5kWh we can desalinate 250 gallons.
The problem is that the water and energy aren't where the users want it to be.
But pipes are relatively cheap - if humanity cared enough, we could build pipes to distribute the plentiful water everywhere.
But it turns out the people without much water tend to be in very poor places and warzones where there isn't much appetite for spending money on pipes.
Oh boy, lemme tell you: water management is one of those things that's More Difficult Than It Seems.
I'm going to recommend Cadillac Desert, which is by far the most entertaining and readable book on water. It goes into the history of water in the western US, a dry region that's very dependent on the Colorado River. The American West isn't a poor, war-torn area, and a LOT of money has been spent on various projects - but water is still a serious issue.
Things like "big pipelines to move water around" have been tried, but they're enormously expensive, and they don't really put as much of a dent in the problem as you'd imagine. Dams can store some excess water, but they cause problems of their own (which is why we don't build as many, and are getting rid of dams we don't need), and they're a bandaid at best. There's not a good solution to "how do we move a TON of water around", at least not now.
I'd also add that it is easy to underestimate the water usage.
Desalination could be viable if it was only for subsistence/drinking. But water use is extensive in every single product/service we use and thing we cconsume. Cost of water going up across the board will have effects that shouldn't be underestimated.
The problem is not capacity of a tube. Let's take a recent example, Teheran. And let's assume desalination is just totally free. The city needs 1.2 billion m3 cubic meters of fresh water, and is on average 1200 meters above sea level. Let's not even count actually transporting that water, let's just discuss pumping it.
E = mgh, blabla, this requires 500 Megawatt constant power, 24/7/365, JUST to move the water up. This is the theoretical minimum power required to lift it against gravity. Does not include pumping the water inland.
This does not include actually pumping the water (ie. horizontal movement) (30% inefficiency would certainly not be considered bad engineering), doesn't include electrical inefficiency (30% in the power plant + 10% in the motors), doesn't include desalination (100%), doesn't include building the massive bridges something like this would require, doesn't include ...
So let's say you need a 4 Gigawatt power plant, every single drop just to keep this one city alive.
And for Asian cities, Teheran is tiny, about the size of Greater London or Paris. Most Pakistani cities are easily double that.
What needs to happen is that people in Asia need to abandon quite a few cities (yes, European cities are largely in, when it comes to water, sustainable places. Africa is less ideal, but still reasonable, US is reasonable with some exceptions, it's a bunch of Asian cities that are the problem here)
> The city needs 1.2 billion m3 cubic meters of fresh water, and is on average 1200 meters above sea level. Let's not even count actually transporting that water, let's just discuss pumping it.
> E = mgh, blabla, this requires 500 Megawatt constant power, 24/7/365, JUST to move the water up. This is the theoretical minimum power required to lift it against gravity. Does not include pumping the water inland.
The energy required to lift that water does not give you a power requirement, which is a rate that energy is consumed. Tehran has a water deficit of 101 million m3 per year which would require 38 MW to lift. That's a couple of wind turbines worth of power. Obviously there's a lot more to keeping the water system working, but you're off by an order of magnitude. Building a small power plant to keep a city of that size habitable is certainly achievable.
> And for Asian cities, Teheran is tiny, about the size of Greater London or Paris. Most Pakistani cities are easily double that.
Tehran's urban area is the 29th most populous in the world with over 14 million people. Pakistan has one larger urban area, Karachi, which is 40% larger.
China is in a bind, though they have more money to deal with it than most countries. Their clean energy is in the west, but not much water out there (well, more than you think, but still not enough), their industry is the in the northeast, their water is in the south east (also in Tibet, but those glaciers are melting quickly), so they have to divert water from the southeast up north (the grand canal they build a decade or so ago), they have ultra high volatile wires to bring the energy from west to east, etc...
Why you just say move, you are still making a compromise. Maybe you have flat land with no water, and you are moving to somewhere that is mountainous with water, you now have to terrace a bunch of mountains before that area is productive, and let's say you use wind and solar, but that is even in another area, so you need wires to bring that in...etc...
Isn’t the problem ultimately that water is heavy and it takes a lot of power to pump it and that’s expensive?
You can pump water faster through a big tube but then you need big pumps and tons of electricity. If it’s going uphill that’s going to be serious power.
1 ton of water is only 240 gallons. So if we're talking a tube that is 4 feet in diameter and 10 miles long, that's 12.5 million gallons, or 52100 tons (or 104,000,000 pounds). While it wouldn't take that much to move that if your pushing downhill, I have to imagine the energy cost would be AMAZING moving it uphill at all.
But also fluid dynamics is the only college course I dropped because it was fucking witchcraft, so who knows.
Filtering (from bacteria, pollution, ...) is another issue, and it also affects floods (floods are not periodic, so you have to store water, but storing water for a long term is not always safe).
Even desalination costs are not trivial in all countries.
Let's say 1 kWh = 50 gallons. UN estimates talk about at least 50 gallons/day per person.
According to Wikipedia [1], the 2023 average electricity consumption in Burkina Faso was 0.14 MWh (=140 kWh) a year per person.
Then there's gravity. If your main source of water comes from the sea, you have to pull water from a lower altitude to a higher altitude, which means you are going against gravity, which means you need pumps. Other energy is required.
> Let's say 1 kWh = 50 gallons. UN estimates talk about at least 50 gallons/day per person.
The energy cost of desalination is to convert sea water into freshwater. A person utilizes lots of water per day, but that water doesn't magically disappear, nor get turned back into sea water. Treating wastewater takes about 1 kwh per 1000 gallons, or about .05 kwh per person per day which is 13% of the per capita electricity consumption of Burkina Faso.
Desalination and long range transport are necessary only for what little is irrecoverably lost due to for example evaporation, and for offsetting the deficit from normal freshwater sources due to over-consumption.
A very efficient way to preserve large amounts of potable water for longer periods has traditionally been: glaciers in mountains. Climate change doesn't make water disappear but amplifies shortages as well as surplus. In many (previously) habitable parts of the world that change drives the price of water (and food mitigation) significant enough to render those areas uninhabitable. For example in Syria, Afghanistan and Iran this is a cause of poverty and conflict.
What are your credentials on this topic? You speak with a lot of certainty, but fail to acknowledge any nuance that would complicate you world view, such that a lot of water shortages happen also in developed and peaceful regions (as it mentioned in the article). The people without much water are not only in very poor places and warzones, unless you are specifically referring to the people dying due to lack of water.
How would your proposed solution of "the oceans are full of water, just desalinate" affect affordability in agriculture and industry? I assume it would require vast investments in infrastructure that has not been built and is not even planned to be built, what would be required for such an infrastructure to be put in place and what challenges need to be overcome? Are there ecological concerns with the required scale of the operation (such as massive brine runoff at the coast)?
In short, you say "I can assure you there is plenty of water", but is that assurance coming from actual knowledge in the area at hand, or is it misplaced confidence due to dodging any inherent complexity before reaching your conclusion?
OP has 38K karma; some people take it as a signal of valuable contributions to HN, other people understand it's signal of throwing everything at the wall hoping something sticks.
I don't think UN is sounding the alarm of the planet running out of water all of a sudden, even they understand we have huge oceans that aren't going anywhere.
> for just 5kWh we can desalinate 250 gallons … pipes are relatively cheap
I live 1500km from the ocean at 1500m altitude with 3 million other people in a place that’s neither poor nor a war zone.
Ignoring the cost of pipes for a minute (which is probably not small), googling the energy required to get 250 gallons (or about 1 cubic meter) of water from there to here, I get at least 140kWh [1], assuming a straight shot and no ups and downs along the way.
If that cubic meter is distributed to 5 households per day (so ~30kWh / household), which is less water than the average household uses [2] but might be reasonable for drinking water needs, we’d still probably be doubling the energy requirement for the entire region from ~30kWh per household [3] to ~60kWh. And the current ~30kWh usage is somewhat elastic and reducible, where the energy to pump water is not.
The "drought vs no drought" conversation hides the fact that a significant percentage of the water in the central valley aquifer has been pumped out for agriculture and other uses. Even if we stopped that tomorrow it would not recharge quickly, and the surface water is not sufficient for current demand.
CA is not in a drought right now. CA has been in conditions of persistent drought, with no more than a year or two of respite, for two decades. The last sustained period of sustained at-or-above-desired-level precipitation ended in 2007.
My logic is "OH NO I KEEP HITTING MYSELF IN THE HEAD WITH A RUSTY POKER WHY DO I KEEP BLEEDING!"
If we dont want a drought, stop messing with the water supply.
"Much of the water used in California comes from the Colorado River. By usage, ~79% of the river goes to crop irrigation (70% of which is cattle feed), ~13% to residential water usage, ~4% for commercial use, and ~4% for thermal power plants"
Some pedantry first: you're describing "water shortage", which is a resource management issue, and not "drought", which is purely a precipitation thing.
But yes: you need to manage resources if we want to live in the environment. The way you don't do that is by announcing "there is no drought in california" and then proceeding to use the water falling today without recognizing that we're almost certainly still in a period of sustained drought and that such consumption isn't any more sustainable in the current La Niña cycle than it was last year or next.
Yes, all shortages can be solved by using less of the resource that we have a shortage of. But that’s like telling a poor person to spend less money if you can’t tell them to make more money.
Drought is simply a way of saying less water came from the sky than was expected. Obviously if less water comes for an extended period of time, you just call it the new normal and stop calling it a drought.
> But that’s like telling a poor person to spend less money if you can’t tell them to make more money.
Not sure where you're going with this metaphor. We absolutely should be helping out people who are financially struggling with advice about how to manage their funds. Don't go clubbing if you're behind on your rent. Cook your own food instead of grabbing another burger. Talk to a bank about consolidating your credit cards.
And of course we do. And it works, and is helpful.
But somehow you don't see that, or how it might apply to thing like "change crop and livestock choices to reflect resource availability" or "change taxation strategy to the externalities are borne fairly and not by consumers"?
You can always use resources more efficiently, you just have to invest and make traeoffs. No one is saying that the region can’t live with less water, farmers just have to change to products that make them less money. So while California is the ideal place to grow walnuts, they need water so maybe the world can just do without? Yes, that’s always a possible answer, it isn’t a simple easy choice to make though.
You make it sound like there are easy things that can be done that are somehow win win.
It’s like telling a poor person that they should do an hour of cooking after their second 8 hour shift in one day rather than grabbing a burger and that will be better for them, no trade off at all.
If you have references for these I would appreciate what you can find.
In general I believe abundance of resources exist in modern society and that there is less and less consideration for the lives of others, not in the "generational trauma" sense, but in the real basics of food, water and shelter.
A lot of people point to hard problems such as the "food miles problem"[1] but are, in many cases, conflicts that drive scarcity for one purpose or another.
5-10 kWh per cubic meter pumped to Riyadh makes sense if you include the older process which requires oil to be burned to heat water first. Per capita, maybe Nicaragua can afford that. There are 65 countries poorer than Nicaragua.
A core piece of wisdom in chemical engineering is that anything is possible with sufficient energy. Fresh water being available in any particular part of the globe is the kind of classic thermal (read: energy) and mass transport problem that chemical engineering is all about.
Increasing energy production buys a lot of optionality when solving these kinds of physical world problems. It allows you to solve problems by throwing energy at them. It may not always be the most theoretically efficient solution, like throwing hardware at software performance problems, but it may be the only practical solution.
For this reason, it makes sense to build as much power generation capacity as possible even it isn't entirely clear what it will be used for. The inability of the developed world to massively scale power generation is the true environmental failure but people don't grok second-order effects.
The problem is that while there is a lot of water available, more than our needs, we do not use water efficiently. In particular, food production is horribly wasteful with water. Even small farms will dump 100s of gallons of water per minute (yes minute) onto the ground to ultimately be washed away or evaporated.
What that means is that the piping to get enough water everywhere is enormous. The global usage was 2 quadrillion gallons of water. [1]
There are ways to use water much much more efficiently, but they are expensive to implement. Hydroponics can grow a lot of food, but it requires a lot of power and infrastructure to get setup.
One estimate focused specifically on oil burned for desalination puts Saudi Arabia at about 300,000 barrels per day used for desalination.
Separately, a reputable energy sector overview notes desalination is about 6% of Saudi Arabia’s electricity consumption (in 2020) [0] [1], which is nowhere near implying over half of extracted petroleum.
Some older and less efficient desalination plants directly burn oil/coal/gas to desalinate water, so no electricity is involved.
That is perhaps the source of the discrepancy.
With cheap oil, there is little financial incentive to upgrade these plants.
Remember the government need not 'pay' market price for this oil - they can prop the market up by restricting oil exports whilst simultaneously using oil internally at production cost.
It genuinely puzzles me why they wouldn’t buy some solar panels to run desalination. The oil they’d then be able to sell instead of burning would pay for it easily.
Of course there is not always a good reason. The reason may be that the country is run by aristocrats who are rich and comfortable and don’t care and the present thing works so why fix it. If the system does stop working it’ll only really impact the poor.
Yes 250 gallons can save a lot of people from dying of thirst but have you considered that with that same 5kwh we can also produce 1 tiktok ai slop video of the queen boxing with mike tyson?
I find this other article [1] more informative, including for instance the global map of Vulnerability to Water-Related Challenges taken from the actual report [2].
Before commenting water is cheap and plentiful please read the proposed definition.
> Water bankruptcy refers to “a state in which a human-water system has spent beyond its hydrological means for so long that it can no longer satisfy the claims upon it without inflicting unacceptable or irreversible damage to nature.”
So when you read "water bankruptcy", you assumed it meant a legal process where the world can apply to a court to have its water debt annulled and start again?
This really made me laugh, but at the same time "water bankruptcy" doesn't mean anything before this statement but bankruptcy did. The term was chosen to give the same kind of emotional reaction as bankruptcy
Data centers consume enormous amounts of water for evaporative cooling. What part is nonsense?
If the data center is built somewhere with ample water supplies this isn't an issue. If it's pulling from groundwater this can be a huge issue. Groundwater isn't infinite and is being depleted in many areas.
In the USA, data centres consume about 164 billion gallons of water annually [1]
Irrigation consumes 118 billion gallons per day [1] and thermoelectric power plants a further 133 billion gallons per day.
There's enormous amounts, and there's enormous amounts. If you really want to get mad about water being wasted, look up what californian alfalfa growers pay for their water.
New datacenter projects are usually closed loop now.
From your first citation:
> Closed-loop cooling systems enable the reuse of both recycled wastewater and freshwater, allowing water supplies to be used multiple times. A cooling tower can use external air to cool the heated water, allowing it to return to its original temperature. These systems can reduce freshwater use by up to 70%.
Citation please, I don’t buy it. Evaporative cooling towers almost double the efficiency of heat rejection vs a closed loop system. I don’t see any data center operator giving up those operating cost efficiency gains just to save some water, but I could be wrong.
It's not a question of quantity but of distribution.
I'm not defending the waste of water that is growing alfalfa in the desert for export, but there are plenty of places datacenters are built where the water they use is impactful.
They can both be bad. Unlike the legal mess that is US irrigation water rights, data centers are also a lot easier to do something about.
I guess it's possible to have a condensing station, but generally speaking you'd need to supply input energy to allow it to cool down and condense somehow. The bigger question here is if a datacenter using evaporative cooling where does the moisture go? If it just feeds a cloud system that rains on nearby fields, it's not much different than irrigating crops. If it feeds clouds that go offshore and rain into the ocean, it's similar to just diverting drinking water into the ocean
I must be missing something, why can't it be entirely closed loop like a water radiator in an old car? A simple fan running through large radiator cores would certainly condense within the system, keeping the water in the system
A closed loop system has a COP of 4, adding in cooling towers almost doubles that to 7. You can reject 1.75x more heat for the same amount of electricity by adding evaporative cooling towers.
> I was under the impression they capture the evaporation, let it cool, and recycle it?
So, how do they get rid of the latent heat of evaporation that's released when the water recondenses?
The whole point of evaporative cooling is to soak up that latent heat and release it later, out in the environment, when the water recondenses somewhere else.
It's kind of like why Dune's stillsuits don't work.
The reason they consume water is the same reason space is a bad place to put data centres, getting rid of the heat is a challenge. Having only radiative heat dissipation is going to severely limit space based manufacture and computing, it puts significant constraints on the space station already.
The water used by data centers are either closed loop, meaning that they recirculate a set amount of water.. or the water evaporates, and my understandingis they don't use potable water for those systems. I might be wrong, but I don't think data centers aren't destroying potable water.
The water is reutilized, a big reason is the difficuty to filter new incoming water because of impurities and uncertainty about quality (e.g. winter times make the river water very muddy and difficult to filter).
Second because is because adding water is a cost, whereas reuse existing water is simpler and saves money. There are always losses of water, however these are neglectible.
Not mentioned here but for more extreme cases of devices cooling is done with distilled water (zero minerals) and the whole device works submerged under this water, the hot water isn't thrown away because it distilled water takes a lot of effort to remove the minerals and effort to keep them out, so the closed loop is very efficient.
In a large city in southern India, our house would get water supplied one day of the week during summers. Our small one bedroom flat had barrels of water drums stored inside the house. We even had one in the bedroom.
I was 14 and I would go down to the street to fetch ground water and fill those barrels up. This was in 2014.
The reality is usually less dramatic than "water completely gone" but more chronically exhausting.
For a sub-Saharan family, "severe water scarcity" often means:
Daily life shifts
Wells and water points yield less or run dry. Wait times at functioning sources grow from minutes to hours. Walking distances to water double or triple. Water quality drops as everyone crowds the remaining sources.
Who carries the burden
Mostly women and girls. During dry season, water collection can expand from one hour daily to four to six hours. Girls miss school, women lose time for farming or income generation.
Practical consequences
Washing, cooking, hygiene get rationed. Livestock often gets priority because it's the livelihood. Latrine hygiene suffers, raising disease risk. Conflicts at water points increase.
What "one month per year" obscures
The statistic sounds manageable, but that month typically falls during dry season when harvests also fail and food gets scarce. The effects compound.
Water rarely just "cuts off" - it's more of a grinding struggle over a shrinking resource, where the poorest have to walk furthest.
That's the British idea of a water shortage; I suspect that many people would be thrilled if their water supply was good enough to consider a lawn in the first place.
This has happened about every year in the past 10 years during Summer in France at least (I guess Spain/Portugal/Italy, all mediterranean countries are alike in this regard, even most continental European countries).
imagine a camping trip or a long hike and you didn't bring even remotely enough water; your shoes are extremely uncomfortable and your clothes are all soaked and dirty and you are constantly itching; heat, stress, kids, sickness, waiting lines, the crowds, noise, air pollution ...
but these people are not on a hike, and they didn't get their full set of nutrients, "ever" and they don't have the safety of "just a couple more hours".
you are constantly on edge. you are tired. there's work to be done. distances to be walked. through the dust and dirt and smog. children to be fed and old people that depend on your care. and you do get horny, and you fuck and you have to wash before and after ... with ... well, not really clean water ...
and did I mention the smell?
now that doesn't apply to all the four billion, of course but you should get the picture.
I know poverty, and some of the itchiness that comes with it but I don't know "severe water scarcity" ... even in townships in SA they'll tell you it's enough and they'll "hit you" if you waste any.
I don't know about the rest of the world, but here in Quebec, Canada, we had a very dry summer in 2025 and some farmers had to bring literal truckloads of water to their farm for their animals to stay alive. I remember that they were saying to the press that the cost it incurred made them lose a lot of money, making these animals net negative for them, budget wise.
This year was an exception, I'm guessing it's going to become the norm. So, much higher food prices.
UN and EU push hard for the closure of reservoirs and dams then cry about lack of freshwater, and shout "climate change" when preventable floods cause mass casualties.
Not sure the choice of the word "bankruptcy" is meaningful. "Bankruptcy" is short for "bankruptcy protection", where an insolvent debtor tells a court they have no way of paying back all their current debts with whatever assets they have, and the court deals with the creditors and restructures all those debts in an equitable way (according to the law), so the debtors liability is limited. This is one of the cornerstones of capitalism, the limited liability concept.
When it comes to nature, there is no limited liability. If you don't have water, you don't have water, there's no way to get any "bankruptcy protection" from anyone.
I enjoy running these kind of articles through an analysis using chatgpt. Language matters and this is a pretty terribly slanted article trying to hype up fear.
Sometimes I wonder if we would be better having a plugin that did this kind of analysis to give you a pointer towards if the writer is even trying to do their job of being objective or think they need to "make the news" to save the world.
The Smithsonian article uses a well-known set of high-impact narrative devices—catastrophic metaphor, point-of-no-return language, scale shock, authority stacking, vivid exemplars, moralization, and fear-to-action solution framing—to intensify perceived urgency and motivate concern.
I can assure you there is plenty of water. There are floods in lots of places every year. The oceans are full of water that for just 5kWh we can desalinate 250 gallons.
The problem is that the water and energy aren't where the users want it to be.
But pipes are relatively cheap - if humanity cared enough, we could build pipes to distribute the plentiful water everywhere.
But it turns out the people without much water tend to be in very poor places and warzones where there isn't much appetite for spending money on pipes.
Oh boy, lemme tell you: water management is one of those things that's More Difficult Than It Seems.
I'm going to recommend Cadillac Desert, which is by far the most entertaining and readable book on water. It goes into the history of water in the western US, a dry region that's very dependent on the Colorado River. The American West isn't a poor, war-torn area, and a LOT of money has been spent on various projects - but water is still a serious issue.
Things like "big pipelines to move water around" have been tried, but they're enormously expensive, and they don't really put as much of a dent in the problem as you'd imagine. Dams can store some excess water, but they cause problems of their own (which is why we don't build as many, and are getting rid of dams we don't need), and they're a bandaid at best. There's not a good solution to "how do we move a TON of water around", at least not now.
Indeed, it's easy to overestimate the capacity of a large tube and underestimate that of a small river.
I'd also add that it is easy to underestimate the water usage.
Desalination could be viable if it was only for subsistence/drinking. But water use is extensive in every single product/service we use and thing we cconsume. Cost of water going up across the board will have effects that shouldn't be underestimated.
The problem is not capacity of a tube. Let's take a recent example, Teheran. And let's assume desalination is just totally free. The city needs 1.2 billion m3 cubic meters of fresh water, and is on average 1200 meters above sea level. Let's not even count actually transporting that water, let's just discuss pumping it.
E = mgh, blabla, this requires 500 Megawatt constant power, 24/7/365, JUST to move the water up. This is the theoretical minimum power required to lift it against gravity. Does not include pumping the water inland.
This does not include actually pumping the water (ie. horizontal movement) (30% inefficiency would certainly not be considered bad engineering), doesn't include electrical inefficiency (30% in the power plant + 10% in the motors), doesn't include desalination (100%), doesn't include building the massive bridges something like this would require, doesn't include ...
So let's say you need a 4 Gigawatt power plant, every single drop just to keep this one city alive.
And for Asian cities, Teheran is tiny, about the size of Greater London or Paris. Most Pakistani cities are easily double that.
What needs to happen is that people in Asia need to abandon quite a few cities (yes, European cities are largely in, when it comes to water, sustainable places. Africa is less ideal, but still reasonable, US is reasonable with some exceptions, it's a bunch of Asian cities that are the problem here)
> The city needs 1.2 billion m3 cubic meters of fresh water, and is on average 1200 meters above sea level. Let's not even count actually transporting that water, let's just discuss pumping it.
> E = mgh, blabla, this requires 500 Megawatt constant power, 24/7/365, JUST to move the water up. This is the theoretical minimum power required to lift it against gravity. Does not include pumping the water inland.
The energy required to lift that water does not give you a power requirement, which is a rate that energy is consumed. Tehran has a water deficit of 101 million m3 per year which would require 38 MW to lift. That's a couple of wind turbines worth of power. Obviously there's a lot more to keeping the water system working, but you're off by an order of magnitude. Building a small power plant to keep a city of that size habitable is certainly achievable.
> And for Asian cities, Teheran is tiny, about the size of Greater London or Paris. Most Pakistani cities are easily double that.
Tehran's urban area is the 29th most populous in the world with over 14 million people. Pakistan has one larger urban area, Karachi, which is 40% larger.
China is in a bind, though they have more money to deal with it than most countries. Their clean energy is in the west, but not much water out there (well, more than you think, but still not enough), their industry is the in the northeast, their water is in the south east (also in Tibet, but those glaciers are melting quickly), so they have to divert water from the southeast up north (the grand canal they build a decade or so ago), they have ultra high volatile wires to bring the energy from west to east, etc...
Why you just say move, you are still making a compromise. Maybe you have flat land with no water, and you are moving to somewhere that is mountainous with water, you now have to terrace a bunch of mountains before that area is productive, and let's say you use wind and solar, but that is even in another area, so you need wires to bring that in...etc...
Isn’t the problem ultimately that water is heavy and it takes a lot of power to pump it and that’s expensive?
You can pump water faster through a big tube but then you need big pumps and tons of electricity. If it’s going uphill that’s going to be serious power.
1 ton of water is only 240 gallons. So if we're talking a tube that is 4 feet in diameter and 10 miles long, that's 12.5 million gallons, or 52100 tons (or 104,000,000 pounds). While it wouldn't take that much to move that if your pushing downhill, I have to imagine the energy cost would be AMAZING moving it uphill at all.
But also fluid dynamics is the only college course I dropped because it was fucking witchcraft, so who knows.
It's not just pipes.
Filtering (from bacteria, pollution, ...) is another issue, and it also affects floods (floods are not periodic, so you have to store water, but storing water for a long term is not always safe).
Even desalination costs are not trivial in all countries.
Let's say 1 kWh = 50 gallons. UN estimates talk about at least 50 gallons/day per person.
According to Wikipedia [1], the 2023 average electricity consumption in Burkina Faso was 0.14 MWh (=140 kWh) a year per person.
Then there's gravity. If your main source of water comes from the sea, you have to pull water from a lower altitude to a higher altitude, which means you are going against gravity, which means you need pumps. Other energy is required.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
> Let's say 1 kWh = 50 gallons. UN estimates talk about at least 50 gallons/day per person.
The energy cost of desalination is to convert sea water into freshwater. A person utilizes lots of water per day, but that water doesn't magically disappear, nor get turned back into sea water. Treating wastewater takes about 1 kwh per 1000 gallons, or about .05 kwh per person per day which is 13% of the per capita electricity consumption of Burkina Faso.
Desalination and long range transport are necessary only for what little is irrecoverably lost due to for example evaporation, and for offsetting the deficit from normal freshwater sources due to over-consumption.
A very efficient way to preserve large amounts of potable water for longer periods has traditionally been: glaciers in mountains. Climate change doesn't make water disappear but amplifies shortages as well as surplus. In many (previously) habitable parts of the world that change drives the price of water (and food mitigation) significant enough to render those areas uninhabitable. For example in Syria, Afghanistan and Iran this is a cause of poverty and conflict.
What are your credentials on this topic? You speak with a lot of certainty, but fail to acknowledge any nuance that would complicate you world view, such that a lot of water shortages happen also in developed and peaceful regions (as it mentioned in the article). The people without much water are not only in very poor places and warzones, unless you are specifically referring to the people dying due to lack of water.
How would your proposed solution of "the oceans are full of water, just desalinate" affect affordability in agriculture and industry? I assume it would require vast investments in infrastructure that has not been built and is not even planned to be built, what would be required for such an infrastructure to be put in place and what challenges need to be overcome? Are there ecological concerns with the required scale of the operation (such as massive brine runoff at the coast)?
In short, you say "I can assure you there is plenty of water", but is that assurance coming from actual knowledge in the area at hand, or is it misplaced confidence due to dodging any inherent complexity before reaching your conclusion?
> What are your credentials on this topic?
OP has 38K karma; some people take it as a signal of valuable contributions to HN, other people understand it's signal of throwing everything at the wall hoping something sticks.
I don't think UN is sounding the alarm of the planet running out of water all of a sudden, even they understand we have huge oceans that aren't going anywhere.
The report itself (https://collections.unu.edu/eserv/UNU:10445/Global_Water_Ban...) does actually talk about a lot of the background, why's and how we can start addressing it, in a very fleshed out form + an executive summary at page 13.
He's also not saying the world is running out of water or clean drinking water... etc.
> for just 5kWh we can desalinate 250 gallons … pipes are relatively cheap
I live 1500km from the ocean at 1500m altitude with 3 million other people in a place that’s neither poor nor a war zone.
Ignoring the cost of pipes for a minute (which is probably not small), googling the energy required to get 250 gallons (or about 1 cubic meter) of water from there to here, I get at least 140kWh [1], assuming a straight shot and no ups and downs along the way.
If that cubic meter is distributed to 5 households per day (so ~30kWh / household), which is less water than the average household uses [2] but might be reasonable for drinking water needs, we’d still probably be doubling the energy requirement for the entire region from ~30kWh per household [3] to ~60kWh. And the current ~30kWh usage is somewhat elastic and reducible, where the energy to pump water is not.
[1] (my calculation: large pipeline, 112MJ * 3<altitude> * 1.5<distance> ~= 140kWh) https://www.quora.com/How-much-energy-would-it-cost-to-pump-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Residential_water_use_in_the_U...
[3] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/electricit...
There are also impediments to the economically rational allocation of water. Look at California for a prime example of this.
theres no drought in california.
if we wanted to tomorrow we could stop it.
its like complaining you are sweaty after working out
The "drought vs no drought" conversation hides the fact that a significant percentage of the water in the central valley aquifer has been pumped out for agriculture and other uses. Even if we stopped that tomorrow it would not recharge quickly, and the surface water is not sufficient for current demand.
Pedantically, you're correct. There's been drought in California for the previous 24 years, but this year there isn't one.
> allocation of water
I thought the GP was referring to the water allocated to farming.
> theres no drought in california.
CA is not in a drought right now. CA has been in conditions of persistent drought, with no more than a year or two of respite, for two decades. The last sustained period of sustained at-or-above-desired-level precipitation ended in 2007.
As always, Wikipedia explains this well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droughts_in_California
Your logic amounts to "I'm not poor because I just got paid! Let's go to the bar tonight!"
My logic is "OH NO I KEEP HITTING MYSELF IN THE HEAD WITH A RUSTY POKER WHY DO I KEEP BLEEDING!"
If we dont want a drought, stop messing with the water supply.
"Much of the water used in California comes from the Colorado River. By usage, ~79% of the river goes to crop irrigation (70% of which is cattle feed), ~13% to residential water usage, ~4% for commercial use, and ~4% for thermal power plants"
> If we dont want a drought, stop messing with the water supply.
How is that different from "if you don't want drought, don't use water for most things"?
Yes, we could curtail agriculture, power generation, etc..., but those all have their own problems.
Some pedantry first: you're describing "water shortage", which is a resource management issue, and not "drought", which is purely a precipitation thing.
But yes: you need to manage resources if we want to live in the environment. The way you don't do that is by announcing "there is no drought in california" and then proceeding to use the water falling today without recognizing that we're almost certainly still in a period of sustained drought and that such consumption isn't any more sustainable in the current La Niña cycle than it was last year or next.
Yes, all shortages can be solved by using less of the resource that we have a shortage of. But that’s like telling a poor person to spend less money if you can’t tell them to make more money.
Drought is simply a way of saying less water came from the sky than was expected. Obviously if less water comes for an extended period of time, you just call it the new normal and stop calling it a drought.
> But that’s like telling a poor person to spend less money if you can’t tell them to make more money.
Not sure where you're going with this metaphor. We absolutely should be helping out people who are financially struggling with advice about how to manage their funds. Don't go clubbing if you're behind on your rent. Cook your own food instead of grabbing another burger. Talk to a bank about consolidating your credit cards.
And of course we do. And it works, and is helpful.
But somehow you don't see that, or how it might apply to thing like "change crop and livestock choices to reflect resource availability" or "change taxation strategy to the externalities are borne fairly and not by consumers"?
You can always use resources more efficiently, you just have to invest and make traeoffs. No one is saying that the region can’t live with less water, farmers just have to change to products that make them less money. So while California is the ideal place to grow walnuts, they need water so maybe the world can just do without? Yes, that’s always a possible answer, it isn’t a simple easy choice to make though.
You make it sound like there are easy things that can be done that are somehow win win.
It’s like telling a poor person that they should do an hour of cooking after their second 8 hour shift in one day rather than grabbing a burger and that will be better for them, no trade off at all.
If you have references for these I would appreciate what you can find.
In general I believe abundance of resources exist in modern society and that there is less and less consideration for the lives of others, not in the "generational trauma" sense, but in the real basics of food, water and shelter.
A lot of people point to hard problems such as the "food miles problem"[1] but are, in many cases, conflicts that drive scarcity for one purpose or another.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_miles
5-10 kWh per cubic meter pumped to Riyadh makes sense if you include the older process which requires oil to be burned to heat water first. Per capita, maybe Nicaragua can afford that. There are 65 countries poorer than Nicaragua.
It's as if they choose the word bankruptcy for a reason.
A core piece of wisdom in chemical engineering is that anything is possible with sufficient energy. Fresh water being available in any particular part of the globe is the kind of classic thermal (read: energy) and mass transport problem that chemical engineering is all about.
Increasing energy production buys a lot of optionality when solving these kinds of physical world problems. It allows you to solve problems by throwing energy at them. It may not always be the most theoretically efficient solution, like throwing hardware at software performance problems, but it may be the only practical solution.
For this reason, it makes sense to build as much power generation capacity as possible even it isn't entirely clear what it will be used for. The inability of the developed world to massively scale power generation is the true environmental failure but people don't grok second-order effects.
The problem is that while there is a lot of water available, more than our needs, we do not use water efficiently. In particular, food production is horribly wasteful with water. Even small farms will dump 100s of gallons of water per minute (yes minute) onto the ground to ultimately be washed away or evaporated.
What that means is that the piping to get enough water everywhere is enormous. The global usage was 2 quadrillion gallons of water. [1]
There are ways to use water much much more efficiently, but they are expensive to implement. Hydroponics can grow a lot of food, but it requires a lot of power and infrastructure to get setup.
[1] https://www.htt.io/learning-center/water-usage-in-the-agricu...
It's fun that desalination is always the first thing to pop up as an answer to that, and never water usage reduction
Saudi Arabia has an incredible water piping system because they are rich. The poor cannot do that.
Saudi Arabia uses more than half of the petrol they extract on desalination.
It's not sustainable and once it runs out, the country will go back to being a poor desert.
One estimate focused specifically on oil burned for desalination puts Saudi Arabia at about 300,000 barrels per day used for desalination.
Separately, a reputable energy sector overview notes desalination is about 6% of Saudi Arabia’s electricity consumption (in 2020) [0] [1], which is nowhere near implying over half of extracted petroleum.
300,000 ÷ 9,500,000 ≈ 3.2% of crude production.
[0] https://www.ifri.org/en/studies/geopolitics-seawater-desalin...
[1] https://www.eia.gov/international/content/analysis/countries...
Some older and less efficient desalination plants directly burn oil/coal/gas to desalinate water, so no electricity is involved.
That is perhaps the source of the discrepancy.
With cheap oil, there is little financial incentive to upgrade these plants.
Remember the government need not 'pay' market price for this oil - they can prop the market up by restricting oil exports whilst simultaneously using oil internally at production cost.
Looking into it a bit more, it seems my information was a bit dated, and they did get strides in the last 15 years.
There’s a big glowy thing in the sky that they can use to extract energy also. They have a lot of that energy too
Are you sure? That’s insane if true.
It genuinely puzzles me why they wouldn’t buy some solar panels to run desalination. The oil they’d then be able to sell instead of burning would pay for it easily.
Of course there is not always a good reason. The reason may be that the country is run by aristocrats who are rich and comfortable and don’t care and the present thing works so why fix it. If the system does stop working it’ll only really impact the poor.
Investing in solar panels was one of the NEOM project goals.
I assured you that water usage can be mismanaged even with plenty of pipes and water infrastructure.
Same with food. Plenty of food, just not where its needed.
well for food, its that "where its needed" is somewhere really specific: Plenty of food, just not paid for.
> But it turns out the people without much water tend to be in very poor places
Hmm... I wonder why those places are poor.
> But pipes are relatively cheap - if humanity cared enough, we could build pipes to distribute the plentiful water everywhere.
Once you start moving water uphill, it becomes vastly more expensive. It takes a lot of power to move water uphill.
Sorry but you have not done the math on the energy costs too pump water from the ocean.
Why on earth is this the top post?
In other words: a crisis.
Yes 250 gallons can save a lot of people from dying of thirst but have you considered that with that same 5kwh we can also produce 1 tiktok ai slop video of the queen boxing with mike tyson?
Salt is engineers' kryotonite.
I find this other article [1] more informative, including for instance the global map of Vulnerability to Water-Related Challenges taken from the actual report [2].
[1] https://www.thebrighterside.news/post/our-world-is-entering-...
[2] https://collections.unu.edu/eserv/UNU:10445/Global_Water_Ban...
Before commenting water is cheap and plentiful please read the proposed definition.
> Water bankruptcy refers to “a state in which a human-water system has spent beyond its hydrological means for so long that it can no longer satisfy the claims upon it without inflicting unacceptable or irreversible damage to nature.”
Anything is true if you define the terms contrary to their meaning.
So when you read "water bankruptcy", you assumed it meant a legal process where the world can apply to a court to have its water debt annulled and start again?
This really made me laugh, but at the same time "water bankruptcy" doesn't mean anything before this statement but bankruptcy did. The term was chosen to give the same kind of emotional reaction as bankruptcy
wait, is that why "humanity" redefines and reinterprets words and meanings all the time?
Good thing that isn't what happened with this sensible definition. What part of that definition do you object to?
Down with lawns!
Our least tasty crop!
And all these huge new data centers are gonna make things worse: https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co...
The idea that data centers are huge water hogs is nonsense.
Data centers consume enormous amounts of water for evaporative cooling. What part is nonsense?
If the data center is built somewhere with ample water supplies this isn't an issue. If it's pulling from groundwater this can be a huge issue. Groundwater isn't infinite and is being depleted in many areas.
In the USA, data centres consume about 164 billion gallons of water annually [1]
Irrigation consumes 118 billion gallons per day [1] and thermoelectric power plants a further 133 billion gallons per day.
There's enormous amounts, and there's enormous amounts. If you really want to get mad about water being wasted, look up what californian alfalfa growers pay for their water.
[1] https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-co... [2] https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2018/3035/fs20183035.pdf
New datacenter projects are usually closed loop now.
From your first citation:
> Closed-loop cooling systems enable the reuse of both recycled wastewater and freshwater, allowing water supplies to be used multiple times. A cooling tower can use external air to cool the heated water, allowing it to return to its original temperature. These systems can reduce freshwater use by up to 70%.
Citation please, I don’t buy it. Evaporative cooling towers almost double the efficiency of heat rejection vs a closed loop system. I don’t see any data center operator giving up those operating cost efficiency gains just to save some water, but I could be wrong.
As i stated, It's literally in the first link from the OP.
It's not a question of quantity but of distribution.
I'm not defending the waste of water that is growing alfalfa in the desert for export, but there are plenty of places datacenters are built where the water they use is impactful.
They can both be bad. Unlike the legal mess that is US irrigation water rights, data centers are also a lot easier to do something about.
I was under the impression they capture the evaporation, let it cool, and recycle it?
I guess it's possible to have a condensing station, but generally speaking you'd need to supply input energy to allow it to cool down and condense somehow. The bigger question here is if a datacenter using evaporative cooling where does the moisture go? If it just feeds a cloud system that rains on nearby fields, it's not much different than irrigating crops. If it feeds clouds that go offshore and rain into the ocean, it's similar to just diverting drinking water into the ocean
I must be missing something, why can't it be entirely closed loop like a water radiator in an old car? A simple fan running through large radiator cores would certainly condense within the system, keeping the water in the system
A closed loop system has a COP of 4, adding in cooling towers almost doubles that to 7. You can reject 1.75x more heat for the same amount of electricity by adding evaporative cooling towers.
COP is coefficient of performance.
> I was under the impression they capture the evaporation, let it cool, and recycle it?
So, how do they get rid of the latent heat of evaporation that's released when the water recondenses?
The whole point of evaporative cooling is to soak up that latent heat and release it later, out in the environment, when the water recondenses somewhere else.
It's kind of like why Dune's stillsuits don't work.
A 1 GW heat source evaporates about 9 million gallons per day.
In 2024, US data centers consumed power at an average rate of about 21 GW.
So, that would be about 70 billion gallons per year evaporated.
Most new datacenters use closed loop systems now. the water just circulates.
They’ll be built and deployed in space soon. Elon said so.
The reason they consume water is the same reason space is a bad place to put data centres, getting rid of the heat is a challenge. Having only radiative heat dissipation is going to severely limit space based manufacture and computing, it puts significant constraints on the space station already.
yeah but Elon said so and thus it must be true
The water used by data centers are either closed loop, meaning that they recirculate a set amount of water.. or the water evaporates, and my understandingis they don't use potable water for those systems. I might be wrong, but I don't think data centers aren't destroying potable water.
The water is reutilized, a big reason is the difficuty to filter new incoming water because of impurities and uncertainty about quality (e.g. winter times make the river water very muddy and difficult to filter).
Second because is because adding water is a cost, whereas reuse existing water is simpler and saves money. There are always losses of water, however these are neglectible.
Not mentioned here but for more extreme cases of devices cooling is done with distilled water (zero minerals) and the whole device works submerged under this water, the hot water isn't thrown away because it distilled water takes a lot of effort to remove the minerals and effort to keep them out, so the closed loop is very efficient.
Microsoft is piloting new zero water cooled datacenters in some locations https://www.axios.com/local/des-moines/2026/01/16/microsoft-...?
Hopefully this can be the new standard.
yes, yes, AI bad.
https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Dy-x!,w_1272,c_limit...
Four billion people face severe water scarcity for at least one month each year
Does anyone know what this looks like for typical cases? The water just cuts off for a month in some places I guess?
In a large city in southern India, our house would get water supplied one day of the week during summers. Our small one bedroom flat had barrels of water drums stored inside the house. We even had one in the bedroom.
I was 14 and I would go down to the street to fetch ground water and fill those barrels up. This was in 2014.
The reality is usually less dramatic than "water completely gone" but more chronically exhausting.
For a sub-Saharan family, "severe water scarcity" often means:
Daily life shifts
Wells and water points yield less or run dry. Wait times at functioning sources grow from minutes to hours. Walking distances to water double or triple. Water quality drops as everyone crowds the remaining sources.
Who carries the burden Mostly women and girls. During dry season, water collection can expand from one hour daily to four to six hours. Girls miss school, women lose time for farming or income generation.
Practical consequences
Washing, cooking, hygiene get rationed. Livestock often gets priority because it's the livelihood. Latrine hygiene suffers, raising disease risk. Conflicts at water points increase.
What "one month per year" obscures
The statistic sounds manageable, but that month typically falls during dry season when harvests also fail and food gets scarce. The effects compound.
Water rarely just "cuts off" - it's more of a grinding struggle over a shrinking resource, where the poorest have to walk furthest.
Edit: Formatting
Probably something like having water for a few hours a day.
And being told to restrict showers, not to water lawns, etc
That's the British idea of a water shortage; I suspect that many people would be thrilled if their water supply was good enough to consider a lawn in the first place.
This has happened about every year in the past 10 years during Summer in France at least (I guess Spain/Portugal/Italy, all mediterranean countries are alike in this regard, even most continental European countries).
imagine a camping trip or a long hike and you didn't bring even remotely enough water; your shoes are extremely uncomfortable and your clothes are all soaked and dirty and you are constantly itching; heat, stress, kids, sickness, waiting lines, the crowds, noise, air pollution ...
but these people are not on a hike, and they didn't get their full set of nutrients, "ever" and they don't have the safety of "just a couple more hours".
you are constantly on edge. you are tired. there's work to be done. distances to be walked. through the dust and dirt and smog. children to be fed and old people that depend on your care. and you do get horny, and you fuck and you have to wash before and after ... with ... well, not really clean water ...
and did I mention the smell?
now that doesn't apply to all the four billion, of course but you should get the picture.
I know poverty, and some of the itchiness that comes with it but I don't know "severe water scarcity" ... even in townships in SA they'll tell you it's enough and they'll "hit you" if you waste any.
I don't know about the rest of the world, but here in Quebec, Canada, we had a very dry summer in 2025 and some farmers had to bring literal truckloads of water to their farm for their animals to stay alive. I remember that they were saying to the press that the cost it incurred made them lose a lot of money, making these animals net negative for them, budget wise.
This year was an exception, I'm guessing it's going to become the norm. So, much higher food prices.
Probably seasonal?
Reminds me of what's happening in Tehran, where they might have to relocate the capital due to severe, chronic mismanagement of their water supply.
Sounds like a bunch of useless scare mongering.
Large scale Desalination is getting increasingly achievable: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/11/20/we-need-more-w...
UN and EU push hard for the closure of reservoirs and dams then cry about lack of freshwater, and shout "climate change" when preventable floods cause mass casualties.
Not sure the choice of the word "bankruptcy" is meaningful. "Bankruptcy" is short for "bankruptcy protection", where an insolvent debtor tells a court they have no way of paying back all their current debts with whatever assets they have, and the court deals with the creditors and restructures all those debts in an equitable way (according to the law), so the debtors liability is limited. This is one of the cornerstones of capitalism, the limited liability concept.
When it comes to nature, there is no limited liability. If you don't have water, you don't have water, there's no way to get any "bankruptcy protection" from anyone.
has Iran tried not to farm pistachios and watermelon in drought areas?
Nobody believes UN.
[dupe] Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46696347
I enjoy running these kind of articles through an analysis using chatgpt. Language matters and this is a pretty terribly slanted article trying to hype up fear.
Sometimes I wonder if we would be better having a plugin that did this kind of analysis to give you a pointer towards if the writer is even trying to do their job of being objective or think they need to "make the news" to save the world.
The Smithsonian article uses a well-known set of high-impact narrative devices—catastrophic metaphor, point-of-no-return language, scale shock, authority stacking, vivid exemplars, moralization, and fear-to-action solution framing—to intensify perceived urgency and motivate concern.
I would no say the "world", but areas of it has as noted. Like South Asia, SW N America, N Africa and Spain.
For many of these areas, desalination could meet the gap, but someone will need to pay for it. That is the main issue, no one wants to pay.