BlunderValley.ca

The Water Consumption Question

Smoky & Peace Rivers, Alberta, Canada

How much water will this project consume, exactly?

A quick look at the numbers:

It's important to note that these figures are not based on information from the project itself. That's because at present, almost no information has been made public. O'Leary Ventures and the Greenview Industrial Gateway must immediately make details available about the exact technologies they plan to deploy, so that the public can properly assess the project's likely impact on the surrounding communities and natural environment. A request for this information was emailed to GIG Executive Director Kyle Reiling on 2024-01-04, and if there is a response, it will be noted here.

Data Centres

Data centres use a lot of water. Figures vary, and some tech companies have a habit of cooking the books when it comes to documenting their resource consumption.

One number we have is from Meta: they estimate that the industry average is 1.8L of water consumed (evaporated) for every 1kWh of electricity used by a data centre. Other research gives a range of between 1L and 9L consumed per kWh.

Now, outside temperatures play a big role in determining the amount of water consumed, and it's true that the cooler climate in Northern Alberta is an advantage here for much of the year. But when we're talking about a 7.5GW project, even that low-end estimate of 1L/kWh represents an enormous amount of water: over the course of a year, this works out to 65.7 million cubic metres of water, a figure that is already more than 2x the 24 million cubic metres that the Greenview Industrial Gateway (GIG) has asked for permission to use.

And we haven't even gotten to the water use of gas plants.

Gas Plants

The water consumption of a typical 'wet-cooled' gas plant is roughly 2L per kWh generated.

There are also 'dry-cooled' gas plants that use almost no water for cooling. However, given that the GIG's executive director Kyle Reiling said in an interview that when it comes to this project, "the large majority of the water is for the electrical production", it's a safe assumption that these proposed gas plants are the kind that use a ton of water. At 7.5 GW total, and a rate of 2L per kWh, power generation would require a staggering 131.4 billion litres of water each year.

But wait, there's more

Because gas plants represent a massive amount of carbon emissions compared to energy generation from renewables like wind and solar, advocates of burning fossil fuels like to talk about Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) as a way to lower the carbon footprint of projects like this one.

But not only does CCS increase the cost of energy generation at a time when wind and solar are already the less expensive options, it also increases a gas plant's water consumption significantly. Depending on the exact process, this increase is likely between 31% and 68%. This means that, if O'Leary and the GIG are planning on capturing carbon emissions, these gas plants would consume between 171 billion and 220 billion litres of water per year - around 7 to 10 times the amount of water they've asked for permission to use. Add this to the earlier estimate of water consumption by the data centres themselves, and the total could well reach 280 billion litres per year.