Ethanol Production Threatens Plains States With Water Scarcity
Environment News Service:
The rapid increase in ethanol plants under construction or planned for eight key farm states is threatening to pull billions of gallons of water each year from an aquifer that is already depleted and under stress, according to a new report issued Thursday by Environmental Defense.
Authored by Martha Roberts and Theodore Toombs of the Environmental Defense Rocky Mountain office and Dr. Timothy Male, senior ecologist with the Land, Water & Wildlife Program in the group’s Washington, DC office, the report takes the form of a case study of the Ogallala Aquifer region.
One of the world’s largest aquifers, the Ogallala Aquifer, also known as the High Plains Aquifer, is a vast, shallow underground pool of water located beneath portions of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming.
The Ogallala Aquifer supports the majority of irrigated agriculture in the southern Great Plains. But the water table is declining in areas where rates of groundwater pumping have far exceeded rates of replacement. The region was also the center of Dust Bowl conditions in the 1930s.
The report warns that water withdrawals for growing corn and processing it to make ethanol fuel will put unsustainable pressure on the aquifer.
New corn ethanol plants currently under construction or planned will increase the region’s ethanol production capacity by 900 percent, the report finds. The area currently hosts only five ethanol plants with combined production of 71.5 million gallons per year, but another nine plants, with 639 million gallons per year capacity, are currently under construction.
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Also read: Ethanol and Water Use: Should We Be Worried?
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