Let’s start thinking about water!

Water requirements for hydrogen production

Lately, it seems that new uses for water are coming quick and serious with chip manufacturing plants, data centers, and, now, hydrogen production. Hydrogen production involves cracking apart hydrocarbons or water molecules into Hindenburg-quality hydrogen gas to power our machines that can’t easily convert to battery power. Texas is well poised infrastructurally to benefit from hydrogen production given the pipelines that spider the state. However, depending on how hydrogen is generated, production requires water, and possibly a lot of water. Lin and pals assess water requirements and how hydrogen production might affect water resources in the state. The authors conclude that water demands for hydrogen could be 2–6.8 percent of water demands by 2050 (that’s 370,000 to 1.25 million acre-feet per year). Natural gas–based hydrogen (blue hydrogen) water production is less water intense at 9 gallons per kilogram of gas as compared to water-based hydrogen with wind-powered polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) electrolysis at 14 gallons per kilogram. PEM electrolysis requires pure water, so desalination is required. Much of the planned hydrogen facilities are located along the water-stressed Gulf Coast. Accordingly, the authors recommend that facilities use treated wastewater or brackish groundwater to minimize water-resource impacts. However, the authors don’t consider the growing use of treated wastewater by the communities themselves (including direct potable reuse) nor the land subsidence impacts from increased groundwater production.

Rainfall impacts on E. coli in Texas recreational waterbodies

Elevated E. coli concentrations in recreational waters increase the risk of recreational activities making people sick. Liu and compadres take a state-wide look at how extreme rainfalls affect E. coli concentrations in water bodies (with extreme defined as the monthly 1-day maximum rainfall from PRISM). Their results show that northern and eastern Texas have higher E. coli concentrations after extreme rainfall events during dry seasons. This is probably due to higher proportions of pastures, wetlands, and silts. Western and southern Texas show slightly higher risks of elevated E. coli after extreme rainfalls during wet seasons. This is probably due to greater slopes and clays. They also showed that increased climate variability will likely increase extreme rainfall events. Furthermore, they show that Black and Latinx populations experience greater impacts from elevated E. coli after extreme rainfalls in certain months as compared to others.

Economic value of oyster agriculture

Texas has recently allowed oysters to be farmed in the gulf (note my deft maneuvering away from the naming controversy here…). Not only does this allow oysters to be corralled and raised before appearing next to lemon wedges and cocktail sauce at a local Eddie V’s, but it allows them to be used as bio-extractors, removing elevated nutrients from baywaters. Lima and hobnobbers took a look at this side-benefit of oysters and placed a price tag on it (equivalent to the cost of upstream wastewater plants to remove the same amount of nutrients). They found that a typical oyster farm removes about 4,900–7,100 pounds of nitrogen a year with a value of about $42,000 to $230,000. It may be that oyster farms could be used to address increased nutrients as an offset to up-basin nutrient pollution (although that doesn’t address in-stream elevated nutrients).