Global Rundown
- A private equity firm seeking to drill dozens of high-capacity wells in East Texas is suing the local groundwater authority for voiding permits following resident pushback.
- Drought and sudden storms are weakening the electricity output of hydropower facilities in the Brazilian Amazon, a trend mirrored across the globe.
- The South African government plans to lift a 13-year moratorium on fracking in one of its most water-scarce regions.
- A new study estimates that data centers across the United States could consume as much water as 10 million Americans by 2030.
The Lead
Earlier this month, the South African government released draft environmental regulations that would reopen the country’s water-scarce Karoo region to fracking after a 13-year moratorium, Mongabay reports. If adopted, experts predict that oil companies, including Shell, would resubmit old applications for exploration.
Experts have warned that opening the Karoo to drilling would wreak havoc on limited water sources — at least 80 percent of the country’s surface waters are already allocated, leaving groundwater reserves particularly vulnerable.
More than 1 million people live in the dry basin, which experiences frequent rural water shortages exacerbated by agricultural usage and climate change. Such shortages have plagued other regions. Between 2015 and 2018, Cape Town narrowly avoided a Day Zero scenario as it suffered from a 400-year drought.
In Context: To Save A Disappearing Fish, South African Farmers Open Their Ponds
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- New Collaboration Brings Real-Time Water Intelligence and Frontline Journalism to U.S. Communities — True Elements and Circle of Blue launch water intelligence collaboration, uniquely aligning data and front-line reporting for local-to-national insights
This Week’s Top Water Stories, Told In Numbers
43
Number of high-capacity wells that Dallas-based private equity firm Conservation Equity Management is seeking to drill in East Texas, potentially extracting 16 billions of gallons of groundwater each year from the Carrizo-Wilcox Aquifer, the Texas Tribune reports.
The project has been in limbo since late October, when drilling permits that had originally been approved by the local groundwater conservation authority were voided following pushback from legislators as well as local farms and residents who worried their wells would run dry.
Now, the company CEO Kyle Bass has filed suit against the groundwater authority for holding up the project. Conservation Equity Management maintains that the purpose of the drilling is to determine how much water is in the aquifer, before they begin extracting and selling water in earnest.
3 Percent
Amount by which hydropower production fell last year in Brazil compared to 2023, the New York Times reports, resulting in hydro accounting for less than half of the country’s cumulative energy output, a significant departure from historic norms. It isn’t just in the Amazon: around the world, drought is hurting hydropower reliability. Sudden bursts of rainfall, meanwhile, are similarly damaging energy infrastructure.
“In 2023, electricity production from hydroelectric plants worldwide dropped by the equivalent of the power consumed in a year by Chile or the Philippines,” the New York Times reports, “the biggest annual decline as far back as 1965.”
In Context: Two-Decade Hydropower Plunge at Big Colorado River Dams
On the Radar
By 2030, data center campuses across the United States could consume between 730 million and 1.12 billion cubic meters of water each year — the equivalent usage of between 6.5 million and 10 million Americans — a study published this week in Nature Sustainability suggests.
The researchers also estimate the carbon emissions from these facilities could equal 10 million cars.
“Projections show that data centers are going to be powered by fracked gas through 2035,” Jean Su, one of the study’s authors, told Inside Climate News. “And that’s in the political interest of the president and in the interest of the fracked gas industry.”
Wetland Watch
Peatland Rewetting: Drained for centuries, just 2 percent of Germany’s historic peatlands remain preserved today — a loss with massive climate consequences. Drained peatlands emit more carbon dioxide each year than all of the world’s air travel combined, Deutsche Welle reports. According to the outlet: “Although peatlands cover only about 3 percent of the Earth’s land area, they hold roughly one-third of the world’s soil carbon — twice as much as all the planet’s forests combined.”
In Germany, some farmers near the Baltic Sea are hoping to change their practices and re-wet their former peat fields to restore these crucial carbon sinks. But money talks, and the effort is rarely immediately profitable. It takes several years for restored peatlands to support healthy paludiculture — “farming adapted to peat wetlands” — and many growers are reliant on European Union subsidies, which are only guaranteed for five years, in the interim.
For many farmers, mounting financial risks deter them from committing to a switch.
