How much water for the chemicals and O&G industry?
That is an increase but less than I was expecting. Looking at the water use charts at TWDB it looks like irrigation uses the lions share of water at over 55%, which is most likely for farming. Municipalities (people) are next at about 25%. Surprisingly cattle and livestock barely register. I would have expected more.
Still not a fan of it, but interesting to see the comparative numbers.
Does the livestock figure include the water being used to grow their feed? Probably not because of course there’s no guarantee that their feed is Texas sourced. But there are just SO many examples of already too dry places having astronomical amounts of water given (read: stolen legally) to farm stupidly water intensive crops that are only good for feeding livestock like alfalfa.
I wonder if this is newly built/to be built data centers for AI, or ones that previously existed/ are being built for general web infrastructure. The article doesn’t say.
You gotta wonder if there’s not ways to make this useful. Like, what if you used steam heat like NYC, or could supply hot water to downtown for businesses and hotels - even if you’d still have to heat it up some, it should be less than heating from tap temperatures.
NVIDIA is going to start selling hot water heaters, the heating elements are 2x H100s.
“Honey can you vibe code something, I need to get a shower!”
