Excellent series of articles from Circle of Blue on China’s rising water needs and how this intersects with its energy demands. In short, China’s water supplies are in the south while its coal reserves are in the north. While wind and solar are going to play a fairly big roll in the future (fairly only relative to the size of China’s energy needs - in absolute terms they will be enormous) coal will still be needed to supply 70-80% of energy needs. But extracting coal requires water, lots of water and the north has very little. One solution to this dilemma is the north-south pipeline:
[quote]…the South-North Water Transfer Project, a feat of national hubris and hydrologic engineering spanning 12 provinces, 3,000-kilometers (1,900 miles) of canals and tunnels, is meant to accomplish something only China would attempt: replumbing an entire nation.
If scheduling and operations projections are accurate, in 2014 some 13 billion cubic meters (3.4 trillion gallons) of water per year will pour through the tunnels of the central line, under construction here in Henan Province, and will be sent north to help curb water shortages in more than a dozen cities, including Beijing.
The eastern line, a second transfer project, should already be operating by then, transporting 14.8 billion cubic meters of water annually from the lower Yangtze River to Tianjin.[/quote]
The USSR was preparing to try something similar before its demise. There was speculation that it would disrupt the climate, potentially worldwide, and would have consequences severe enough that they would have wished they had never tried it.
Something like the Caspian Sea fiasco, I guess.
[quote=“bababa”]The USSR was preparing to try something similar before its demise. There was speculation that it would disrupt the climate, potentially worldwide, and would have consequences severe enough that they would have wished they had never tried it.
Something like the Caspian Sea fiasco, I guess.[/quote]
Gotta link? I would be interested in reading about that.
Wow, that will be a colossal user of power. The CAP canal, (Central Arizona Project), which provides Colorado River water to Phoenix and Tucson, is much shorter (541 KM) and requires about 25% of the electricity generated from the Navajo Generating Plant. (2280 Megawatts). Much of it is used to pump the water up from 224 m at Lake Havasu , to 728 m at Tucson.
China is fucked. The fact that they’re even considering anything so outlandish suggests they’re grasping at straws to prevent imminent famine and economic collapse. I remember reading about this project while I was in China a few months back - they had a bit of a feature on China’s environmental issues in the local press, which quite surprised me.
The basic problem is that China is simultaneously trying to copy American levels of conspicuous consumption while exporting everything of value - their water, raw materials, air - to other countries. That’s simply not physically possible. In a scant 30 years, China has gone from being relatively unspoilt to a vast environmental disaster zone unable to feed it’s people (according to the article I read, there is now less than 100m2 of functioning farmland per person - on average, a vegetarian needs about 200m2, a meat-eater about 1000m2).
Since they haven’t changed their modus operandi to any noticable extent - after all, just imagine the kind of ecological disruption that water-pumping operation will produce - I give them 20 years at the outside before they do another USSR.
The sad, sad thing is, China could have been a fairly self-contained, sustainable and profitable economy if they’d been a bit smarter. It could easily have become one of the most prosperous places on the planet. Seems to me, the “Chinese Miracle” has simply been an enormous face-saving exercise to allow Chinese leaders to run around shouting see! see! we can make ugly, car-filled cities even better than you Americans! Now its payback time.