Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Water as the New Oil

Business Week raises another subject for us to worry about: water.



[Having grown up in Arizona, I've heard about water issues all of my life. My grandfather, a cotton farmer, used "waterstealingcalifornians" as one word. Of course, the farmers in California had their own version regarding Arizonans.] An excerpt from the article:


If water is the new oil, T. Boone Pickens is a modern-day John D. Rockefeller. Pickens owns more water than any other individual in the U.S. and is looking to control even more. He hopes to sell the water he already has, some 65 billion gallons a year, to Dallas, transporting it over 250 miles, 11 counties, and about 650 tracts of private property. The electricity generated by an enormous wind farm he is setting up in the Panhandle would also flow along that corridor. As far as Pickens is concerned, he could be selling wind, water, natural gas, or uranium; it's all a matter of supply and demand. "There are people who will buy the water when they need it. And the people who have the water want to sell it. That's the blood, guts, and feathers of the thing," he says.

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