Summary for Monday March 22

Topic 1: Blue Covenant/Bottlemania project discussion. See here for details.

Topic 2: Water footprint of oil shale- Just like the Canadian tar sands that we discussed on Friday, US oil shale is an unconventional source of hydrocarbons that are economically viable at high oil prices and that uses large amount of water (2.6 to 4 units of water for every unit of oil extracted according to the BLM-warning: huge 673 page .pdf) in a part of the world that does not exactly have a great deal of water to spare.

Topic 3: The general concept of water footprint- According to Hoekstra and Chapagain (2007) US per capita water consumption is 1797 gallons/cap/day. Of that total use, 9% is domestic, 59% agricultural, and 32% industrial. You should be able to reproduce these numbers, be able to explain the differences between the different types of uses, and be able to tell where 'virtual' or 'embedded' water is found in these numbers. You should know where the USA ranks in the world in terms of per capita water consumption and why.

Topic 4: The specific water footprint of certain consumer goods- you should have a general idea of the amount of water that is required in the production of some common products. I do not want you to memorize the list that we presented in class this morning but you should have a general idea, for instance, that a can of Coke requires ~250 times the can's volume of water (mostly to grow the sweetener with a little bit to run the factory), and processed food can require way more water than unprocessed, and that corn-fed beef requires a huge amount of water per pound.

If you are interested in reading more about water footprints and what goes into their calculation, the Water footprint manual (Hoekstra et al., 2009) is an excellent (and exhaustive) resource. Also, I mentioned that US water consumption was down according to a recent USGS report (that compared 2005 to 2000 and 1980). A link to that study can be found here.

Slides shown in lecture today are available as a .pdf on Sakai.

The my maps page has been updated with the locations mentioned in today's lecture.