Measuring the Embodied Energy in Drinking Water Supply Systems: A Case Study in The Great Lakes Region

Abstract

A sustainable supply of both energy and water is critical to long-term national security, effective climate policy, natural resource sustainability, and social wellbeing. These two critical resources are inextricably and reciprocally linked; the production of energy requires large volumes of water, while the treatment and distribution of water is also significantly dependent upon energy. In this paper, a hybrid analysis approach is proposed to estimate embodied energy and to perform a structural path analysis of drinking water supply systems. The applicability of this approach is then tested through a case study of a large municipal water utility (city of Kalamazoo) in the Great Lakes region to provide insights on the issues of water-energy pricing and carbon footprints. Kalamazoo drinking water requires approximately 9.2 MJ/m(3) of energy to produce, 30% of which is associated with indirect inputs such as system construction and treatment chemicals.

Modeling the determinants of large-scale building water use: Implications for data-driven urban sustainability policy

“…"water-energy nexus") is garnering substantial interest from the research community. The power generation sector consumes nearly twice as much water as the next biggest sector in the United States (Blackhurst, Hendrickson, & Vidal, 2010) and drinking water supply and distribution have also been shown to require significant amount of energy, highlighting the importance of simultaneously understanding energy and water usage (Mo, Nasiri, Eckelman, Zhang, & Zimmerman, 2010). Recent work also illustrated the merits of conveying this linkage between energy and water usage to engender efficient behavior (Jeong, Gulbinas, Jain, & Taylor, 2014).…”

Can municipal wastewater treatment systems be carbon neutral?

“…The primary energy factors were specifically adjusted for Florida following the method provided by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA, 1995), and are provided in Table 2. The embodied energy intensities for the construction and operation of the whole WWTP, the construction of CHP systems ( 3 1 ), heat drying systems ( 3 4 ), and reclaimed water pipeline systems ( 3 7 ), and for recovered nutrient ( 3 6 ) were calculated using Equations (2) and (3) based on a hybrid inputeoutput method (Mo et al, 2010(Mo et al, , 2011. A commodity-by-commodity inputeoutput table containing 424 sectors derived from the 2002 make table and use table provided by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA, 2011) was used in this study.…”

Comparing the Life Cycle Energy Consumption, Global Warming and Eutrophication Potentials of Several Water and Waste Service Options

“…LCA has been widely used to evaluate the system performances of water and wastewater technologies. For example, LCA studies have addressed specific aspects of conventional centralized drinking or wastewater systems, i.e., various options for drinking water supply systems [18][19][20][21], centralized and decentralized wastewater treatment [22][23][24], stormwater management strategies [25], or entire water and wastewater service systems [26]. Several recent review articles summarized the LCA developments in the water management area and emphasized the continuing research needs [24,26,27].…”