Minnesota is a Great Lakes state -- although it also feeds the Hudson Bay, Missouri and Mississipp ecosystems. Only a few hundred miles from Lake Superior, there's not enough water in some places to support the needs of expanding industries like ethanol processing. A warning of water scarcity to come in many areas of the Great Plains, putting increasing pressure on the Lakes.
It might be hard to imagine a water shortage in the Land of 10,000 Lakes. But in arid southwestern Minnesota, a scarcity of water has forced utilities to distribute water from well fields via thousands of miles of pipelines and to turn away more than a dozen coveted factories that could make fuel and food from local farm products.
"People can see they're running out of water," said Tim Cowdery, a Minnesota-based hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. "They'd like to build more industry. They'd like to build more ethanol plants. They just don't have the water to do it."
Cowdery and other water resource experts said the region's predicament offers an early glimpse of the sorts of water shortage issues expected to be commonplace across the country in decades to come as demand rises. A farming region such as southwestern Minnesota faces a triple whammy:
• Farms need a lot of water for irrigation and livestock.
• Farm pesticide runoff has polluted groundwater, shrinking the available supply.
• Ethanol plants, soybean processing plants and slaughterhouses use hundreds of millions of gallons more water.
The area relies, not on one large underground aquifer, but on many smaller ones, and more than a century of well-drilling has pretty much found what seems to be available. Healy said his water system and three others have "searched for water throughout a fairly large portion of the area. We haven't found anything in large enough quantity to be of any real value."
http://www.startribune.com/stories/484/5801665.html
Posted by Dave at December 26, 2005 09:15 AM