U.S. Water Utilities Grapple With Aging Infrastructure, Rising Costs, Affordability

The country’s metropolitan centers, by and large, are forging ahead on their own, not waiting on Beltway politics to be resolved before making investments to prepare their water systems for the decades ahead.

The largest increases in water prices last year among major U.S. cities were clustered in Arizona and California, states vulnerable to drought, climate change, and other natural hazards that are poised to constrain water supplies. To prepare, cities in these states are spending billions of dollars on water recycling facilities and distribution systems.

Such large investments, and the rate increases necessary to pay for them, are calling into question the ability of poor households to keep up with the rising cost of water. Cities continue to grapple with a water-utility trilemma: balancing infrastructure investment, financial stability, and affordability of their services.

Oil and Gas Developments Confront Water Challenges

The Permian basin, which spans New Mexico and Texas, is the hottest play in oil these days. It is also an arid region where fossil fuel development is putting immense pressure on water resources. The intersection between water and energy, and the consequences for markets, policies, and ecosystems, is on full display.

With fossil fuel production in the Permian basin reaching ever greater heights, New Mexico lawmakers moved to clarify the legal status of the salty, chemical-laden water that gushes from wells in larger volumes than even the oil that is the object of the hunt. For every barrel of oil produced in the basin, between two and five barrels of “produced” water come out of the ground with it.

That salty water has to go somewhere. A burgeoning, multibillion-dollar industry is being constructed to dispose of that waste and, potentially, put it to use outside of the oilfields.

Not having a means for getting rid of produced water “could literally shut down the oil industry,” one industry observer told Circle of Blue.

Polluted Waters Take Toll on Health and Environment

Polluted waters are an underestimated and underappreciated global scourge.

That conclusion comes from a recently released World Bank report, whose authors claim water pollution is an “invisible crisis” that will worsen as the planet warms. Water pollution, as Richard Damania, the report’s lead author, told Circle of Blue, is “bad all around.”

Many of those pollution problems have developed over decades. In farming communities, the culprit is nitrate concentrations, which are rising in private wells. Elsewhere in the United States, the health risks from toxic “forever” chemicals, known collectively as PFAS, are forcing regulators to consider new drinking water standards.

Attempts to meet water challenges have unleashed their own set of perils. The waste product from desalination is growing too large to ignore, argues a paper from a United Nations think tank that provides the first estimate of global brine production from desalination.

HotSpots H2O

Water is both a source of tension and a casualty of war. In the end, it is the people who suffer.

Circle of Blue’s weekly HotSpots series highlights areas in which water access plays a role in civic upheaval and armed conflict.

A political standoff in Venezuela this year plunged a nervous citizenry deeper into misery and deprivation. Mismanaged infrastructure produced power outages, disease outbreaks, and unreliable water service.

Allegations of mismanagement and corruption were also leveled in Zimbabwe, where two reservoirs that supply the capital Harare went dry during a drought, cutting municipal water service to an estimated two million people.