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Inside California’s audacious plan to stash more than a trillion gallons of water underground
The world is slowly but surely running out of groundwater. A resource that for centuries has seemed unending is being lapped up faster than nature can replenish it.
“Globally speaking, there’s a groundwater crisis,” said Michael Kiparsky, director of the Wheeler Water Institute at UC Berkeley’s Center for Law, Energy, and the Environment. “We have treated groundwater as a free and limitless source of water in effect, even as we have learned that it’s not that.”
Aquifers are the porous, sponge-like bodies of rock underground that store groundwater; they can be tapped by wells and discharge naturally at springs or wetlands. Especially in places that have already been hard-hit by climate change, many aquifers have become so depleted that humans need to step in; the Arabian Aquifer in Saudi Arabia and the Murzuk-Djado Basin in North Africa, per a 2015 study, are particularly stressed and have little hope of recharging. In the U.S., aquifers are depleting fast from the Pacific Northwest to the Gulf, but drought-stricken California is the poster-child of both water stress and efforts to undo the damage.
In March, the state approved plans to actively replenish its groundwater after months of being inundated by unexpected levels of rainfall. While this move is not brand-new — the state’s Water Resources Control Board has been structuring water restrictions to encourage enhanced aquifer recharge since 2015 in the brief windows when California has water to spare — the scale of this year’s effort is unprecedented.
But just how will all that flood water get back underground? California’s approach, which promotes flooding certain fields and letting the water seep down slowly through soil and rocks to the aquifers below, represents just one potential technique. There are others, from injecting water straight into wells to developing pits and basins designed specifically for infiltration. It’s a plumbing challenge on an unprecedented scale.
The act of putting water back into aquifers has a number of unglamorous names — enhanced aquifer recharge, water banking, artificial groundwater recharge, and aquifer storage and recovery, among others — with some nuanced differences between them. But they all mean roughly the same thing: increasing the amount of water that infiltrates into the ground and ultimately into aquifers.
This can have the overall effect of smoothing the high peaks and deep valleys of water supply in places dealing with extreme weather fluctuations. The idea is to capture the extra water that floods during periods of intense rainfall, and bank it for use during droughts. (While aquifers can also be recharged using any old freshwater, water rights are so complicated in the West that floodwater often represents “the only surface water that’s not spoken for,” Thomas Harter, a groundwater hydrology professor at U.C. Davis, told local television outlet KCRA.)
Recharge has the potential added benefit of protecting groundwater from saltwater intrusion. As water is pumped from a coastal aquifer, water from the ocean can seep in to fill the empty space, potentially poisoning the well for future use for agriculture or drinking water. It’s a risk that will only get bigger as the climate warms and sea levels rise.
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According to the Environmental Protection Agency, aquifer recharge is most often used in places where groundwater demand is high and increasing even as supply remains limited. These tend to be places with lots of people and lots of farms; the San Joaquin Valley, which is the focus of California’s current plan, checks all of those boxes. Aquifers are the source of nearly 40% of water used by farms and cities in California, per the Public Policy Institute of California, and more in dry years. And, until 2023, most recent years have been dry.
In response to this year’s sudden reversal of California’s water fortunes, the state’s Water Board — which regulates water rights — allowed local contractors of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to move up to 600,000 acre-feet of water, or well over a trillion gallons, to places that normally would be off-limits this time of year. Those contractors, who are largely farmers and other major landowners, have until July 30 to take advantage.
“California is essentially the pilot project for how we want to do this in the future,” said Erik Ekdahl, deputy director for the Water Board’s water rights division. It won’t be until the end of the year that the state will know exactly how much water was successfully banked, but Ekdahl said anecdotally that some contractors have already taken steps to put the spare water underground.
This comes as California’s enormous snowpack begins to melt: a potential boon for the aquifers that could also mean problematic and dangerous floods for the communities downstream of the runoff.
How does enhanced aquifer recharge actually happen? It’s not as if the vast underground stretches of rock and sediment have faucets or even obvious holes leading to their watery depths. People aiming to reverse the centuries-long trend of drawing up water without actively replacing it have a range of artificial recharge options, which either speed along the natural seepage process or direct water straight to the aquifer below.
In the former cases, one option is to allow water to flood fields left fallow, a process known as “surface spreading,” as is beginning to happen in the San Joaquin Valley.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
Water can also be directed to dedicated recharge basins and canals. In both cases, excess water is absorbed by fast-draining soil, which encourages it to pass below ground. Aside from the technical challenge of redirecting water from typical flood patterns, these approaches tend to be low-tech.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
But in cases of aquifer depletion where those approaches are impractical — such as when the aquifer is under impermeable rock — injection wells represent a direct connection to the groundwater. These are either deep pits that drain into sedimentary layers above an underground drinking water source (like a traditional well functioning in reverse), or else webs of tubes and casing that blast water straight into the source.
Heatmap Illustration/Getty Images
Cities are also experimenting with aquifer recharge on a smaller scale. For urban stormwater, the EPA promotes certain “green infrastructure” approaches that mold the built environment to mimic natural hydrology. For instance, shallow channels lined with vegetation, known as bioswales, redirect stormwater while encouraging it to seep through the ground. Permeable pavement — in use in several Northeastern states — works much the same way. Meanwhile, rain gardens designed to prevent flooding have the added benefit of replenishing groundwater.
Determining when and where to use different approaches to aquifer recharge, though, can be unclear. We are still a long way from widespread or coordinated adoption of these techniques, but researchers are working on weighing their costs and benefits.
Supported by a $2 million EPA grant, Kiparsky is part of a U.C. Berkeley team looking at how to make California-esque recharge work on a national scale. , including by developing a cost-benefit tool for water managers. Some of the geochemical and physical considerations are relatively simple to measure: Is the soil in question porous? Are there gravel-filled “paleo valleys” that could allow water to rapidly seep to the aquifers below, as one 2022 study found?
More complicated, potentially immeasurable, but no less important are the legal and regulatory considerations around water rights. It is, as Kiparsky put it, one of the quintessential modern examples of the tragedy of the commons. Whether the government will be able to entice individuals to use their own little corner of Earth to fill an aquifer for the benefit of the many is an open question.
But Kiparsky is fairly optimistic that recharge will take hold in years where there is water to spare, as the West recognizes that future drought must be prepared for, especially when it’s raining.
“Is recharge going to become a bigger part of water management? I would say absolutely,” he said. “I’m not usually in the game of making predictions, but I would predict the answer is yes. When we can figure out how to do it.”
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On prepurchase agreements, Al Gore, and Norway’s EVs
Current conditions: Ecuador’s government-enforced blackouts will begin tomorrow night as drought threatens hydroelectric plants • Storm Boris is causing flooding in parts of Italy • Montana could see very heavy rainfall and flash flooding today.
Frontier, a coalition of carbon removal buyers, announced this morning a fourth round of prepurchase agreements, worth $4.5 million. The coalition facilitated agreements with nine suppliers to remove carbon from the atmosphere on behalf of five of Frontier’s buyers: Stripe, Shopify, Alphabet, H&M Group, and Match. The removal projects are located across six countries and utilize a range of techniques, including rock weathering, direct air capture, and ocean alkalinity enhancement. In a press release, Frontier said “a significant number of companies in this purchase cycle are integrating carbon removal into existing large-scale industries. This strategy can reduce costs and accelerate scale-up relative to standalone carbon removal projects.”
Frontier
Brazil’s worst drought on record, now in its second year, has caused water levels in the rivers that run through the Amazon to fall to historic lows, and some have even dried up entirely. One key tributary that supplies the mighty Amazon River, the Solimoes, has water levels that are 14 feet below average for the first half of September. The drought is fueling numerous large fires, many of which were started by humans but have plenty of dry vegetation to keep them going.
Plumes of wildfire smoke hang over South America.NASA
According to data from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, almost half of the Amazon fires are burning pristine forest. This is unusual, The New York Timesreported, and “means fighting deforestation in the Amazon is no longer enough to stop fires.” The Amazon rainforest is one of the world’s most important carbon sinks. If it collapses, it could release huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, exacerbating the climate crisis. Researchers with World Weather Attribution say climate change is the main driver of the Amazon’s ongoing drought. “Climate change is no longer something to worry about in the future, 10 or 20 years from now,” Greenpeace spokesperson Romulo Batista toldReuters. “It’s here and it’s here with much more force than we expected.”
A coalition of some of the world’s most prominent shipping and carrier companies is piloting the “first-ever U.S. over-the-road electrified corridor.” Participants include AIT Worldwide Logistics, DB Schenker, Maersk, Microsoft, and PepsiCo, who will drive their long-haul heavy-duty electric trucks along the I-10 corridor between L.A. and El Paso to identify pain points and share learnings in an effort to hasten the decarbonization of land freight. Terawatt Infrastructure will provide the charging infrastructure for the corridor with six of its own charging hubs. Terawatt’s website says it has 14 sites under development, four of which are expected to come online this year. Heavy-duty vehicles account for a quarter of transport-related greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S. The new coalition is supported by the global nonprofit Smart Freight Centre.
Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore’s green asset management business, Generation Investment Management, put out its eighth annual Sustainability Trends Report this week. The paper is packed full of interesting insights (both uplifting and depressing), but one stands out. It says upgrading the power grid is “the critical issue to get the energy transition moving faster in the big, developed economies.” It includes this graphic showing the cumulative backlog of renewable-energy projects wanting to connect to the grid in the U.S.:
Generation Investment Management
Gore has been doing the media rounds this week. He told the Financial Times that a Trump victory in November “would be very bad.” “Most climate activists that I know in the United States believe that the single most important near-term decision America can make with regard to climate is who is the next president. It’s a bit of a Manichaean choice.” But, he added that the energy transition was, at this point, “unstoppable.”
In case you missed it: Norway has become the first country in the world to have more electric vehicles on the road than gas-powered cars. Diesel still reigns supreme in terms of registered vehicles, but the share of fully electric cars registered is now larger than the share of cars that run on gasoline. The director of the Norwegian road federation said he expects EVs will overtake diesel cars, too, by 2026. EVs already make up the vast majority (94%!) of new vehicle sales in Norway, and could very well approach 100% sometime next year.
A recent study finds that most people have a tendency to grossly underestimate the average carbon footprint of the richest individuals in society, while overestimating the carbon footprint of the poorest individuals.
Geothermal is getting closer to the big time. Last week, Fervo Energy — arguably the country’s leading enhanced geothermal company — announced that its Utah demonstration project had achieved record production capacity. The new approach termed “enhanced geothermal,” which borrows drilling techniques and expertise from the oil and gas industry, seems poised to become a big player on America’s clean, 24/7 power grid of the future.
Why is geothermal so hot? How soon could it appear on the grid — and why does it have advantages that other zero-carbon technologies don’t? On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob and Jesse speak with a practitioner and an expert in the world of enhanced geothermal. Sarah Jewett is the vice president of strategy at Fervo Energy, which she joined after several years in the oil and gas industry. Wilson Ricks is a doctoral student of mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University, where he studies macro-energy systems modeling. Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University.
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Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: I just wanted to hit a different note here, which is, Sarah, you’ve alluded a few times to your past in the oil and gas industry. I think this is true across Fervo, is that of course, the technologies we’re discussing here are fracking derived. What has your background in the oil and gas industry and hydrocarbons taught you that you think about at Fervo now, and developing geothermal as a resource?
Sarah Jewett: There are so many things. I mean, I’m thinking about my time in the oil and gas industry daily. And you’re exactly right, I think today about 60% of Fervo’s employees come from the oil and gas industry. And because we are only just about to start construction on our first power facility, the percentage of contractors and field workers from the oil and gas industry is much higher than 60%.
Jesse Jenkins: Right, you can’t go and hire a bunch of people with geothermal experience when there is no large-scale geothermal industry to pull from.
Jewett: That’s right. That’s right. And so the oil and gas industry, I think, has taught us, so many different types of things. I mean, we can’t really exist without thinking about the history of the oil and gas industry — even, you know, Wilson and I are sort of comparing our learning rates to learning rates observed in various different oil and gas basins by different operators, so you can see a lot of prior technological pathways.
I mean, first off, we’re just using off the shelf technology that has been proven and tested in the oil and gas industry over the last 25 years, which has been, really, the reason why geothermal is able to have this big new unlock, because we’re using all of this off the shelf technology that now exists. It’s not like the early 2000s, where there was a single bit we could have tried. Now there are a ton of different bits that are available to us that we can try and say, how is this working? How is this working? How’s this working?
So I think, from a technological perspective, it’s helpful. And then from just an industry that has set a solid example it’s been really helpful, and that can be leveraged in a number of different ways. Learning rates, for example; how to set up supply chains in remote areas, for example; how to engage with and interact with communities. I think we’ve seen examples of oil and gas doing that well and doing it poorly. And I’ve gotten to observe firsthand the oil and gas industry doing it well and doing it poorly.
And so I’ve gotten to learn a lot about how we need to treat those around us, explain to them what it is that we’re doing, how open we need to be. And I think that has been immensely helpful as we’ve crafted the role that we’re going to play in these communities at large.
Wilson Ricks: I think it’s also interesting to talk about the connection to the oil and gas industry from the perspective of the political economy of the energy transition, specifically because you hear policymakers talk all the time about retraining workers from these legacy industries that, if we’re serious about decarbonizing, will unavoidably have to contract — and, you know, getting those people involved in clean energy, in these new industries.
And often that’s taking drillers and retraining some kind of very different job — or coal miners — into battery manufacturers. This is almost exactly one to one. Like Sarah said, there’s additional expertise and experience that you need to get really good at doing this in the geothermal context. But for the most part, you are taking the exact same skills and just reapplying them, and so it allows for both a potentially very smooth transition of workforces, and also it allows for scale-up of enhanced geothermal to proceed much more smoothly than it potentially would if you had to kind of train an entire workforce from scratch to just do this.
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
Watershed’s climate data engine helps companies measure and reduce their emissions, turning the data they already have into an audit-ready carbon footprint backed by the latest climate science. Get the sustainability data you need in weeks, not months. Learn more at watershed.com.
As a global leader in PV and ESS solutions, Sungrow invests heavily in research and development, constantly pushing the boundaries of solar and battery inverter technology. Discover why Sungrow is the essential component of the clean energy transition by visiting sungrowpower.com.
Antenna Group helps you connect with customers, policymakers, investors, and strategic partners to influence markets and accelerate adoption. Visit antennagroup.com to learn more.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.
Why the new “reasoning” models might gobble up more electricity — at least in the short term
What happens when artificial intelligence takes some time to think?
The newest set of models from OpenAI, o1-mini and o1-preview, exhibit more “reasoning” than existing large language models and associated interfaces, which spit out answers to prompts almost instantaneously.
Instead, the new model will sometimes “think” for as long as a minute or two. “Through training, they learn to refine their thinking process, try different strategies, and recognize their mistakes,” OpenAI announced in a blog post last week. The company said these models perform better than their existing ones on some tasks, especially related to math and science. “This is a significant advancement and represents a new level of AI capability,” the company said.
But is it also a significant advancement in energy usage?
In the short run at least, almost certainly, as spending more time “thinking” and generating more text will require more computing power. As Erik Johannes Husom, a researcher at SINTEF Digital, a Norwegian research organization, told me, “It looks like we’re going to get another acceleration of generative AI’s carbon footprint.”
Discussion of energy use and large language models has been dominated by the gargantuan requirements for “training,” essentially running a massive set of equations through a corpus of text from the internet. This requires hardware on the scale of tens of thousands of graphical processing units and an estimated 50 gigawatt-hours of electricity to run.
Training GPT-4 cost “more than” $100 million OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has said; the next generation models will likely cost around $1 billion, according to Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei, a figure that might balloon to $100 billion for further generation models, according to Oracle founder Larry Ellison.
While a huge portion of these costs are hardware, the energy consumption is considerable as well. (Meta reported that when training its Llama 3 models, power would sometimes fluctuate by “tens of megawatts,” enough to power thousands of homes). It’s no wonder that OpenAI’s chief executive Sam Altman has put hundreds of millions of dollars into a fusion company.
But the models are not simply trained, they're used out in the world, generating outputs (think of what ChatGPT spits back at you). This process tends to be comparable to other common activities like streaming Netflix or using a lightbulb. This can be done with different hardware and the process is more distributed and less energy intensive.
As large language models are being developed, most computational power — and therefore most electricity — is used on training, Charlie Snell, a PhD student at University of California at Berkeley who studies artificial intelligence, told me. “For a long time training was the dominant term in computing because people weren’t using models much.” But as these models become more popular, that balance could shift.
“There will be a tipping point depending on the user load, when the total energy consumed by the inference requests is larger than the training,” said Jovan Stojkovic, a graduate student at the University of Illinois who has written about optimizing inference in large language models.
And these new reasoning models could bring that tipping point forward because of how computationally intensive they are.
“The more output a model produces, the more computations it has performed. So, long chain-of-thoughts leads to more energy consumption,” Husom of SINTEF Digital told me.
OpenAI staffers have been downright enthusiastic about the possibilities of having more time to think, seeing it as another breakthrough in artificial intelligence that could lead to subsequent breakthroughs on a range of scientific and mathematical problems. “o1 thinks for seconds, but we aim for future versions to think for hours, days, even weeks. Inference costs will be higher, but what cost would you pay for a new cancer drug? For breakthrough batteries? For a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis? AI can be more than chatbots,” OpenAI researcher Noam Brown tweeted.
But those “hours, days, even weeks” will mean more computation and “there is no doubt that the increased performance requires a lot of computation,” Husom said, along with more carbon emissions.
But Snell told me that might not be the end of the story. It’s possible that over the long term, the overall computing demands for constructing and operating large language models will remain fixed or possibly even decline.
While “the default is that as capabilities increase, demand will increase and there will be more inference,” Snell told me, “maybe we can squeeze reasoning capability into a small model ... Maybe we spend more on inference but it’s a much smaller model.”
OpenAI hints at this possibility, describing their o1-mini as “a smaller model optimized for STEM reasoning,” in contrast to other, larger models that “are pre-trained on vast datasets” and “have broad world knowledge,” which can make them “expensive and slow for real-world applications.” OpenAI is suggesting that a model can know less but think more and deliver comparable or better results to larger models — which might mean more efficient and less energy hungry large language models.
In short, thinking might use less brain power than remembering, even if you think for a very long time.