Albuquerque, New Mexico
water problems

First posted
Monday May 1, 2008 07:01

Tuesday June 9, 2009 06:08

Tuesday June 9, 2009 06:08 http://www.prosefights.org/abqwater/abqwater.htm#16golfcourses

The Semiconductor Industry Association said Friday it expects worldwide chip sales to sales will drop 21 percent this year, a much larger drop than the 5.6 percent decline it forecast late last year. SIA said it now believes global sales for the year will be $195.6 billion, down from the $248.6 billion it had projected previously. SIA projects that sales will begin to rebound in 2010, with year-on-year growth of 6.5 percent to $208.3 billion, followed by 6.5 percent growth in 2011 to $221.9 billion. One of Intel Corp's largest chip manufacturing plants is located in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, immediately northwest of Albuquerque. While semiconductor manufacturing is a minor user of the world's total water supply, its impact on specific regions can be significant. For example, Intel Rio Rancho is the largest water user in the Bernalillo water district of New Mexico, even though its annual water draw is only about the same as 16 golf courses.

Photos of Rio Rancho new construction - Monday April 6, 2009.

Time running out on water-rights bill comment. April 9, 2009

Monday April 6, 2009 05:55 Banjo Bob lesson on Saturday April 4, 2009 terminated with Worried Man Blues assignment from Janet Davis's book SPLITTING THE LICKS. Janet Davis disc 1 was loaded into the car cd and an essential non-gas-wasting trip was taken to Bernalillo then up highway 550 to 44. This was done as a suggestion of Jim at Sportsman's Warehouse on Sunday March 29 who described new construction in that area. We wanted to view new construction. We returned to Albuquerque, while listening not only to disc 1 but disc 2. Disc 2 contains over 96 tracks and disc 1 77 tracks so the long essential non-gas-wasting trip was required. We returned to Albquerque Northeast heights via Unser Bvld, then Paseo del Norte. From an electric energy, natural gas, petroleum, water, waste, sewage and environment standpoint the trip reveals a possible, if not probable, or certain disaster in the making - as Jim described. PNM FOIL 9 may be optimistic about future New Mexico electric power. PNM forecaster Steve Martin alerted us about new construction as the principal factor in increased electric load. See FOIL 1. Martin also alerted us to the electric consumption of the San Juan-Chama drinking water project. See FOIL 2. Below Shoenberg and Olson articles appear to be another media attempt to obscure the problem of over-building to try to protect the new construction business. Do not fear the enemy, for your enemy can only take your life. It is far better that you fear the media, for they will steal your HONOR. That awful power, the public opinion of a nation, is created in America by a horde of ignorant, self-complacent simpletons who failed at ditching and shoemaking and fetched up in journalism on their way to the poorhouse. Mark Twain http://www.prosefights.org/abqwater/abqwater.htm#olson

Albuquerque Journal Saturday April 4, 2009 Is Albuquerque Water Too Cheap? The water authority doesn't charge a higherrate for high water useuntil someone goes above three times their winter average - or they use more than 62,832 gallons in~ a single month. Winter averages are based on bills from December through March. The water rate doubles when it hits either mark. Wastewater charges are based on winter averages as well, so high users in those months get a higher charge all year. Still, it doesn't have the same blood-pressure-raising, eye-bulging, foul-languag& causing effect as the dramatic monthly highs and lows of Zetland's offering. More important to proponents of steep block pricing, it doesn't have the same motivating effect. The other consideration under the current water rate system in Albuquerque is that conservation has to be funded. If residents start a massive conservation effort and dramatically loWer water use in the city, the water authority's operating revenues tumble, too. For some water utilities, this has meant conservation brought a pat on the back accompanied with a rate increase for everyone. In fairness, the water authority has overseen conservation in recent years without having to increase rates and has a business plan that doesn't include rate increases until 2012, even with lofty conservation goals. None of this matters, of course, if the theory doesn't work in practice. So let's look at Tucson, which has a similar water system to Albuquerque's. Tucson uses a form of the steep block pricing advocated by Zetland and others, albeit more lenient, with each residential customer's water costing $1.23 per unit for the first 11,000 gallons a month. After that it jumps to $4~52 per unit and grows from there. Mitch Basefsky, a Tucson Water Department spokesman, said the formula has its pros and cons. He said there is a much higher risk involved for a utility using the pricing scheme, as utilities are forced to guess how well the city will conserve each year to balance a budget. In conservation terms, he said the rate system works. He said that since the system was adopted 15 years ago, water use has dropped by about a third and 75 percent of the customers never use more than the first 11,000 gallons a month. With a big water conservation goal to meet in Albuquerque - it has two decades to make big cuts in water use per state engineer's orders -residents need some sort of serious kick in the pants. Maybe Zetland's plan is it, maybe it isn't. But either way, your water rates - and your conscience - are going to be a big part of the discussion. UpFront is a daily front-page opInion column. Sean Olson can be reached at 823-3563 or at solson@abqjournal.com. Albuquerque Journal Tuesday March 31, 2009

Water upheavals are intensifying because the population is growing fastest in places where fresh water is either scarce or polluted. Dry areas are becoming drier and wet areas wetter as the oceans and atmosphere warm. Economic roadblocks, such as the global credit crunch and its effects on Mulroy’s attempts to sell bonds, multiply during a recession.


The study notes, for example, that IT firms require huge amounts of water for their manufacturing processes, with Intel and Texas Instruments alone using 11bn gallons in 2007 to make silicon chips. Highlighting the potential risk to investors, the study calculated that a water-related shutdown at a fabrication facility operated by either firm could result in between $100m and $200m in lost revenue during a quarter, or two to four cents per share. ...

Saturday January 10, 2009 15:40 Electricity, natural gas, and oil may prove problems in addition to water. The construction industry may be headed into even tougher times soon because of energy and water limitations. http://www.prosefights.org/abqwater/abqwater.htm#fleck

Flaw in Law Drives Water Rush Standing at the farthest reaches of Rio Rancho, looking west, it takes an act of imagination to see a city of 300,000 among the cactus and bullet-pocked real estate signs. It takes even more imagination to look down at your feet and imagine the vast reservoir of water local officials and developers say lies below. But if you accept that the water is there - and there seems little doubt among scientists that it is - it takes little imagination to see the gaping hole its discovery and potential development has exposed in New Mexico water law. All up and down the wild mesa lands and valleys to the west of the Albuquerque metro area, holes are being drilled and claims are being staked by developers who believe they can bring the brackish water to the surface, clean it up and use it to water subdivisions stretching to the horizon. When the Legislature convenes Jan. 20, it will again be asked to deal with the problem, closing the loophole in state law that leaves the deep, brackish water unregulated, creating what the state's top water official, state Engineer John D'Antonio, has called "a free-for-all." Bruce Thomson, the soft-spoken head of the University of New Mexico's Water Resources Program, is blunt. Lack of regulation, he said, "is approaching a crisis." In his epic history of oil, "The Prize," Daniel Yergin describes what happened in 1901 when wildcatter Anthony Lucas found the greatest oil field America had seen In an area known as Spindletop near Beaumont, Texas. With no rules in place to govern what followed, there was a free-for-all. Yergin describes a pig pasture selling for $35,000. Land worth $10 an acre soared in value to $900,000 an acre as drillers covered every inch of Spindletop hill with wells, sucking up the oil as fast as they could. By 1902, production at Spindietop began declining. Oil is not a renewable resource. Water is not oil, but there are similarities in the politics and policies that accompany our consumption of the two precious liquids. Using groundwater, which is almost never replaced by nature on time scales that are of any use to people, boils down to mining a resource that will never be replaced. Brackish water is not like Spindletop oil. For one thing, the expense of cleaning it up for municipal use - in money, energy and waste disposal - is likely to slow its development, experts say. But the lack of regulation creates a built-in incentive for a Spindletop-like rush to be first to drill. Denise Fort, a professor at the University of New Mexico School of Law, puts it this way: "We don't take adequate account of the future when we do mine groundwater." To Fort, the rush to use brackish groundwater beneath the mesas and valleys west of Albuquerque is merely the latest manifestation of a longstanding New Mexico problem: rapid consumption of groundwater without a clear idea of how we will cope with the consequences when it runs out. Albuquerque ran headlong into that reality in the mid1990s when it realized the city's groundwater supply was running low and-turned to water imported from the Colorado River Basin to help cover the deficit. Economists have long grappled with the question of what it means to use a resource like oil or groundwater "sustainably." For oil, one approach is to invest some of the proceeds of its exploitation to create an endowment for future generations. That is the idea behind New Mexico's ''severance tax'' on oil or minerals "severed" from the ground. When the oil is gone, a nest egg remains for your grandchildren. That might work for oil and gas, but what about a city built on a water supply that is not sustainable? No amount of money will buy new water when the wells run dry. Writing regulations that ensure the brackish water is used in a sustainable fashion, so future residents will have water, is a difficult problem, Thomson said. There are "enormous uncertainties'' about how much water is down there and how pumping it up might affect other aquifers or even surface supplies. But they are questions he believes must be answered. "In my view," Thomson said, "we absolutely should not allow residential development that is dependent on nonsustainable water supplies." Contact Journal science writer John Fleck at 823-3916 or e-mail him at jfleck@abajournal.com. Albuquerque Journal Saturday Januay 10, 2009

Sen. Bingaman introduces San Juan water package comment.

Monday January 26, 2009 05:37 PNM forecaster Steve Martin alerted us about new construction as the principal factor in increased electric load. See FOIL 1. Martin also alerted us to the electric consumption of the San Juan-Chama drinking water project. See FOIL 2. Drinking water project was undertaken so that new construction continues. But there may be electricity shortage within the next several years if PNM's FOIL 9 is correct. NAIOP definition. http://www.prosefights.org/abqwater/abqwater.htm#naiop

BUSINESS OUTLOOK Albuquerque Journal Monday December 8, 2008

Tuesday December 9, 2008 13:42 Flyer received in mail Tuesday December 9, 2008. Focus must be on why the San Juan-Chama drinking water project. This is a project to keep Albuquerque area new construction in business. Future electric power shortage may do bad thing to this water project. Good video about Albquerque water problems on above cd. Eclipse Aviation is another of Mayor Martin Chavez' projects.

http://www.abcwua.org

The Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority’s San Juan-Chama Drinking Water Project will supply up to 70% of the metropolitan area’s future water. San Juan-Chama water diverted from the river will be transported to a state-of-the-art treatment plant, from which purified water will be delivered to Albuquerque area homes and businesses. City of Albuquerque is claiming possible water overuse. And is thinking of imposing fines to abusers.