Water use: Biofuel plants’ thirst creates water worries

State regulators fear some parts of Iowa won’t have enough water to handle the booming biofuels industry.

Plant operators say they have reduced the amount of water needed to produce ethanol, but the facilities still need abundant local water supplies. A single plant producing 100 million gallons of ethanol a year – a capacity quickly becoming the norm – uses as much water as a town of approximately 10,000 people, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources reports.
That’s 400 million gallons of water a year for one plant – and scientists aren’t sure the state has enough water to handle the ethanol boom and other expanding industries.

The last statewide water-use inventory was a dozen years ago. Back then, biofuel plants used less than 5 percent of the state’s water. The percentage is 7 percent now and could grow to 14 percent by 2012, after planned expansions and new plants come online, according to an October study by the Minnesota-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.

“It frankly is one of our important natural resource issues,” said state geologist Robert Libra of the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. “We haven’t paid attention to the water supply in a long time. We need to do so before there is a panic.”

Des Moines Register