Water, water everywhere ... ?
USGS water assessment, data center water use, and some good news
In the closing days of the Biden administration, the U.S. Geologic Survey released its National Water Availability Assessment Report, which is a whopper of a study not only on how much water Americans use and for what, but also on the quality of that water and whether and by how much demand is exceeding supply.
Most of what it says won’t be too surprising to Land Desk readers. Demand exceeds supply in swaths of the Southwest, and climate change threatens to exacerbate the imbalance. Irrigated agriculture is by far the biggest water guzzler nationwide, with Western farms consuming more than those in any other region. Municipal water consumption is staying fairly flat, even as populations increase. Thermoelectric power plants withdraw massive amounts of water, but then return much of it to the water body, keeping consumptive use relatively low.
I’m not going to try to sum up the report for you, though. Rather, I’ll give you a few of the more interesting morsels of data and maps and charts from the assessment, in no particular order, and you can make of them what you will.






This is just a small sampling of what’s in the assessment. If you want to read more, check it out here.
The USGS assessment doesn’t break out data centers’ water use, but I imagine if the agency survives the current administration intact, it may get there in a decade or so. The computer processing centers suck up massive amounts of electricity to process those Google searches, Facebook posts, Twitter rants, and, especially, AI queries — not to mention for “mining” cryptocurrency. Less known is that they also can use large quantities of water to keep the processors cool.
A new report out of the Berkeley Lab is mostly focused on quantifying current and forecasting future energy use by data centers. But it also talks water. And the numbers are alarming: In 2023, U.S. data centers directly1 consumed about 66 billion liters (or 17.4 billion gallons) of water. The report’s authors expect that figure to double — at least — by 2028.

That is a crap-ton of water, for sure, especially given the large number of data centers located in the Phoenix and Las Vegas areas, neither of which has a lot of liquid to spare. But some perspective is warranted here. As Len Necefer points out in an All At Once By Dr. Len dispatch warning against AI-alarmism, data centers still use a heck of a lot less water than, say, growing hay or fracking oil and gas wells.
66 billion liters is 53,507 acre-feet (sounds a lot less alarming, yeah?). For some context, alfalfa and other hay growing in the Great Salt Lake Basin alone consumes about 900,000 acre-feet per year, and hydraulic fracturing gulps up about 353,000 acre-feet (a little over Nevada’s total allotment of Colorado River water) annually.
I’m still frightened by the invasion of the data centers, however. In his last days in office, Biden signed an executive order opening up federal sites and public land to new AI data centers and accompanying “clean” energy installations (which includes nuclear and even natural gas and coal, so long as they capture carbon). And Trump is now encouraging data center developers — i.e. tech-broligarchs like Musk and Bezos — to burn coal to power their AI bots (and Trump and Melania both issued their own cryptocoins).
🤯 Crazytown Chronicle 🤡
Look, I don’t like writing about Trump any more than you like reading about him. Believe me. But he is the president, and the things he does and says sometimes have consequences. He also just makes stuff up. Like this “Truth” Social post:
Whaaaaaaat!?! I guess all that water assessment stuff is irrelevant, now, eh? I mean, here we’ve all been fretting about the Colorado River, and little did we know that Trump could make it all irrelevant by sending the military in to turn some valve somewhere and deliver all the water from the Pacific Northwest directly to the fire hydrants of L.A.
The first person who sends me a genuine picture of the giant faucet and who can mark on a map where the military turned the water on and where the pipelines or canals that carry it go gets a free Land Desk t-shirt.
But, in all seriousness, as Dr. Genevieve Guenther pointed out on her BlueSky social media feed, it’s kind of scary what’s being implied here (aside from the pure fabrication): A president is suggesting sending the military into a blue state to force his policy preferences on them. Not good.
(On that note, we’re over at BlueSky, too: @landdesk.bsky.social)
😀 Good News Corner 😎
And, finally, even the commissioners of Garfield County — or at least two out of three of them — realized it was a really bad idea to rename the Burr Trail after Trump. After a heated public hearing, they voted not to name any road in the county after him, for now.
Direct uses do not include the amount of water used by power plants to produce the electricity or hydraulic fracturing to extract the natural gas that fuels the power plants and so forth.
Hello Jonathan,
Thanks to you and your commenter, `I did pipe up and emailed those commissioners ‘bout not renaming Burr Trail. Thanks for updating on this point and to those others piping up too.
Trump is trying to get his followers used to the idea of his using military force against states and/or cities. Really really dangerous stuff here