By 2025 two-thirds of the world’s population could be living in areas where fresh water supplies are under serious stress. Our industry is not a big water user, compared for example, to agriculture. But growing crops to make biofuels and mining bitumen from oil sands can be water intensive; and some oil and gas operations use (and produce) quantities of water that can be significant in water stressed areas. In 2008, our operations used approximately 224 million m3 of fresh water.
Much can be done to reduce our water footprint. Our Pearl GTL plant (see Qatar), for example, has been designed to take no fresh water from its arid surroundings. The Schoonebeek project (see Schoonebeek) in the Netherlands will re-use municipal wastewater to make steam. In Oman, a project is moving ahead to plant reed beds that will clean up all the 45,000 m3 a day of water brought to the surface when the joint venture we are part of produces oil. This will allow that water to be put to use.
