Why does this metric matter, when 95% of the water Intel uses is already returned to the water supply?

From the same verge article as the 4 million gallons a day figure:

> Last year, the company pledged that by 2030 it will restore and return more freshwater than it uses. It’s nearing that benchmark in Arizona, where Intel says it cleaned up and returned 95 percent of the freshwater it used in 2020

How is it possible to return more fresh water than you use? Where does the surplus come from?

Because water that isn't fresh can become fresh. We have the technology.

They're already purifying a staggering amount of water, might as well purify a bit more while they're at it.

That still doesn't explain where this unfresh water comes from.

They can take wastewater (which is no longer fresh), clean it up for use, and return it back to the system.

While Arizona is landlocked there's also not a ton of distance between it and the Gulf of California so they could do desalinization, although I imagine that's too costly to consider at the moment.

> It has its own water treatment plant at its Ocotillo campus in Chandler that’s similar to a municipal plant. There’s also a “brine reduction facility,” a public-private partnership with the city of Chandler, that brings 2.5 million gallons of Intel’s wastewater a day back to drinking standard. Intel uses some of the treated water again, and the rest is sent to replenish groundwater sources or be used by surrounding communities.

They're taking raw untreated river/lake/aquifer water, purifying it to an incredible degree for the fab. When they use the water it gets cleaned again.

Now that water can either be returned to the river/lake/aquifer or if you clean it sufficiently well it can go straight into municipal drinking water supplies. That's how this fresh water comes out of nowhere.

That doesn't seem right. As far as I know, rivers/lakes/aquifers are pretty much the definition of fresh water.

Yes they are the definition of fresh water, not purified water.

Running fresh water is relatively clean, but it doesn't mean there isn't giardia or other microbes / impurities.

Okay, but Intel promised to return more freshwater than it used. So it can't simply take freshwater, purify it, and return it at a surplus.

Maricopa and Pinal counties have lots of agricultural water that either comes directly off the Colorado river via canal, or is pumped from shallow alfalfa field runoff groundwater that is too full of nitrates to be even remotely potable.

We also, unlike the CA Central Valley or the Midwest who are apparently cool with depleting their resources as fast as humanly possible, are acutely aware of our groundwater supply constraints, given that we live in a desert, and practice a lot of aquifer recharge and management.

Intel cleans it, uses it, and dumps it into aquifer recharge, which cleans it even further.

The midwest gets more than enough water via rain, so nobody worries about water. Farmers don't irrigate crops, they just accept lower profits in drought years. You might be thinking of the west where water is a problem.

I'm pressing 'X' to doubt, right now:

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/nation...

edit: Maybe I should have said Great Plains, which overlaps, but is not precisely the same as, the Midwest.

The great plains does have issues. The rest of the midwest doesn't.

So one business / structure will use 1/200th of all water? That does sound like a lot.

Not to mention that industry itself only accounts for 6% of Arizona's water usage [0] so we're talking about one single structure increasing the industrial usage by ~10%.

[0]

Industry is a surprisingly small portion of water consumption in many places. In many states, household water use (including lawns) can handily exceed the water used by industry.

Using this water for domestic chip making is arguably a very reasonable use of water. If we’re going to start cutting water usage, let’s start with things like golf courses in the desert instead of critical chip-making infrastructure.

I feel a bit of tension. I'm not a big fan of people using water to grow grass in the desert, but I'm also not a big fan of making tens or hundreds of thousands of people sacrifice so that one large corporation can profit.

Yeah, I know that chip manufacturing helps everyone by improving our economic independence, and that's not a small thing, but we're already writing Intel a big check and they obviously benefit from the profits of the chips they will manufacture (assuming they manage it correctly and it doesn't just get left behind for cheaper foreign manufacturing the moment the market economics change).

Maybe chip manufacture really benefits from being somewhere arid, and that's probably just pretty incompatible with water conservation?

I used to get so mad about people growing lawns here in Phoenix until I discovered that Burmuda grass will tenaciously grow with little irrigation, and that some kind of vegetation is better for water retention in soil than bare dirt.

As I mentioned in my longer comment elsewhere, Arizona is seismically stable, and fabs don’t need specialized structures when using advanced process nodes.

The biggest misuse of water resources and poor land management comes from our conventional, commercial farming practice. Healthy, living soil can do a lot ecologically including water conservation, but we farm in a way to continually deplete soil.

Changing how residential homeowners do landscaping can help as well.

I switched out my whole yard to zoysia (which is one of those creeping vine grasses like Bermuda). I picked it over Bermuda because it grows in thicker. I went from watering at least once a week to maybe once or twice a year if at all. That is in a area with an ok amount of rain.

I liked this type of grass as it grows relatively slowly which means about half the amount of mowing needed to be done. Low water (less than Bermuda), kills most weeds (less pesticides and weed killers), less mowing, those are the upsides. Downsides are turns yellow in October and does not turn green until the end of april (not HOA friendly), and like most creeping vine grasses is invasive and hard to get rid of if you do not like it, it also grows very poorly in shaded areas. Aggressive trimming is also needed when it reaches walkways, streets, driveways, and the side of your house.

I also spent a good amount of time building up a decent bed for the grass to grow in with mulching and proper aeration. Another thing I did was to make sure I had a good mix of the correct type of insects, moss, worms, and transplanted from local areas potting soils for other bits in the soil, trying to keep area and the type of grass in mind. As the original builder had scraped off the good stuff, leaving me with clay and rocks and rye grass, then took it to another site before I bought the place. This helped tremendously with the soil. Though I could have done better on my homework with that.

Depending on where you live, what sort of rain you get, and the soil types, this can be a 1 year job or a 10 year job. It really takes time to do.

It also helps with the heat island effect.

But yeah, there's lots of different types of grasses that are OK to have in arid climates. But most lawns in my region (socal) aren't these special grasses. Subterranean irrigation can help too.

Is it potentially a little narrow to frame "one large corporation... profit[ing]" as the main result of consuming the water?

They're also:

- producing useful things

- employing people to do said production (and design the production process, and the thing that's getting produced)

- paying suppliers for the parts that go into the useful things getting produced

Yeah, I agree that my framing was narrow. Corporations of course benefit society.

> paying suppliers for the parts that go into the useful things getting produced

I suspect this is overstated considering how much of these parts likely come from abroad, especially from oppressive countries that subsidize their manufacturing via pollution and pseudo slave labor. But still there are certainly American wholesale and logistics jobs which are supported.

Chip manufacturing benefits from somewhere that has very predictable weather and low/no seismic activity.

Its fucking lawn grass. Its one of the most worthless things in the world and a complete waste of resources. At least chips do something other than sit there wasting water.

I agree. But the idea of asking tens or hundreds of thousands to give up their frivolities so a single corporation can profit strikes a nerve in me, however irrational it may be. I'm not reflexively anti-corporation--corporations are economically necessary--but I guess I'm touchy about the question of whether people exist for corporations or corporations for people.

They can keep their lawn. She’s should just have to pay more money since the water has more valuable uses elsewhere

Itel can also move somewhere else. It's bad coming into a community and telling everyone their water costs more now because you want a lot of it.

If anything, Intel should pay them to get rid of their lawn

The article didnt say water prices are increasing. They get most of their water from recycling what they use. Regardless filling a pot of water for pasta would go from a fraction of a penny to a fraction of a penny even if intel increased their water use ten fold

The simple answer is to set the water price so supply matches demand, and let everyone sort out what they prioritize.

I don't expect this to happen.

What sacrifice are people making when the water is recycled?

I was responding to the implication that people should reduce their water consumption for this facility.

That’s one metric for impact. Perhaps you can think of some other metrics to compare it to before influencing the reader’s opinion?

Definitely sounds like a lot. Perhaps conservation efforts are in order, to reduce water waste by ~1% to allow for this strategically important, high value added industry to develop further. Thankfully, water waste is so rife in Arizona that it shouldn't be all that difficult to do so.

Maybe, if there are important reasons why this factory should be in a desert state. I think everyone agrees that chips are vitally important now, but chip shortages aren’t nearly as bad as a water shortage is.

Not exactly. Fabs use a lot of water to run, but it's mostly self-contained with very little loss. I can't remember the exact number, but the fabs Intel already have in Phoenix only lose around 4-5% of the water. The rest is reclaimed and recirculated. I believe the two breaking ground today will be even more efficient, possibly even net producers once rain water and other sources are taken into account. It's been a few months since I read into it, though, so I may be misremembering

net producers of water? check this please

What is ‘using water’ in this context? Is it boiled off? Contaminated and needs to be cleaned?

In chip making they remove all the impurities making it PURE h20, which is in fact too pure to be just dumped back in the ground, needs to be re-mineralized before it can be dumped.

If that's all that it needs, why would they not recycle it back into the water supply?

From the same verge article:

> Last year, the company pledged that by 2030 it will restore and return more freshwater than it uses. It’s nearing that benchmark in Arizona, where Intel says it cleaned up and returned 95 percent of the freshwater it used in 2020

Yeah.

It's unfortunate that alongside this incredibly important detail the article carries a bunch of highly judgemental wording that encourages people to incorrectly interpret "use" not as "cycle through" but as "remove from water supply and banish to a superfund site."

The rest of the comment section is guilty of this too.

I fully appreciate the need for independent verification, but assuming the worst is not that, and it actually leads to bad incentives in the same way as assuming the best (or refusing to think about it at all) leads to bad incentives.

yeah. If there is something I’m missing, hopefully someone can point out what it is, because I don’t really understand why this matters.

Historically, companies have shown that they will do the worst imaginable.

The bar needs to be set high on holding them too account, or else the shareholders will get their way and Arizona will gets new superfund site. Being charitable will be abused by companies

Probably better to just re-filter it back to pure H2O and reuse on site.

Clean, pure, delicious semiconductor wastewater.

You do understand that literal sewage is treated and returned to the water supply just fine

"It's got what plants crave"

"It's got electrolytes!"

> which is in fact too pure to be just dumped back in the ground, needs to be re-mineralized before it can be dumped

how so? isn't rainwater also "pure H2O"?

Good question. I assume rainwater picks up minerals naturally as it filters through dirt and whatnot, but then why couldn't that be the case for fab wastewater? It also makes me think about the sheer amount of polluted filth that must wash out of a city after it gets rained on.

No, rainwater has dissolved air and dust in it.

Sounds like an excellent candidate for re-use.

4 million gallons X 3.785 kg/gallon X 1 metric ton / 1000 kg = 15140 metric tons, not 126000 metric tons. The calculation for Arizona is correct.

That gives 0.066%, no 0.55%.

yeah, you’re right, I accidentally used “US short ton” smh that one of the online calculators gave me, very embarrassing

On the other hand, there are very standard technologies for water recycling. UHF, RO, ZLD, MEE etc. Water is quite easy to recycle given intention to do it.

One single factory using 0.55% of the entire state's water consumption is pretty massive.

Thanks for doing a fact-check.

Might there be other other downstream states in USA or Mexico that would push that 0.55% ratio higher?

Note that the Verge quote is

> It’ll guzzle between 2 to 4 million gallons of water a day by some estimates

We can easily convert just fine in the US:

> "Alexa, how much does 4 million gallons of water weigh in metric tons?"

> "4 million gallons of water weighs about 15 thousand metric tons"

:-)

Not that this actually makes it easy to deal with unit conversion, because we still have to find the right gizmo to ask and phrase the question right. "Hey Google" for instance when I ask it the above question just tells me how much a million gallons of water weighs in pounds.

Not being sure if Google was right on that, I asked Alexa how much 1 million gallons of water weighs in pounds. It told me that 5000 gallons of water weighs 41726.320547 pounds. If I ask without saying I want the answer in pounds it then does tell me the answer for the requested 1 million gallons in pounds.

But if we happen to ask the right gizmo, and happen to phrase it just right...unit conversion is no problem for Americans.

(Of course I still had to do it by hand, because Alexa's answer disagreed with the answer at the top of this thread, and I am not confident that when Alexa disagrees with an HN commenter that Alexa is right).