Dubai.
It's home to 2.1 million people and yet it's built in a desert who gets almost all of their
water from the sea.
Water is simply pumped from the ocean where it's turned to steam to remove the salt.
In Dubai, there isn't really a natural source of freshwater at all.
Water there is a man-made resource.
Just think about that for a moment, an entire city where almost all of the water is man-made
and yet there's a splash-tastic water park with 30 water slides and 3 gigantic pools,
there's a fountain which can spray 83,000 litres at any given moment and it's situated
on a 30-acre man-made lake, there's golf courses in Dubai, an artifical ski slope.
The United Arab Emirates where Dubai is, uses about 4 times as much water per person than
Europe does and it's a country with almost no natural water.
The same is true for the city of Las Vegas in the United States.
It's built on a desert with a natural water supply too small to support the growing population.
So what did they do?
They placed a massive dam across the Colorado River, the Hoover Dam, to create the mighty
Lake Mead and Las Vegas seemed set to have all of the water it needed but as the population
of Vegas grows, you can actually see on these year on year satellite photos that Lake Mead
is shrinking and the water authorities now think Lake Mead could dry up totally in 20
years.
So they need a plan B, and plan B is to build a 300 mile pipeline from Snake Valley in Utah
to take 130,000 acre feet of water per year.
But residents there say their creek will dry up under the strain so the water used by farmers
in Snake Valley is soon going to be transported to Las Vegas to fill up fountains.
So perhaps Vegas can blunder its way through its fountain induced water nightmare by stealing
the water of its neighbours.
Earth policy institute and many other commentators have told us to expect this kind of water
conflict more it's happening in Spain, it's happening in Africa and it's happening in
the Middle East.
But Dubai is in an interesting position.
It can use its own access to cheap oil to simply create water.
As the cost of oil continues to rise in the same scenario we mentioned earlier, places
like Dubai just get richer and richer.
It's of no concern to desalinate all of your drinking water if you have so much oil.
Projects like building entire new islands off the coast doesn't seem daunting.
What's going on in Dubai is a massive consolidation of wealth because of the huge demand for oil
and a shrinking market from which to get it and the United Arab Emirates sits on huge
oil reserves.
Other countries like the United States don't have that luxury, since they already hit peak
oil int he 1970s but, hold on while things get a little confusing.
There's a flipside to this entire peak water and peak oil thing because the United States
has refused to adhere to the rule.
If you look at this graph it shows US oil production following the exact bell-shaped
curve you'd expect, it peaked in the 1970s but then this happened.
It's because the cost of oil became so high for so long that shale oil became economically
viable and here's where things get weird.
Crude oil is like sticking a huge straw in the ground and just sucking up milkshakes.
"I drink your milkshake.
I drink it up."
Shale is quite a bit more effort.
It's like trying to suck oil out of a rock.
There's all sorts of stuff you have to do to it before you get your oil.
You've got to use huge diggers to dig the rock out, you've got to use massive trucks
to shift it, you've then got to crush the rock then you've got the boil the rock to
get oil vapours out of it, condense it, transport it and then refine it.
Until now it's been so much effort that we've never really bothered to try but since oil
costs are now so high it becomes financially sane to try and get it.
And one more thing to tie this all up.
There's an additional, vital ingredient in the production of shale oil, massive amounts
of water.
An operation pulling in 2.5 million barrels of shale in the United States could demand
up to 520 million cubic metres of water per year.
That's three times the amount of water that Vegas plan on borrowing from Utah, which is
already causing internal political conflict in a country already at breaking point for
water supplies so peak oil and peak water are linked.
They're both catch-all phrases for simple ideas.
We can't just keep consuming every resource and hope to engineer our way out of every
problem we come across, whether that's desalinating water, building massive dams or flattening
massive areas of land desperately trying to retrieve oil from rocks.
When we simply focus on raising a line on a graph we are ignoring all of the hidden
consequences.
So what on earth do you think we should do about it?
Let me know in the comments below and we'll see you guys again next time.