With widespread drought front and center, water is on everyone’s mind.
So, in June, when Caroline County asked Virginia Marine Resources Commission for permission to install an intake pipe in the Rappahannock River for drinking water, the hearing morphed into a litany of public concerns over water supplies.
For the last 20 years, Caroline County has been working on a water plan for its growing population. But when Public Works Director Joseph Schiebel finally stood before Marine Resources commissioners he faced a barrage of questions.
"Long-term effect down the road, I mean, I’m just curious. I probably shouldn’t even go any further on it because that's a DEQ related item as far as looking at that," commissioner Thomas Preston mused.
The permit was unanimously approved and will allow the county to build a facility that could remove up to 9 million gallons of water a day from the Rappahannock River. Originally, the county wanted 13 million gallons a day, five million a day for drinking water and an unknown amount for cooling data centers. That led to a wave of protests.
"So, when it became contentious, the board's like we didn't want it for cooling anyway, let's drop it. So, we just dropped it back to our needs," Schiebel said. "We've taken it completely out of our permit. The board of supervisors has also adopted ordinances that will not allow cooling facilities to be able to use potable water, period."
But public trust had been dented. People at the VMRC hearing, including representatives from the Rappahannock and Mattaponi Tribes, expressed continued concerns with whether 9 million gallons a day was really needed. And, they worried about the health of the Rappahannock, which is listed as one of the country’s most endangered rivers. Tribes wanted to know why the water, after it’s used, would be returned to a different river— the Mattaponi. The Mattaponi Tribe has since filed a legal challenge to the approval.
At one point, VMRC Commissioner Joe Grist, who once managed water withdrawal permitting for DEQ, reminded the room discussions about water usage was DEQ territory.
Answers to some questions can be found in DEQ’s annual water resources report. And there’s DEQ’s manager for the state water supply, Weedon Cloe.
"This is the most intense drought that we've had in the Commonwealth since 2008, and it borders on the historic drought that we saw back in 2002," Cloe noted in an interview.
For more than a decade, groundwater in Virginia has been stressed. DEQ now limits users. This has led to counties like Caroline to seek water from rivers. New businesses are advised to seek permits for surface water.
But it’s power plants that take up the most water. Every day power plants in Virginia pull about 4.1 billion gallons of water from mainly its rivers. That’s right, billions per day.
Power generation typically has a 2% consumptive use," Cloe noted.
The rest is cooled and returned to the source. The largest of these water consumers is Surry Nuclear Power Plant, which takes 1.5 billion gallons a day from the James River.
"Do the math on that, 2 percent of 1.5 billion it's like 30 million. So, it’s lost 30 million gallons per day," Cloe said.
And where does it go?
"It goes in the atmosphere. Returned as rain somewhere," Cloe explained. "It becomes cloud and those are those cooling towers that you see and they're discharging to the atmosphere and yes, eventually they will condense and rain.
On the very last page of the water resources report is an appendix about water transfers. This is like the proposed transfer of Rappahannock River water to the Mattaponi River after it’s been recycled by Caroline County.
The largest transfer of water in the state comes from Lake Gaston, in Southside Virginia, to the City of Norfolk for processing. The final destination - the City of Virginia Beach.
Other transfers include water from the Potomac River pulled by Fairfax County and provided to Loudoun County, which also uses it for data centers.
See more on daily monitoring of the drought on rivers throughout Virginia at the US Geological Service water monitoring site.