Don't these fabs need like an insane amount of water? Why would they build it of all places in arizona which as far as I know barely meets drinking water requirements (at least at some cities) and is basically mostly a desert?
While Arizona doesn't have an abundance of excess water, they do have pretty strict usage guidelines and rules in place from the Department of Water Resources [2]. Assuming we can trust the government's call on this (are they being objective and fair, or tilting the reports to bring in Billions of dollars of corporate revenue and jobs) then these fabs should have no problem being supplied with water or impacting others in the area.
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/04/why-intel-tsmc-are-building-...
Although Phoenix is one of America's most progressive cities with regard to minimizing per-capita water usage, the whole prospect of the city of Phoenix was ill-conceived from the beginning.
Of course that doesn't matter now -- the city is there. But I hope that TSMC knows what they're getting themselves in to.
> Chipmakers are setting up shop in Arizona as drought worsens
> Major semiconductor manufacturers looking to expand in Arizona will likely be spared from water cuts induced by an unprecedented water shortage in the Southwest, at least for now. As part of the scramble to end a shortage of another kind — the global dearth in semiconductor chips — both Intel and TSMC plan to open new facilities in Arizona. But they’re setting up shop just as one of the worst droughts in decades grows worse across the Western US.
> ...
> While Intel recycles much of its water, more fabs will mean it will need to send even more water through its systems. The company says that Arizona has been “vital” to Intel’s operations for more than four decades. The state is already home to its first “mega-factory network” and its newest semiconductor fab. Intel used more than 5.2 billion gallons of water in Arizona in 2020 — roughly 20 percent of which was reclaimed water, according to its most recent corporate responsibility report.
> ...
> TSMC said in an email to The Verge that for now it doesn’t expect the water shortage to have “any impact” on its plan to build a new fab in Arizona, although it says it will “continue to monitor the water supply situation closely.”
I am hopeful that the politicians there are smart enough to realize that semiconductor fabs are an industry whose water needs are worth prioritizing more than farming alfalfa in the desert.
The problem is that these agricultural water rights are old, and the folks who hold them are often disenfranchised. Using a ton of water in the desert to farm is their whole livlihood; we don't just pull people's generational careers out from under them any more, like we used to. Not without a chance at an alternative.
It feels like we have so many problems caused by people just not living in the locations in the USA where there is lots of rainfall and water. I have tons of water, my state just uses lakes filled by rainwater. We make electricity with it too.
https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Average_precipitat...
I always find it interesting that people keep cramming into the western and specifically southwestern part of the USA. Like the original settlers just kept going that way due to the human natural urge to keep going further and hope things would be better over the horizon. I often wonder what America would be like if the western US was settled first. I imagine people would have noticed how awful and non-conducive to human life it is and kept on trucking to the promised land in the East.
We can restructure incentives, though. (e.g.: taxes). Perhaps this is just kicking the ethical quandary down the road.
There's lots of hand wringing about living in hot, dry climates. It's just odd to me because where people live, in general, are not particularly amenable to the number of humans living there.
https://www.energystar.gov/campaign/seal_insulate/identify_p...
I don't really see a hot/cold stratification in this chart- https://www.statista.com/chart/12098/the-us-states-with-the-...
And even then, the difference in costs seems quite small. Alaska is $332 and Georgia is $310.
It's also worth recognizing that the western United States was settled first, as people came down the Pacific Coast after crossing the Beringia land bridge during the previous ice age. California in particular has always been quite densely populated, and the only (IIRC) indigenous irrigation systems were built by the Hohokam near the Colorado Plateau.
EDIT: https://repository.si.edu/bitstream/handle/10088/23978/SMC_8...
>The population [of California] cannot be tabulated by tribes, but there can be no question that it was several times larger than any other area north of Mexico and that the destruction has been correspondingly greater.
Fabs are expensive because every part of building it from the electrical wiring to the seismic isolation to the HVAC system needs to be perfectly tuned to remove all sources of noise. Most of these costs are superlinear if not exponential with the magnitude of noise.
...deputy spokesperson Nina Kao said via email that “approximately 65% of the water used in the Arizona fab will come from TSMC’s in-house water reclamation system...
https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/joannaallhands...
for the Cynical person: Ensuring a future crisis is a sure fire way to get a nice Big Government Bailout in a few years to pay off the rest of the Capital costs that were not already covered by CHIPS....
Intel and ASML already have facilities in Arizona. I'd assume TSMC chose partly based on that allowing them to hire out of the local talent pool, along with incentives from the state.
The problem isn't the pipes, obviously.
It's the fact that the 1922 agreement that divided up the water in the Colorado River (upon which Arizona depends) incorrectly calculated the amount of water available in the river every year.
The Colorado River Compact divides up 20 million acre-feet of water. Modern analyses show that the Colorado river's average flow is about 15.5 million acre feet, and has been less than 13 million acre-feet during the last decade or so. These reductions curtail who gets what water.
https://www.5280.com/how-the-100-year-old-colorado-river-com...
People have a fetishization with hyping up disappearing water sources as leading to mass forced desertions of population centers, which is not rooted in any kind of reality.
We can already pipe oil from texas to Canada with ease, we can do the same from Canada to Arizona with water. Or wherever else. The economics and viability of it is obvious and clear.
Residents of water scarce areas would pay marginally higher taxes to support this
I have never heard this. Where are you reading that?
Disappearing water sources are a reality. Time and time again, long pipelines like what you suggest just aren't viable.
I'd suggest you enjoy some fact-based reporting on the topic: https://grist.org/agriculture/drought-water-pipeline-cost-we...
The near- and medium-term solutions we need are solely in use reduction. Period.
The choice of abandoning trillions of real estate vs a 10s of billions infrastructure project is obvious.
Article cites the cost as $14B which is effectively nothing vs the alternative. Even $100B is nothing. These two TSMC fabs are $40B alone
So much fearmongering from economically illiterate people. Use your brain
Your comparison to oil pipelines is nonsense. Where to start: privatization, a global commodity market, relative scarcity, massive extractive capex.... Sure, we built oil pipelines easily in the past. How difficult has it become? Surely the capital exists. Why don't we build more?
Nobody is talking about abandoning real estate.
The tragedy of people like you is that you provide a half-compelling distraction. People (cities/farmers/industry) need to use less water.
The longer it takes to get people to realize this, the harder it is to fix.
Thats why they are economically illiterate. The obvious and more cost effective choice will win in the end, and it doesn’t involve austerity and suffering and repentance for high water use
The folks who wrote the Colorado River Compact thought they were solving the problem of dividing the river's water permanently, too. They made it worse.
I don't disagree that economics are a critical part of this conversation. But I don't understand how you're making the argument that enabling more water use, not less, is cost effective.
Even amortized across 50 years, $30B is more than the $0B required if we just use less water.
None of this even comes anywhere near discussing the potential deleterious ecological (and economic!) impacts of draining water-rich ecosystems by piping their water elsewhere. Look to the phase-out of leaded gasoline as a great example of how externalities matter.
Generally speaking, substantial alterations to hydrological regimes can cause deleterious cascading ecological effects. Just look toward the literature on the hydrological (and consequential ecological) effects of dams (necessary to divert water) for examples.
One of particular interest is dams' tendency to reduce the frequency and severity of flooding events, which are characteristically necessary for much of the functioning of floodplain ecosystems such as those you're describing.
Such reductions can wreak havoc on biodiversity in these regions.
Water is not usually created/destroyed it is moved around and contaminated.
Humans need water. We don't need to use less of it. We need more of it and there is plenty of it. For example, farms need water to grow food. Humans need food (and water) or we die. And water isn't going anywhere. It doesn't get destroyed. As you probably know, there is a water cycle. It falls out of the sky, bubbles up from the ground, and can be found by drilling for it, just like our most critical energy sources.
For oil. Water has far lower value density.
Which is vastly cheap enough and sufficient to solve this problem. Much cheaper than alternatives
Just the lack of understanding of like 15 different aspects of the problem with that idea and the confidence to defend regardless is kind of amazing.
What's really sad is that so many people are brainless enough to believe that this is not possible to solve, and easily so, once incentives drive it forward.
Your comment does remind me of many of the 0.1-0.5x engineers I've worked with though. We need hundreds of people to maintain a mobile client, it's not possible to do it with a handful!
For comparison, the Phoenix metro area uses 2.3 million acre feet of water per year (40% of which is used in agriculture).[2] So a bit over 1% of the Columbia's annual flow.
Another comparison: the Colorado "in its natural state" averaged just 22,500 cfs, less than 10% of the Columbia.[3]
I'm not saying that piping water from Oregon to the southwest is a good idea, but it's not as if we don't have water in the west. It's just a lot further north than most of the population centers.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_River#Discharge [2] https://askabiologist.asu.edu/questions/how-much-water-are-w... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colorado_River#Discharge
Oil and gas are far more value dense than water. Pipeline transport adds somewhere around $5-20 per barrel of oil, or $0.03/L. Some quick googling suggests Phoenix residents pay around $0.00022/L. That's a factor of 142x.
True scarcity would drive prices up and increase cost viability of transport, obviously. The reason its not done right now is because its not an imminent problem