The Water Footprint of Energy Policies

According to business-as-usual scenarios, increase in the world population by almost 20 percent during the next 25 years asks for more than 40 percent more energy than today. Production of such amount of additional energy requires a vast amount of natural resources such as water to be used for constructing new energy infrastructures as well as operating power plants. In this paper, the water footprint of the existing and future energy policies is calculated based on the water footprint of different energy technologies and possible future energy mix in the period of 2012-2035. For this purpose, different energy scenarios developed by the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) are utilized to determine the contribution of each energy source to the total energy production with respect to uncertainties in the future energy markets. Based on the outcomes for different International Energy Outlook (IEO) scenarios, the sensitivity of energy policies' water use efficiency to the future energy mix is discussed.