The Water-Energy Nexus: Saving Water and Energy in Rice Production

March 3, 2010 by Eugene Tay
Filed under Events, Insights

Venue: ESI Conference Room, 29 Heng Mui Keng Terrace, Block A #10-01, Singapore 119620

Speaker: Dr. Bas Bouman, International Rice Research Institute, Los Banos, Philippines

The water-energy nexus is an understudied field. To oversimplify the issue, water is needed to produce en-ergy and energy is required to process and move water. Given this reality, there is a positive co-relation be-tween water and energy and thus, by default, between water consumption and greenhouse emissions. Con-sequently, efforts to decrease water consumption globally must be an integral part of the global efforts for mitigating the devastating greenhouse emissions and particularly global warming.

Added to growing consumption of water for personal and industrial purposes, food production is account-ing for major global water requirements. While many varieties of agricultural products of global demand (e.g., wheat and corn) are water-intensive, rice is especially so requiring much larger amount of water dur-ing the course of its production. It is therefore more energy-intensive than many other crops. Against this background, efforts to reduce water consumption for cultivating rice are especially important given the sheer size of the undertaking as the land used globally for such cultivation is about 150 million hectares producing around 600 million tons of rice for global consumption.

Visit the Energy Studies Institute (ESI) website for details and registration.

Source: Energy Studies Institute