A county‐level estimation of renewable surface water and groundwater availability associated with potential large‐scale bioenergy feedstock production scenarios in the United States

Abstract

AbstractThis study examines fresh renewable water resources available for bioenergy feedstock production in the United States. The impacts of feedstock irrigation on surface and groundwater resources available to nonbioenergy sectors were quantified using a pair of water availability indexes: streamflow availability index and percolation flow availability index. The two metrics were applied to both historical (2008) and three possible future biomass production scenarios from the 2016 U.S. Billion‐Ton Report at the county level. For both historical and future scenarios, we found that the consumptive irrigation requirements for bioenergy feedstock account for <0.01% of annual streamflow in all but three counties in Nebraska. Results suggest that the irrigation demand of future biomass production could be supplied by annual renewable groundwater flow in about 94% of feedstock‐growing counties that use groundwater for irrigation, representing about 92% of production tonnage. Counties that require irrigation from nonrenewable groundwater resources are mostly located in the Northern Plains and Pacific regions. We also evaluated the sensitivity of crop water footprint estimation to soil moisture carryover by comparing blue water estimates from six different empirical and process‐based methods. Our findings suggest that accounting for preseason soil moisture is critical for representative blue water estimation, so that the irrigation water consumption is not overestimated. This is especially true in the Corn Belt region, where blue water estimates with and without preseason soil moisture would be about 1.9 versus 45.5 billion m3/year under the historical scenario. This difference is smaller in semiarid regions like the High Plains, but the blue water estimate can still triple if soil moisture is not considered. From the perspective of renewable surface water and groundwater resources, scaling feedstock production up in the High Plains and California will require careful planning integrated with water management strategies to improve water resource conservation.