Sustainable Water Resources Utilization on Energy Industry Based on the Gray Water Footprints Assessment in Hunan Province

Abstract

Currently, the energy and fresh water scarcity are two of the major issues to be tackled by natural resource management. Furtherly, the water resources scarcity due to pollution is among the most serious challenges for sustainable water resources management in China. In this paper, the concept of gray water footprint (GWF) was introduced for the assessment of water utilization in energy industrial sectors, focusing on the water scarcity due to the quality degradation. Hunan Province was taken as the study case for the GWF accounting from 2005 to 2014. The results indicated that the water supplies in the energy sectors of Hunan province, in most cases, were surplus the gray WFs of the same time period. Therefore, the water pollutants in the sectors could be fully assimilated. Thus, the water quality in the energy industrial sectors of Hunan province were not deteriorated from the energy sectors.