Low-water Mark
Thirsty industries in Bozhou, Anhui Province have sucked up too much groundwater. Diversion projects have provided relief, but hydrologists caution that resource availability must be considered before approving new manufacturing
Water resource officials have given a sharp rap on the knuckles to officials in towns across China over declining water tables, instructing them to better monitor groundwater levels. China's Ministry of Water Resources (MWR) summoned officials from the governments of Shuozhou, Shanxi Province, Bozhou, Anhui Province, Shangqiu, Henan Province, Yulin, Shaanxi Province, and Changji and Yili, the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, on January 8, demanding they keep tabs on the sharp drop in groundwater levels the MWR observed in Q2 and Q3 of 2020.
In Bozhou, the city that saw the biggest drop in groundwater, the water table plunged by 16.7 meters between May 16 and 17, 2020. It remained at that depth for more than 100 days until August 18, 2020, when the water table suddenly rose 9.5 meters.
In northwestern Anhui Province, Bozhou has suffered water scarcity for decades. Every summer, the mayor's hotline rings off the hook
with complaints about water shortages. At times, the city limits supply to residential communities. Although supply issues have to some extent been fixed in the last two years, residents struggle with low offpeak water pressure – so low, people are unable to shower.
Local officials claim their water woes are because of pollution in the Guo River, the city's major source of surface water, and that purification does not help much. Like other water-stressed cities, overexploitation of groundwater is causing its own problems, including cavities in the subsoil, sinkholes and subsidence. Polluted water can flow into the space and degrade the existing aquifer. Although Bozhou is sourcing water through diversion projects from the Yangtze River basin, this is not a sustainable solution. Experts say the city has to adapt its water use based on availability.
Brewing Subsidence
According to data from the MWR'S observation sites, the cavity caused by groundwater extraction in Bozhou was 67 meters deep in 2019, 2.1 meters deeper than in 2018 and 6.2 meters deeper than in 2017. Tao Yuezan, a civil engineering professor at the Hefei University of Technology, told Newschina that the groundwater level in Bozhou has decreased by two to three meters every year for a decade.
“Bozhou has to exploit water deep underground, since the shallow layer (0-50 meters deep) contains fine sand which is very difficult to filter out and the middle layers (90-150 meters deep) do not retain much water,” Tao said. “Bozhou has no choice but to exploit deep groundwater,” he added.
Bozhou's economy is propped up by distilling and brewing alcohol – beer and hard liquor – as well as pharmaceuticals, all water-hungry industries. At the end of 2018, Bozhou's liquor production output hit 12.4 billion yuan (US$1.8B), 11.5 percent of the city's total industrial output. Distilleries paid 15.8 percent of the city's tax revenue. Despite the water shortage, Bozhou government in 2020 proposed raising the city's annual output of the traditional Chinese medicine industry to 50 billion yuan (US$7.4B).
One of the country's top liquor makers, Gujing Group, which makes fermented grain liquor, or baijiu, exploits groundwater in Gujing Town, part of Bozhou's administrative district. Excessive exploitation has lowered the water table so much that wells must be dug at least 500-600 meters deep. In some regions, the wells go as deep as 800 meters.
In 2016, Anhui Provincial Water Resource Bureau (WRB) warned that excessive exploitation was causing aquifers and groundwater in many regions in the province to dry up, exposing these areas to the risk of subsidence. It instructed at-risk areas including Bozhou to decrease the number of over-extraction sites to 70 percent of current levels by 2030 and to take measures to restore depleted groundwater.
“Our bureau's research has found that exploitable [water] volume is actually a different concept to what is a safe volume to exploit. Taking the northern Huai River as an example, the exploitable groundwater volume in this region is 5 billion cubic meters, but we found subsidence occurs when the exploited volume reaches only 800 million cubic meters. Based on this, we predict the safe volume should be much lower than the total resource amount, about 6 to 8 percent,” a retired official from Anhui WRB told Newschina on condition of anonymity.
Not Fit for Use
Zhao Dejian, deputy director of Bozhou WRB, revealed that Bozhou's water supply is still far below demand, despite the excessive groundwater exploitation. According to the government's 2020 water resource survey, Bozhou's per capita water resource is 279.1 cubic meters, far less than the average level of Anhui Province (848.1 cubic meters) and the international standard for severe water shortage (500 cubic meters per capita).
For two decades, the government has tried hard to clean up the 421-kilometer Guo River, the second-longest tributary of the Huai River that flows through Henan and Anhui Province, but with little success.
“The Guo River became black and smelly in the 1990s when industry and agriculture began to boom and urbanization took off,” Zhao told Newschina. “By the early 1990s, the water quality in half the 16 tributaries of the Huai River deteriorated, all categorized below Level 5, which means the river water couldn't be used for anything,” he added.
China classifies the quality of surface water into five levels for different uses. Only water rated Level 3 and above is fit for drinking, natural reserves and aquiculture. Level-4 water can be used for industry and entertainment facilities where there is no direct contact with humans, and Level-5 water can be used for agriculture. Below that, water should not be used for any purpose.
Water quality began to improve after the central government ordered a clean-up in 1994 and established a system for ecological compensation in 2011 that subsidizes and encourages local governments to repair and protect ecology. But Zhao said the Guo River's water quality is still only at Level 4 or lower.
“The Guo River does not have consistent water quality and not all sections have raised the quality to Level 4. Although some sections may have reached Level 3, it's still nowhere near safe enough to drink or for use in daily life,” Zhou Biao, director of the resource management department of Bozhou WRB, told Newschina. He said Guo River water still has limited industrial and agricultural use.
Diverting Plans
Bozhou decided to look elsewhere for its water, joining the Yangtze to Huai project. Similar to China's South-north Water Diversion Project which diverts southern river waters to the parched north, the Yangtze to Huai project aims to divert water from the lower reaches of the Yangtze River, Asia's longest river that flows through 11 Chinese provinces and municipalities from west to east, to the Huai River. Started in 2016, the project covers 12 cities and 46 counties in Anhui Province and two cities and nine counties in Henan Province. According to the plan, Bozhou will receive 438 million cubic meters of water from the project annually after completion in 2023, about half of the city's current annual water supply.
“We intend to distribute about 50,000 cubic meters of the diverted water to water plants in Gujing Town for domestic use, which will save an equivalent amount of groundwater,” Zhao said.
The rest of the water from the transfer project will be equally shared by other counties and towns for domestic, industrial and agricultural use, Zhao said.
In June 2020, Bozhou opened a surface water plant which uses water from the Xifei River, part of the water diversion project. Meng Hao, the plant's chief coordinator told Newschina that his plant supplied 20,000 cubic meters of water every day since August 2020 and now, daily supply has increased to 100,000 cubic meters, nearly 60 percent of Bozhou's total water supply.
Due to the supply increase, Bozhou's water table rose to 72.07 meters by January 18, 1.25 meters higher than in the same period of 2020, authorities said.
According to Bozhou government's 2020 water resource report, the city supplied 1.07 billion cubic meters of water in 2020, 32.1 percent of which was surface water, 65.3 percent groundwater and the remaining 2.6 percent from external sources.
Adapting to Availability
Yet, many experts warn about the impact of large-scale water diversion. The Yangtze to Huai project has been controversial since it was made public, with opponents worrying it will increase pollution in the Yangtze basin and waste more water.
“We should remain cautious about water diversion projects... Although they ease immediate shortages, they make people careless about saving water. Increased water use increases sewage as well, which causes new ecological problems since nature's ability to clean itself is limited,” said the retired Anhui water official.
One advantage touted as a reason for water diversion projects is to compensate for groundwater depletion, but Chen Jian, director of the Groundwater Protection Office of the Chinese Academy of Environmental Planning under China's Ministry of Environment and Ecology (MEE), suggested caution.
“Compared to groundwater, surface water is more tolerant of the environment and can purify itself better, so we have adopted stricter supervision for groundwater. Our supervision objectives for surface water and groundwater are different,” he told Newschina. “We have to use scientific data to prove the compensation effect of using surface water to compensate for groundwater depletion and have to carefully appraise the hidden risks,” he said, adding that the MEE is researching this issue.
The interviewed experts proposed a change in mindset over water use, with a need to consider water resources when making decisions about production. “Many local governments fail to decide on output by water resource [availability],” Ma Yong, deputy secretary-general of the China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation, told Newschina.
“We have to make clear that water resources are fixed and we should plan local industries based on such limited resources… It turns out that many governments tend to accept whatever industry they can attract regardless of whether it is suitable for the local geology and resource conditions,” he added.
An interviewee from Bozhou government who declined to give his name told Newschina that several years ago, Bozhou approved a beer factory without notifying the local water resource bureau, only to find that the plant had to use groundwater to make beer. It made the beer taste strange, and the brewery went bankrupt.
Bozhou is trying to make changes. According to Li Songhu, an engineer in the resource management department of Bozhou WRB, the bureau has delineated water use restrictions for different industrial sectors, and each enterprise and plant has to submit next year's water use plan for approval. “We will double and triple the water price for excessive water use,” he told Newschina.
“We are also building pipelines to water recycling and purification plants and are planning to expand the use of recycled water to the thermoelectricity and textile industry... We have set this year's rate of recycled water use at 20 percent,” Li's superior Zhao Dejian said.