EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Water footprint for energy production and supply in Thailand

Tomohiro Okadera, Jaruwan Chontanawat and Shabbir H. Gheewala

Energy, 2014, vol. 77, issue C, 49-56

Abstract: Water and energy are both important resources that are inextricably and reciprocally linked. Indeed, energy production requires a lot of water (e.g., cooling water at power plants), and numerous studies have investigated the water footprint of energy production (WFEP). However, energy is typically supplied to domestic consumers by both domestic and foreign producers, so it is necessary to take both internal and external energy productions into account. The aim of this study is to evaluate the water footprints of energy production and supply in Thailand by applying standard water footprint analysis methods based on bottom-up approaches, which define separate footprints based on production and consumption perspectives. Our findings show that the WFEP for 2010 was nine times greater than that for 1986, while the water footprint of energy supply (WFES) was eight times greater because of the use of biomass energy. We discuss external dependency, the impacts on domestic water resources, and policy implications, and we suggest ways to promote a reliable energy supply by limiting the use of water resources for energy production in Thailand.

Keywords: Water-energy nexus; Water footprint; Energy production; Energy supply; Bottom-up approach; Thailand (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544214003776
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:energy:v:77:y:2014:i:c:p:49-56

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2014.03.113

Access Statistics for this article

Energy is currently edited by Henrik Lund and Mark J. Kaiser

More articles in Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:eee:energy:v:77:y:2014:i:c:p:49-56