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I wish people would be careful when they throw around the worry about a water shortage. This is just silly. The issue is not the supply of water, but the cost.

After all, I can ship a liter of bottled water from Fiji almost anywhere in the developed world overnight via FedEx for less than $100. You can have all the water you need, if you are willing to pay for it.

I live just a few miles from the Mississippi River, which flows here at the speed of a medium jogger and is about 1/2 mile wide and 30-40 feet deep. This is maybe a dozen million gallons a second that we let flush downhill to the Gulf day and night. If water was so "short" here in the midwest, we would dam the river and build a pipeline to where it was needed. But, water is not yet that valuable, or conversely, water is not that "short" anywhere near here.

Indeed, water is so plentiful that the debate about river management right now is how long the "barge season" should be. That term implies that the dams upstream in the Dakotas are opened to raise the water level down here so that barges can be moved up and down the river with towboats. We let millions of extra gallons every second run in the river so we can save some money using barges instead of trucks.

So, is there a water shortage? It is just ROFL silly to claim there is. There is only water that costs more than some people want to pay. If an ethanol plant needs water, then it should pay what it costs. Further, government must price water to include all the costs. If that is too much, then the plant shouldn't be built.

I'm familiar with an ethanol plant under development in central Indiana. It, and the associated grain handling facilities, will sit on 260 acres. In that part of Indiana, 260 acres of land can be expected to receive just under 300,000,00 gallons of rainfall per year. No aquifer is depleted, no government has to supply water.