Water wars are no longer from apocalyptic imagery. Something as dramatic is already happening in Taiwan, where a drought is causing chip manufacturers to compete with locals for water use.
Starting on June 1, in fact, the country will cut water supply for the major chip making hub Taichung. Because a front brought over 100mm rain since last Sunday, the hub of Hsinchu has not cut off water. This released in part the tension, but the drought crisis is still there and the alert level is rising to its highest.
The economy minister Wang Mei-hua said: “We need to further tighten water use restrictions in response, in advance of a scenario when rainfall from the plum rain is falling short of expectation.”
Typhoons are an important source of water supply for Taiwan. As there hasn’t been any last year, the country got little rainfall last summer.
“Especially in central and southern Taiwan, rainfall has been lacking from last October until now,” explains Greenpeace East-Asia campaigner, June Liu. “Furthermore, the delay of the spring rain makes the situation even worse. Domestic water use has been cut off two days a week since April this year in some cities.”
Taiwan is normally a place with plenty of rain. However, due to topographical factors and people’s water use habits, water shortage has not been rare in the past 10 years. This is the most severe since 1964.
“Actually, the drought risk also happened in 2015, but this time the scale is wider than 2015, because the total rainfall was only 78% of the average,” says Chia-Wei Chao, chair of Taiwan Environment and Planning Association.
Since October last year, the agricultural sector has had different levels of water regulation policies. As the drought continues, the water regulation policy has been gradually tightened all the way to this year.
That’s why the government policy has partially suspended the water supply to high-tech industry and manufacturers have been ordered to save 15% of industrial water use.
Now, producing semiconductors consumes lots of water. Take Taiwan’s leading semiconductor producer and the world’s largest contract chipmaker, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co Ltd (TSMC). It uses more than 150,000 tons of water per day, approximately 80 standard swimming pools.
Total water consumption from TSMC increased by 70% between 2015 to 2019, which accounts for 3.4% of total industrial water usage. Due to the drought, TSMC and other semiconductor manufacturers have been depending on water trucks to maintain production. It is estimated that TSMC will spend over NT＄0.5 billion (around 23.69 million euro) on the water trucks this year, exceeding its original budget planning.
Global supply has been affected since. And, as climate model projections show that both typhoons and spring rainfall decrease with climate change, microchips are likely to become rarer and rarer.
According to the latest analysis by Swiss Re, Taiwan belongs to the high climate risk group. The research from Academic Sinica also predicts that the exposure to water shortage in North Taiwan, which includes Taipei and Taoyuan, the most populated metropolitan area, will increase dramatically due to climate change.
Greenpeace research shows that the rainfall in reservoirs may decrease up to 25% in northern Taiwan and days without rain may extend to 50% in middle and southern Taiwan by the end of this century.
“Wells and desalination are now the swords at the frontline of battling water shortage,” Liu says. However, they might be double-edged swords as they do not fix the climate problem in the long term.
“The root causes of water security are the low water price and insufficient investment on the infrastructure to prevent water leakage,” Chao says. “The government plans to increase water prices for the biggest companies and also accelerate the retrofit of water supply pipelines.”
TSMC and other chip companies try to increase their process water recycling ratio, which is around 87% between 2015 to 2019, while total water consumption still increased by 70% for TSMC. “I think they have to spend some research effort on water efficient process development,” Chao adds.
With the growing extreme weather events and the carbon tariff policy from the EU, corporations are under pressure and start to seek solutions.
An increased number of Taiwanese companies have also committed to reducing their carbon emissions and changing to 100% renewable energy. “We expect a more proactive action will be taken on by both the supply chain and the government,” Liu says. “We also call on the global governmental agencies that have committed to 2050 net-zero.”
The goal must be put into law to guarantee carbon reduction is well monitored. “For healthy economic development, the Taiwanese government must speed up its actions in a climate emergency,” Liu adds.