Water abstraction is the process of taking water from the environment for irrigation or treatment to produce drinking water. A falling water droplet Water (from the Anglo-Saxon and Low German wæter) is a colourless, tasteless, and odourless substance that is essential to all known forms of life and is the most universal solvent. ... Irrigating cotton fields Irrigation in the Heart of the Sahara Irrigation (in agriculture) is the replacement or supplementation of rainfall with water from another source in order to grow crops. ...
Depending on the environmental legislation in the relevant country, controls may be placed on abstraction to limit the amount of water that can be removed. Over abstraction can lead to rivers drying up or the level of groundwateraquifers reducing unacceptably. For the Second World War frigate class, see River class frigate The Murray River in Australia A waterfall on the Ova da Fedoz, Switzerland A river is a large natural waterway. ... Groundwater is water flowing within aquifers below the water table. ... An aquifer is an underground layer of water-bearing permeable rock, or permeable mixtures of unconsolidated materials ( gravel, sand, silt, or clay) (see also groundwater). ...
The science of hydrogeology is used to assess safe abstraction levels. Hydrogeology (hydro- meaning water, and -geology meaning the study of rocks) is the part of hydrology that deals with the distribution and movement of groundwater in the soil and rocks of the Earths crust (commonly in Aquifers). ...
Abstracted water is used for a large number of purposes: as a domestic water supply for both consumption and for household use, for agriculture, for industry, and for many other purposes.
Water is also lost via leakage in the overall distribution systems; the estimated quantities lost, and thus their percentage of the total being distributed, varies from one water company to another.
The estimated values of water loss by the major regional water companies for 1994 to 1997/98 as a percentage of that put into distribution (which does not give an indication of the quantities lost) are shown in Figure 4.
An abstraction licence gives the holder a right to take water from the stated source every year, until the licence expires or until the holder wishes to give up that right by cancelling the licence.
To acquire an abstraction licence, the applicant must be the occupier or prospective occupier of the land on which the abstraction point is located.
In addition, most licence holders pay an annual charge based on the amount of water licenced for extraction, the source of the water, the time of the year the water is used and the purpose the water is used for.
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