Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right. Much as food production is an alternative to exporting water, aluminum (or fertilizer) productions are alternatives to exporting energy. You'll typically find aluminium smelters where electricity is cheap. E.g., the Pacific Northwest / Western Canada, where ample hydroelectric resources exist.
> Much as food production is an alternative to exporting water There's only very little water in exported food, so as long as you're not using non-replenishable sources (like fossil water) or limited sources (like rivers) for food production, the amount of water that is actually exported is negligibly small.
The point isn't how much water is physically in food exported, but how much was required to create it. From this Forbes article:
http://www.forbes.com/2008/06/19/water-food-trade-tech-water...
We don’t realize it as we sit down to a meal, but most crops require huge volumes of water to grow: 65 gallons to grow a pound of potatoes; 650 gallons for a pound of rice.
Often, food supplies are only maintained at the expense of literally emptying some of the world’s great rivers, such as the Indus in Pakistan, the Yellow River in China and the Nile in Egypt. Elsewhere, underground reserves are being pumped dry.
But increasingly, countries are giving up on trying to feed their populations from their own resources and are switching to food imports. That means they are also importing the water embodied in the crops, or virtual water. Every ton of wheat arriving at a dockside carries with it, in virtual form, the thousand tons of water needed to grow it.
And if you're looking at meat, it's much higher -- about 2,500 gallons per pound of beef.
Similarly, it's not that you're going to get zapped by electricity when touching aluminum, but the amount of electricity required to extract that aluminum is vast.