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Part of the beauty of the borehole is that it requires no elaborate apparatus. A single farmer may be able to sink his own tube well and start pumping. That is why India and China are now perforated with millions of irrigation wells, each drawing on the common resource. Sometimes this resource may be huge. But even big aquifers are not immune to the laws of physics. Many places are seriously overdrawn. In those places, farmers probably have to pay something for the right to draw groundwater. But almost nowhere will the price reflect scarcity, and often there is no charge at all and no one measures how much water is being taken.
鉆井抽水的一個優點是不需要使用復雜的機械設備。一個農民或許就能夠自己挖掘管井開始抽水。這就是為什么在印度和中國的大地上，布滿了數百萬個灌溉井，每口井都在抽取人類共用的水資源。有時候這一資源可能還算豐富，但是即便是那些大的蓄水層也免不了受到物理定律的影響。許多地方抽水嚴重過量。在那些地方，農民或許也需要為抽取地下水而付些費用。但幾乎在任何地方，他們所付的費用都不能真正反映出水的稀缺，通常，用水完全是免費的，也沒有人計算究竟有多少水在被抽取。
Priced or not, water is certainly valued, and that value depends on the use to which it is harnessed. Water is used not just to grow food but to make every kind of product, from microchips to steel girders. The largest industrial purpose to which it is put is cooling in thermal power generation, but it is also used in drilling for and extracting oil, the making of petroleum products and ethanol, and the production of hydroelectricity. Some of the processes involved, such as hydro power generation, consume little water(after driving the turbines, most is returned to the river), but some, such as the techniques used to extract oil from sands, are big consumers.
無論有沒有標價，水肯定是有價值的，而其價值取決于用它的用途。水不僅用來種植糧食，還用來制造從芯片到建房、架橋用的鋼梁等各種產品。其工業上最大的用途是熱電廠發電過程中的冷卻處理，但它還用于石油勘探和開采、石油產品和乙醇的生產以及水力發電。其中有些工序，如水力發電，耗水很少（在推動渦輪機轉動后，大部分水返回江河)，但是有些工序，如在沙子中開采石油所使用的技術會消耗大量的水。
