Abstract Water boreholes are critical components of water supply infrastructure worldwide, providing water quality and quantity levels that are often unmatched by alternative sources; however, there is a significant global lack of understanding regarding their lifespan, defined as the total duration of a borehole’s use. This lack of knowledge hinders the ability of water utilities to anticipate the need for new groundwater development, borehole replacement, or maintenance operations. Gaining in-depth knowledge about borehole lifespan and the variations depending on regional or environmental contexts could bring important insights for optimizing water resource management and improving infrastructure planning. To date, no large-scale study has analyzed the lifespan of boreholes, and no method has yet been proposed to systematically assess it. The aim of this paper is to propose the application of survival analysis to evaluate borehole lifespan. Survival analysis techniques, which have proven advantages in analyzing the lifespan of assets across various fields, are a set of statistical methods designed to analyze the time until an event occurs. Here, the method is applied to borehole data from over 35 countries, representing diverse hydrogeological environments and socio-economic conditions. The paper concludes that, over a 60-year period, the mean utilization time of the analyzed boreholes is 35.0 ± 1.6 years. Deeper boreholes (> 145 m) tend to have longer lifespans than shallower ones, while those with nominal production rates below 20 m 3 /h experience a 28% reduction in lifespan compared to higher-capacity boreholes. The analysis also revealed that boreholes constructed after 2005 tend to have shorter lifespans.
Trottet et al. (Fri,) studied this question.