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Big water cutbacks ordered amid Colorado River shortage
11–20 of 211 posts
Re: Big water cutbacks ordered amid Colorado River shortage
#12Could we feasibly just run desalination stations from the coasts and pipe the water - like oil - to fill up these reservoirs? Setting cost aside for a second, is there any reason not to do something like this?
That would take 10-20 years to build out...what will you do next year?
Re: Big water cutbacks ordered amid Colorado River shortage
#13Could we feasibly just run desalination stations from the coasts and pipe the water - like oil - to fill up these reservoirs? Setting cost aside for a second, is there any reason not to do something like this?
The real solution is to renegotiate the Colorado River Compact acknowledging that historical flow is several million acre feet less than what is allocated. Desalination and pumping is prohibitively expensive and would require as much interstate cooperation as reopening the original deal. And at the end you have hundreds of millions of gallons of brine to deal with.
Re: Big water cutbacks ordered amid Colorado River shortage
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
Setting cost aside? No. It costs a lot because it requires lots of energy which probably means lots of fossil fuels burning.
There’s other ways to mitigate that cost. Israel for instance runs many desalination plants from if I recall correctly solar power. We could do the same with solar and wind. Never the less, yes, because I believe cost can be managed and figured out over time, where as I don’t know what other mitigating factors would be the consequence of such a choice
Do you have a source on the solar power Israel desalination? They use natural gas and coal.
Re: Big water cutbacks ordered amid Colorado River shortage
#15Could we feasibly just run desalination stations from the coasts and pipe the water - like oil - to fill up these reservoirs? Setting cost aside for a second, is there any reason not to do something like this?
Anything is possible for enough money but I don't think you understand how much money what you're proposing would cost. In electricity alone desalination costs around 3kwh/m^3. 3.7mwh/acre foot of water. Last year we got 9.2 million acre feet of water in the Colorado River of the allocated 15 million acre feet. So if we say we want to supplement flows with just 2 million acre feet of desalination water, that's 7 Pwh of electricity. Per year. That's approximately 1000x the annual generated power of the largest nuclear plant in the world.
And we haven't even pumped that water 3700 feet up from sea level to the elevation of lake Powell.
Re: Big water cutbacks ordered amid Colorado River shortage
#16At least this article notes that the vast majority of water usage is agriculture. This isn't something cities could or should solve by switching to (expensive) desalination to effectively subsidize agriculture. Most notably, alfalfa is mentioned here as farmers are going to have to switch to less water-intensive crops. Decreasing alfalfa production may well impact the ability to feed cattle. In the short term, that's…
> But this article makes the same mistake so many make: blaming this on climate change. It's not. It's simply usage. See Figure 2 on page 10 [1].
> [1]: https://www.usbr.gov/watersmart/bsp/docs/finalreport/Colorad...
I don't trust that a 2012 report is up to date on our latest climate modelling, or even that this is a climate-adjusted projection at all. Actual data past the point of publishing has not followed this graph. Anything more recent that supports your claim?
Your source also says:
> In the long-term (2041 through 2060), the futures that consider the Downscaled GCM Projected water supply scenario [not shown], which incorporates projections of future climate, show a high inability to meet resource needs, regardless of the demand scenario and the operation of Lakes Powell and Mead.
Re: Big water cutbacks ordered amid Colorado River shortage
#17[deleted]
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Re: Big water cutbacks ordered amid Colorado River shortage
#18The answer to this problem lies here: “Entsminger pointed out that roughly 80% of the river’s flow is used for agriculture, and most of that for thirsty crops like alfalfa, which is mainly grown for cattle, both in the U.S. and overseas.” The simple solution would be to raise prices on water such that it disincentivizes growing water hungry crops than alfalfa for example. The west’s water crisis is less about cities…
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Re: Big water cutbacks ordered amid Colorado River shortage
#19Could we feasibly just run desalination stations from the coasts and pipe the water - like oil - to fill up these reservoirs? Setting cost aside for a second, is there any reason not to do something like this?
Anything is possible for enough money but I don't think you understand how much money what you're proposing would cost. In electricity alone desalination costs around 3kwh/m^3. 3.7mwh/acre foot of water. Last year we got 9.2 million acre feet of water in the Colorado River of the allocated 15 million acre feet. So if we say we want to supplement flows with just 2 million acre feet of desalination water, that's 7 Pwh…
This is a great comment. Thank you for doing the math. I thought the word "just" was doing a lot of work in the original comment.
Re: Big water cutbacks ordered amid Colorado River shortage
#20The answer to this problem lies here: “Entsminger pointed out that roughly 80% of the river’s flow is used for agriculture, and most of that for thirsty crops like alfalfa, which is mainly grown for cattle, both in the U.S. and overseas.” The simple solution would be to raise prices on water such that it disincentivizes growing water hungry crops than alfalfa for example. The west’s water crisis is less about cities…
The reason this doesn’t happen is that farmers/farming lobbies have a lot of political power, especially in rural districts and no politician wants to be painted as anti-farming interests.