Through the upraised, highly striated, hardened argillite that forms the core of the Rocky Mountains? Good luck with both boring that and maintaining a tunnel under such high differential stresses.
Stranger
I watched the American Canal being built. Couple of my uncles worked on the San Lois Dam. I don’t know, my friend, if it could be done in the 6th century BC, then I see no reason it can’t be done in the 1960s.
This canal delivered water downhill, across relatively gentle gradients, and doesn’t have to deal with any major seismic or geologically challenging comditions. It’s not even remotely comparable to what you are suggesting.
Stranger
The pumping plant for that canal is at the head of water and pumps water up 200ft to the side of the canyon. The canal itself is barely over 100 miles.
No such thing as a free lunch. We supply sufficient energy to fight gravity pushing water up to a sufficient height before letting gravity take over again. California has decided the water can be better used elsewhere and decided the energy expenditure is worth it.
And that’s for a relatively small amount of water, i.e. minimizing evaporative losses as much as possible, over a relatively short distance with a small elevation gradient from the elevated source to the final destination.
Louisiana to either West Texas or Georgia is considerably more difficult and energy intensive, since it’s more or less uphill all the way.
ETA: This is something one of my civil engineer friends didn’t like about Sharknado. Too many examples of water flowing uphill. That doesn’t happen unless you provide external energy for it.
No, read for comprehension, please. I said at $100 a barrel (no, not gallon as above) for oil, pumping a small amount (we don’t pipeline much oil compared to our daily water use) makes reasonable economic sense.
For water? The economics and engineering are on a different order of magnitude than the short runs with which you are comparing.
That’s gasoline, i.e. refined oil, not crude.
Agriculture in CA uses 80% of the water in the state, while residential and other business use makes up for the remaining 20%. Any effort that is not primarily focused on agricultural use is missing most of the problem.
Correct, and to add: the federal statute that SuperAbe referenced is more than just a statute – it reflects the reality of an international treaty, as noted by johnpost. 4 of the 5 Great Lakes are international waters, and Great Lakes water levels are a major environmental concern and constantly monitored by both US and Canadian agencies. The idea of siphoning massive amounts of water from the Great Lakes is not just a violation of federal and international law, it’s environmental lunacy.
I live in So Cal and like most my neighbors, I have drought resistant landscaping. I probably water twice a year. I get my cars washed at places that recycle the wash water (filter and reuse it) We all have low flow shower heads and 1 gallon flush toilets. We wouldn’t think of hosing off our sidewalks instead of sweeping them. I’ve lived here most my life and I’ve seen the lakes filled to overflowing to so low the fish lay sideways to swim.
What pisses me off is the water bill. We get charged “emergency fees” when water is low, and when it’s not, we get charged storage fees. This after the water district brags about owning it’s own lake where our water comes from.
They are building a desalinization plant about 5 miles from my home now. It’s on a nice little lagoon that we used to swim and raft in when we were younger. Hopefully, they won’t screw that up.
As the Great Antibob points out, this is overall uphill. Describing the Grapevine as a “gentle gradient” pegs you as living in Denver, CO. I agree that the San Andreas Fault is completely insignificant in this discussion, any aqueduct down Central Oregon would have to deal with exploding volcanoes if the 9.5 M earthquakes don’t wreak it first.
It is true I only have a lay-persons understanding of the engineering difficulties involved. Perhaps if you could explain why it would ten times more costly to build an aqueduct from Louisiana to Georgia than it would be to rebuild the Alaska pipeline. Any discussion on the economics has to start with what we are paying today, in the form of crop insurance. My understanding is these premiums are staggeringly high.
Sure, it’s a bad idea, but it’s a better idea than desalinization plants in Atlanta, GA
You know what? That would be exactly what it will do: boil water to make high-pressure steam to drive electrical turbines to light you home, etc. Yes, some bottle designs capture charged particles from the plasma and decelerate them to generate electricity directly, but that is a minuscule fraction of the output.
The main power source of nuclear, coal, oil, gas and most (not all) other plants is heat, used to make steam, used to drive turbines, used to make juice. The biggest trick would be to make high-pressure pipes that can handle corrosive sea water. Perhaps the process could be phased, to create low-pressure steam to feed into the high-pressure pipes. Steam made from salt water is, you know, no longer salty, so it would just be a matter of getting from the liquid phase to the gas phase.
And here is another interesting point: you see those cooling towers in the fission plants? You see the billowing columns of fog rising high into the sky? Water vapor is lighter than air (which is why we have clouds up there), and spent steam may still have a fair bit of heat (ascent potential) in it. So all we need to do is figure out how to get that turbine exhaust up far enough that we can condense it way up there and start it running down a pipe to where we need it. Yes, it does sound a bit absurd, but it might be doable.
Fact is, we could do this with fission plants right now, I am not seeing why we need to wait for fusion. Most of the water would be used for ag anyway, so its rad levels may not be that big if an issue.
An aqueduct to Georgia wouldn’t be used for agriculture. It would go to Atlanta. Remember that border dispute where Georgia was trying to claim part of Tennessee? The underlying cause of that was that Georgia was trying to gain access to the Tennessee River. The Atlanta area has grown too large, and is now starting to outstrip the available water supply.
It’s pretty much a desperation move on Georgia’s part. The odds that the Supreme Court is going to unilaterally redraw a 200+ year-old state boundary are only infintesimally greater than 0%, and even if they did, any state that depends on water from the Tennessee River would presumably sue Georgia over environmental concerns if they tried to divert any large amount of water.
Look, pumping expensive water to California is stupid, because what are they planning to do with that water? Dump it into the cotton fields, or the rice fields, and all the other water-intensive crops grown in California’s central valley.
If it was a matter of getting people enough water to drink, then we could easily pay $10 a gallon for drinking water. But water for drinking is an infinitesimal slice of the water used. Most water goes for agriculture. The rest goes for industrial and household use, flushing toilets, washing dishes, watering lawns, taking baths, and so on. Less that 1% is actually drank.
So yes, we could create massive waterworks that pump water over mountains and deserts to California. These waterworks will cost billions of dollars and use vast amounts of energy. Who is going to pay for it? The taxpayers? And then we give this water, which we paid billions of dollars for, for free to California’s farmers? Or do the farmers pay for it? Because the farmers aren’t going to pay for it, the only thing that makes it economical to grow water-intensive crops in California is cheap water. Expensive water means farmers switch to dry crops, grazing, drip agriculture, letting fields fallow in drought years, and so on. That’s what happens in every other part of the world where there isn’t much water.
It makes a heck of a lot more sense to shift agricultural production to where the water is than to shift water to where the agriculture is. Yes, people have been building aqueducts and irrigation systems for thousands of years. But ancient people didn’t pump water more than a couple of feet. They relied on gravity to move the water. And all the sources of gravity-fed water for California are already being used.
The idea that we pump the Columbia River or the Great Lakes to California is nonsensical. The Columbia River already is tapped for agriculture–in Eastern Washington and Oregon. The fact that lots of water flows into the ocean doesn’t mean it would make sense to pump it to California.
Remember, this is water that is going to be dumped onto fields, to grow vegetables. How about instead of doubling the amount of water we dump on California’s vegetables, we use the water a bit more efficiently? Or we charge farmers market rates for water? Which would mean higher prices for vegetables, but we’re already paying high prices for those crops, we just pay in other ways than at the grocery store.
Just call it “artisanal sea salt,” put Gandhi’s picture on the can, and sell it for an exorbitant price. Whole Foods already sells pink salt and gray salt, after all. 
Desal is a horrible solution, 4th stage water purification is the best solution. Takes less than half the energy and fucks up the environment by a order of magnitude less- not only are you not sucking up all that seawater, you’re not pumping stuff into the ocean.
The amount of water California budgets for all human use is 43 million acre feet per year.Counting only “indoor residential” use (drinking, bathing, toilets and laundry) calls for 3.3 million acre feet per year.
3.3 million acre feet per year equals 1,075,000,000,000 gallons. That’s about 2.94 billion gallons per day. The output of 16 desalination plants would be 800 million gallons per day. I guess you could call it a bite, but not much more.
I was addressing your reference of the Canal of the Pharaohs. And no, I don’t live in Denver, CO and have driven the high gradient of the Grapevine along I-5 countless times. If you’d actually read the post by Great Antibob or did even a cursory amount of research, you’d understand that the Delta-Mendota Canal travels less than 120 miles, is elevated less than 200 feet, and by the way only carries a maximum capacity of 4600 cu ft/s, which may sound like a lot but is a figurative drop in the bucket for wide scale crop irrigation. And I don’t understand your point regarding the San Andreas fault as I didn’t mention it but the complexities of running a pipeline above or with greatly more difficulty through the Rocky Mountains would have to cope with a wide range of geological and seismic problems.
While a system going from Louisiana to Georgia doesn’t experience the same set of challenges, the highly permeable and poorly supported karst-rich substrate under most of Georgia would pose a great challenge. And given the amount of replenishable aquifers under southern Georgia and Florida, it would make little sense to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build and maintain a pipeline to transport water from southern Louisiana (which is subject to flooding by virtue of being at the delta of North America’s largest river system) when readily accessible water is much closer and more available. We already have a giant and expensive civil engineering works project to attempt to control flooding and direction of the flow of the Mississippi River (the Old River Control Project) and even with this effort and these resources they’re fighting a losing battle to control and divert the flow of the Mississippi at flood levels. Believing that we can somehow build a pipeline which can technologically redirect that water to another region of the country is naïveté in the extreme.
The Earth has a way of moving water around, called the hydrologic cycle. It is powered by the largest fusion power source in the solar system. The mass of water it moves around dwarves any amount of human effort we could possible put to such an effort. Trying to work against it and irrigate large swaths of desert or prevent flooding of cities built upon a flood plain is the foolishness of human hubris and the utter lack of foresight. And thinking that it is somehow cost beneficial to build massive civil structures to move water around in order to save on crop insurance premiums is obtuse. It is ultimately cheaper and more sustainable to change how our agricultural systems work and even relocate cities to areas naturally resistant to flooding.
Stranger
Why would you cross the Rockies anyway when there’s a huge source on the west side in Alaska?
Hmm… could you make use of the Earth’s rotation to get the water to flow south?
As mentioned above, the water problem in California–though we do have serious drought problems–is primarily one of inefficiency. We really ought not to be growing rice and cotton in the Central Valley. And there is an arcane and archaic system of water allocation that privileged agriculture at a time when the cities were small. Now they are huge.
I’m all in favor of conserving water and I make every effort to do so at home–I too have low-flow toilets, drip irrigation, xeriscape, don’t hose the sidewalks or wash my own car. I even turn off the shower while scrubbing. And I certainly don’t want to get rid of California’s agriculture. But I’ve read that there would be no water problem in California if farmers used 10% less water. (No cite, did a quick Google, which turned up lots of interesting looking articles though.)
I live near the Central Valley in CA. The water shortage and it’s impacts make the evening news daily. A couple days ago they interviewed someone representing farmers, and at the end he states that “people keep asking why we grow food in a desert. Well, where else are we supposed to grow it?”. (my sarcastic retort in my head was “where the water is!”).
Therein lies the problem. The climate here is usually good for growing crops, and the occasional drought can usually be withstood, even with CA’s large population and varied industries. The issue is that while the climate is good for growing, there are too many hands on the limited amount of water, and when there is a shortage, it shines a spotlight on this. Everyone wants theirs.
There just are not enough places with the right climate for growing food crops, so it is easier to move water around than to move the crops elsewhere. We are talking about a $40B industry- it is foolish to think those sub-industries are just going to up and move to Texas. That said, I think we could cut back on some of those crops, especially rice, which is very water intensive.
Dude, what?
Yeah, the Earth is rotating. The water rotates along with the Earth. Here’s an experiment for you. Set a glass of water on the desk in front of you. Wait for the Earth’s rotation to fling it thousands of miles south, or west, or east, or north. When your glass of water reaches California, let us know.
Of course, in real life, we make use of the natural transfer of millions of gallons of water from various parts of the world to other parts. The sun evaporates water, wind blows the clouds around, water dumps out of the clouds, and gravity moves the water downhill.
Again, there is no particular difficulty in moving water from Alaska to California, we could fill up tankers at the Copper River and barge it all down to LA. The problem is that the water would be so expensive that you couldn’t economically grow vegetables using it.
We can move any amount of water we want from one place to another. We just have to pay for it. What we can’t do is make that water cheaper than water that drops out of the sky, or flows downhill from rivers. You can grow rice in the Central Valley by going to Costco and buying millions of bottles of Dasani and hiring hundreds of Mexicans to crack open the bottles and pour them on the fields. But that would result in the most expensive rice ever grown. This rice has to compete with rice grown in places that get abundant natural water.
Expensive irrigation programs that move water across continents add costs to agriculture, and pretty soon it becomes obvious that you can save billions of dollars if you’d only choose to plant crops that don’t require that much water if you’re farming in the desert. It makes a lot more sense to grow water-hogging crops in places with lots of water than it does to try to move the water to the crops.
I grew up in Fairbanks Alaska. I knew a guy who grew an apple tree in a greenhouse, that he kept heated all through the winter. How much, per pound, do you imagine his apple crop costed him if you factored in all the costs of production? Hundreds of dollars per pound. You can set up vast acres of heated greenhouses in Alaska to grow apples, but you’re never going to be able to compete with apples grown in Washington.
Shipping water from the Great Lakes to irrigate California is a project that makes about as much sense as those interior Alaska apple orchards.
Slight nitpick: South Pass (7,400’ and change) is the lowest pass across the divide in the central and southern Rockies, but not the lowest point along the whole divide. There’s several 5,000’-something passes in Montana and Canada and it’s 4,000-something feet through much of southern New Mexico.