What type of sciences or technology is currently being researched for the purpose of moving water around on continents for irrigation?
You can’t have it. Go away.
- Love the Great Lakes region
Since there are many pipelines moving fuels around the country, water could also do the same:
Here is a paper on the subject:
Pipe Dreams: Water Supply Pipeline Projects in the West
Not sure how well-regarded this outfit is, but the info is mildly decent reading on the topic.
Chock full of info about why Great Lakes freshwater won’t be moved around the continent.
Ah, GQ. Well then.
Duluth MN, at the end of Lake Superior sits at 214m above sea-level.
Albuquerque NM, sits at 1619 m above sea-level.
Leave aside the requirements of building aqueducts/pielines etc. Let’s just move 1 cubic meter 1400m into the air.
E=mgh=1000101400 → 1.4e7J
Albuquerque apparently uses 120 gal/person/day and has over 500,000 people. Let’s move it all up in the air
0.5m^3*500,000 * 365 → 91.25e6 cubic meters a year.
That means you need 1.3e15 J of energy for a small city which I think works out to ~40MW I think.
Moderator Note
Just a friendly reminder, please hold off on the non-factual answers in GQ until the question has been addressed factually.
Noted - thanks.
The largest such project currently in development is in China:
The technology is fairly simple - pumps, canals, and tunnels. What is impressive is the scale of it. They are measuring the amounts of water in kilometers cubed !
I take it they are moving the water down hill though -from Qinghai to Inner Mongolia. Makes it easier if I understand it correctly
One idea I read about once was to fill a large flexible bladder (perhaps holding three thousand gallons) with fresh water and tow it, like a barge.
A good rule, but it was funny. 
What if we take some of the mosquitos too?
What we need to do is to re-route a few tropical storms each year into the Colorado river watershed…
I am thinking the technology is fairly straightforward - a system of canals, pumps, holding dams, and gravity is how it’s been done. The real challenge is likely the political will and funding to undertake such a project. No one has a problem sending fuel thru pipelines around the country, but taking someone’s water and sending it somewhere else can be a real thorny issue.
3 thousand gallons is a kiddie pool. The article says 3000 cubic meters or 790,000 gallons. Which would still only supply about 65 households for a month.
Moving fuel around is a drop in the bucket compared to moving water around
Canals I imagine. I don’t know how much research is being done though.
Possible, but prohibitively expensive. You can move water downhill easily enough (that’s what rivers are), and you can pipe/pump water throughout a city at acceptable cost. But according to @Oredigger77 in this thread, it costs about 13 cents to move a gallon of water 100 miles. And irrigation quantities are really massive compared to the commodities we shove through cross-country pipelines. According to this, a bushel of corn requires about 3000 gallons of water, which works out to $390 worth of water if you’re pumping it through pipelines just 100 miles long.
Liquid fuel pipelines don’t “send fuel…around the country”; they are used to transfer crude oil to specific refinery facilities, or from refineries to nearby oil depots for storage and OTR distribution. Water distribution to end users would be like sending gasoline via pipeline to individual gas stations. Of course, you don’t have the environmental concerns for spilling water as you do for hydrocarbon fuels (other than losing the water). The US Southwest, of course, has large system for the storage, allocation, and distribution of water for irrigation (the Colorado River Storage Project) and the state of California has its own projects for the storage and distribution of water from the Upper Feather Watershed and Western Sierra Mountains to the Central Valley and down to Southern California, and the the Eastern Sierra watershed via the Owens Valley Aquaduct, which have been infamously politicized. All have been strained by overuse to irrigate water-thirsty crops in semi-arid and arid climes as well as domestic use of water during massive expansion of suburban populations.
Of course, except for having to pump water uphill through the the Grapevine section near Castaic and Sylmar, all of these essentially ship water downhill at little cost other than maintaining aqueducts and dams. Even setting aside the “political will and funding” to try to move water from the Great Lakes to the Southwest (setting aside the fact that Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York all have a vested interest in these lakes, Canada has a geographical claim to approximately half of four of the five lakes (and hydrologically Huron and Michigan are actually one body), just getting the water over the Rocky Mountains and into the Southwest is an absurdly difficult hurdle that makes Libya’s Man-Made River Project look like a child’s sand castle in comparison.
We should be learning to conserve the water we have and grow crops more efficiently and/or where it is sustainable to do so rather than attempt to construct an enormously expensive, complex, and ultimately unsustainable water distribution system with massive ecological impacts. The notion of transporting water across two-thirds of the continental US to grow cashews and citrus in the desert boggles the mind.
Stranger
Wouldn’t it be easier to just have people (and farms) move to where the water is?
I agree with all you state. I was just sharing that there are proposals to move more water around than there is today. Another issue is how agriculture factors into water usage - as you say, crops are growing in areas that they probably should not. And to put a finer point on it - much of these crops (tree nuts in particular) are sent overseas as profitable exports. So, water projects that serve agriculture also tend to require large public investment, but the benefits are privatized. That is a whole other discussion, tho.
One of the problems with most water conservation programs is that when the water returns, so do old habits. My city (northern CA) has outdoor watering restrictions in place due to the drought, but as soon as winter rains arrive, even if late and less than expected, the restrictions will be rescinded and everyone will go back to drowning their lawns. We have a short memory when it comes to these things. This is also a problem when investing in raising dams and other water projects, like desalinization - people only feel the urgency when the pain is acute, but investment and interest “dries up” during normal-wet years.