This is a key point around the economics of moving water. It may make more economic sense to just buy-out farmers and allow the land to return to nature, compared to the cost of transporting water. And then create incentives to relocate crops to areas where there is enough water to support them. Any technical solution to the water problems out west always rely on socialized risk and cost, and then end-up with privatized benefits and profits.
Why not let them go broke?
What is so special about farmers? If in any other industry a key resource becomes too expensive companies go broke, this is considered a normal part of economics. Why are producers of economically unviable products exempt of economics if they call themselves “farmers”?
(In our country we’re having some problems with farmers that cannot stay within their manure allowance and are making a stink— I think they are idiots or eco-terrorists, this might skew my view of farmers a bit)
Presumably, they own the land, so they should be compensated for that. If the land is owned by someone else, that person should be compensated. That’s what I mean with “buy-out”. I don’t think it’d be right to just confiscate land because it’s no longer viable as a farm.
Why should the government buy the land? Or confiscate it? What will the government do with that land?
As @The_Librarian stated, in any other failing industry, when the business is no longer viable, the owner or company goes broke.
There are many empty, abandoned buildings and factories in this country. Did the government buy those when the business failed?
I don’t think that is the same thing. Farms are dependent on the government-funded water projects, as well as government-allocated water rights - government is a major part of the equation. An abandoned factory building has no such dependency. Buying them out of the land and the water rights would free both up for other purposes, a lot more quickly than just waiting around for them to fail. Since the government essentially controls their fate by controlling the water, the government can and should help them fail faster, and soften the blow.
Water rights rules vary from state to state. I know a man who owns the water rights for several properties in Utah, all so he can have a grass lawn. The neighbors must suffer because he was there first. This is a big issue.
And yes, gov’t is a huge part of the issue. We’ve made damn sure that one state cannot sell their portion of Great Lakes waters to Texas or anyone else without the say so of all the surrounding states and provinces.
Let’s take a WAG as to the amount of electricity needed to get water across the Rockies. As a reference point, the CAP (Central Arizona Project) canal has 14 pumping stations with a total lift of 2900 feet, using 2.5 million MWh annually to move 1.4 million acre-feet of water, so about 1.8 MWh per acre-foot of water. Not all the water is transported the length of the canal, so that number is high. For argument’s sake let’s call it 1.5MWh/acre-foot.
That’s to raise the water 2900 feet. Assume 10000 feet to get over the Rockies brings the electricity use to around 5 MWh/acre-foot.
Colorado River water allotments total 15 million acre-feet per year for US users with an additional 1.5 million acre-feet owed to Mexico by treaty. So 16.5 million acre-feet/year.
Calculations of long-term average Colorado River flow range from 13.2 to 14.3 million acre-feet per year (vs. 16.4 million during the wet period when the allotments were determined - the crux of the problem). Split the difference to get 13.8 million acre-feet per year on average, meaning that at full allotment we need to make up for 2.7 million acre-feet/year (essentially 2 CAP canals worth).
So 13500 GWh per year, or 1.5GW continuous power 24/7/365. Just to keep up with where we are now.
Surely, much of that can be recovered. California has multiple powerplants that recover energy used for pumping water uphill. If you’re clever, you can even put a reservoir at the peak and get pumped storage for free. Use renewables on the pump side, don’t bother with pumping at night or with no wind, but use the storage at the peak for buffering. Recover the energy on the downhill side.
1.5GW isn’t really that much at any rate. The US installed tens of GW of solar+wind last year.
That’s only one and a quarter flux capacitors.
This has been thought of before. I give you… the North American Water and Power Alliance:
I know that tunneling is slow and very expensive but I have a feeling at current human populations it won’t be long before serious tunneling operations start taking place even if completion dates are decades into the future.
As an Example:
As a result of steadily increasing demand for water, construction of a booster pumping station adjacent to the Greater Winnipeg Water District’s surge tank in St. Boniface was completed in 1950. This station allowed the District to fully develop the capacity of the existing works and to increase the flow to the City of Winnipeg from 30 to 42 million gallons per day. The station was equipped with three 20 million gallons per day pumping units with electrically controlled switchgear and electrically operated discharge valves. This was the first major addition to the District’s aqueduct since the original works were completed in 1919.
This was in the news a while ago, because when they built the aqueduct in the early 1900’s it cut off the Shoal Lake Indian Reserve from road access, until Justin Trudeau was elected Prime Minister and directed the department to build the 12 miles of road and a bridge over the channel to allow the residents to drive to the TransCanada highway. Priorities.
But there’s an example. Winnipeg is according to statistics a city of slightly less than 1M people. That’s the level of water supply that they need.
I vaguely recall a movie (or TV show?) where the final chase and shoot-out was in an aqueduct under construction to add to the NYC water supply. This was a tunnel over 20 feet in diameter, more like 30. And it wasn’t even the main supply, and had the advantage of water flowing downhill. (What would a pump on a 20-foot-diameter pipe look like, anyway? Especially one that could pump uphill?)
The problem with any idea about moving water is scale. Are there any decent sized cities where an appreciable amount of their water supply is pumped uphill any distance?
I think you’re thinking of a scene from Die Hard with a Vengeance that was set in Water Tunnel #3, construction on which was started in 1970 and isn’t expected to be complete for a few years. In short it’s a very expensive, very long-term construction project.
Every penny and every minute would be better used on more practical projects.
Advocating a tunnel is basically saying: “since I can’t reach the top shelf I’ll put myself through 30 years of bone grafts to make me taller, instead of finding a ladder.”
The California Aqueduct supplies a good share of Southern California’s water, and is sourced from Northern California and transported mainly by gravity. At one point water is pumped nearly 2,000 feet uphill:
At Edmonston Pumping Plant it is pumped 1,926 ft (587 m) over the Tehachapi Mountains.
As I noted upthread, it’s about 13 cents a gallon to move water 100 miles through a pipeline. It’s 1500 miles from Lake Michigan to Las Vegas, so figure $2 per gallon if you want to move water there, on top of what the city of Las Vegas currently charges to distribute water through the municipal pipe network to your property (less than a penny a gallon). In other words, hydrating Las Vegas residents with Lake Michigan water would result in their water bills increasing by a factor of 200. Their monthly water bill wouldn’t be $100, it would be $20,000.
That’s just obviously nonsense, though. I don’t know what assumptions your source used, but they’re either wrong or absurdly conservative and unrealistic. You could transport water by truck for $0.13/gal over 100 mi.
The California Aqueduct already transports water over 700 miles through mixed terrain, including pumping it over a 2000-foot mountain. It transports 650 million gallons a day. It does not cost $591M/day. LA spends only $1B/year on importing water, and even if all of that went to the Aqueduct, it would still mean the transport costs were only a fraction of a penny per gallon ($0.0006/gal over 100 mi).
85% of LA’s water is already imported via aqueducts hundreds of miles long. A 1500 mile aqueduct isn’t going to cost 200 times that.
Another thing to consider is you would not need a pipeline the entire way, just from the Mississippi River to the Continental Divide (assume it’s varying levels of uphill). You would just need to get it into the Colorado River drainage basin and then gravity and natural waterways take over and the water would work it’s way into Lake Powell and Lake Mead. I think it’s about 600 miles from LV to the source of the Colorado in Rocky Mountain National Park, so that reduces the amount of pipeline (and cost). Not saying this is a feasible thing, but I would expect such a project to take advantage of gravity whenever it could.
Do they? snowthx noted above that the Edmonston Pumping Plant already efficiently transports large volumes of water over a 2000-foot mountain.
But we can go back to basics, too. A gallon of water weighs 3.78 kg. Let’s take a 1 km mountain as a reference. That’s 3.78*1000*9.81=37 kJ, or 0.01 kWh. Pumps are about 90% efficient, which means the pumping costs are under a tenth of a cent per gallon, and that’s if you don’t bother recovering the energy.
OK, I agree 13 cents per gallon is overly pessimistic. But it’s still very costly.
For a pipeline traversing 1000 miles, an altitude gain like that forms only a small part of the total power requirement.
I went to this site:
I spec’d a 48" diameter of galvanized steel pipe, 5M feet long (about 1000 miles from Lake Michigan to the continental divide in Colorado). Flow rate? I guessed at 10 ft/s for a flow velocity, so about 125 cubic feet per second. Result was 10,638 psi of head loss for the entire trip. I ended up with a power requirement of 255753 KW. At 15 cents per KW-hr, that works out to 85 cents per cubic foot, or about a penny per gallon. Since that’s all frictional losses, none of that energy is recoverable. A pound of almonds requires 1900 gallons, so if you used this transcontinental water for your almond orchard, the water cost alone would be $19 per pound of almonds. Almonds currently retail for maybe $6 per pound, so now they’d cost at least $25 per pound.
If used for municipal water supplies, people would see their water bills double. Not as bad as 20X, but still enough to cause hardship for a lot of folks.
Those cost figures also don’t include the construction and maintenance costs for the pipeline that need to be amortized into the price of the delivered water. I’m not in a position to estimate those, but they only move the cost higher.