Posted on 06/03/2022 2:53:40 PM PDT by Peter ODonnell
I love to visit the desert southwest region, so I am fairly familiar with water issues in that part of the country. Two large reservoirs on the Colorado River, Lake Mead and Lake Powell, are both critically short of water after many years of high usage, mostly by the urban areas of southern Nevada from Lake Mead. As Lake Mead drops, water from Lake Powell is allowed to drain out at a relatively high rate, which also drains Lake Powell. Both are now fifty to sixty feet below their design (and former) levels, leaving a nasty "bathtub ring" of bleached sandstone between the intended shorelines and the current water levels.
One unexpected side effect was the recent discovery of murder victim(s) in Lake Mead, as the vehicles containing their corpses (evidently dumped in the lake decades ago) emerged from the receding waters.
So this is a bit of a ramble about the big question, how if at all could the federal and state governments act to find water to route into those lakes, or alternatively, supply directly to Nevada so that the outflow could be reduced?
The planet has plenty of water, but very little is located in proximity to the desert southwest, unless massive desalination projects could be undertaken. The various levels of government do not seem very keen on spending billions on desalination, which is somewhat puzzling since they are quite happy to spend it on trains that fail to connect large cities even after a massive expenditure.
Massive desalination would need to be located near an ocean shoreline, which means it would be some distance from Las Vegas or Lake Mead. The best location assuming international co-operation would be the region around the Colorado River delta into the Sea of Cortez (Gulf of California). That delta is now dry 95% of the time as the last of the Colorado's water is siphoned off before Yuma and the Mexican border. Most of that goes towards the Imperial CA region south of the Salton Sea.
Desalination projects on the California coast would be further from target areas and there's the Coast Mountains in the way, making transport of the water created more difficult.
Speaking of the Salton Sea, of course that was created by an engineering failure when dams on the lower Colorado gave way in 1905 (a very wet year apparently) and water rushed into the below-sea-level Salton basin. The water levels there have also been declining since the 1950s and now lie quite a bit lower which in that flat terrain means a long way away from the original shorelines. The result has been a stinking mess that has killed off both lake fish stocks and the tourist trade in what used to be a playground for southern Californians.
So one concept that might be worth exploring would be to pump ocean water through the flat low-lying gap between the Sea of Cortez and the Salton Sea, to raise its level back to what it had been, or possibly a bit higher (too much higher and it would begin to overflow into valuable agricultural land north of Imperial). Then desalination could take place there, considerably closer to Las Vegas and Lake Mead. There would still be elevation changes to consider for any pipeline aspects. I am no expert on transportation but I don't think rail or road transport of fresh water is a viable option on the scale required, although that might prove wrong.
How else could one get fresh water into southern Nevada (or the two Colorado River reservoirs, or for that matter, any dry part of the inland west?).
If not by desalination, then we have challenges that have no obvious easy solutions. But in theory, if it's a looming problem for the oceans that arctic land ice is going to melt faster, then that runoff (mainly from Greenland) could be collected and transported to the dry regions. How might that work? I have been racking my brains (perhaps not a very large task) and have come up empty on this.
The technical details: the water running off from Greenland, whether it's excessive or normal, comes from about thirty or forty roughly equal streams that all hit the many fjords you see on a map of Greenland. I suppose some of that fresh water is utilized by the few large towns on the west coast of Greenland. Most just runs into the ocean. Roughly half of it would be on the unpopulated east coast. There is no one location that has a much larger proportion of this runoff, which begins under the large ice caps of the interior of Greenland and emerges near the margins of the ice caps usually 5-10 miles inland from the coast. After short travel along rocky rapid-strewn rivers, the meltwater runs into the Atlantic or Arctic Oceans.
If some of that could be collected (in a fleet of ships) and transported to the Gulf of Mexico it could be relocated within a thousand miles of the dry southwest states. How it gets from (for example) Corpus Christi to Arizona or Nevada is a separate question. There's lots of potential use for it in Texas and New Mexico also.
Here again, I have only a vague idea how many ocean vessels (presumably of a size equal to the largest now in existence) would be needed to transport a reasonable amount of water to Texas, or what the overall costs of that would be, relative to the market value of the water if deliverable there. I would imagine the numbers are in the range of 10,000 ships and the equivalent of a price on water that is somewhat higher than current market values, but if society needs water, then the cost aspect is relative to other things such as survival, quality of life, health, national security etc.
I cannot imagine a transfer technology that does not use ships, but I suppose somebody could look at underwater pipelines. Of course it becomes obvious that an easier solution is to build the massive desalination in Texas instead. Or you could perhaps tow icebergs, they are after all frozen variations of the runoff and despite being in the ocean, are mostly frozen fresh water. Once thawed, they would not require desalination.
The Antarctic is a more distant source of larger icebergs. It has been proposed in the past to tow some of those to the California coast where they could melt into reservoirs near the coast. Cost has been the main problem, the technology while difficult probably already exists.
Other possible schemes would be diversion of abundant water supplies from central regions (in the Mississippi River basin) to the west. How much of the water in the Mississippi (or the Missouri) could be diverted before that led to water shortages in regions dependent upon them? Would it work to divert only at times of high runoff to alleviate flooding at those times? Would the amounts available do much to resolve water shortages further west, or would it be a case of too much work for not enough gain?
Are there other solutions? I fantasized for example taking an interior valley of Nevada (having seen almost all of them) with dry mountain ranges on both sides, engineering catchment of all the meagre annual rainfall and snowmelt that ran off from those mountains, and transferring it to streams in southern Nevada that feed into the Colorado River. That would raise the levels of Lake Mead because those rivers are normally dry most of the year and just fill up with water a few times a year after snowmelt or monsoon storms.
Some Nevada valleys have a bit of irrigated agriculture that depends on those meagre water supplies; others do not. Most Nevada valleys have a dry lake somewhere that collects this runoff naturally, and this also applies to western Utah. The largest dry lake is Sevier Dry Lake which actually has some water in it quite often, as it receives runoff from a fairly permanent river, the Sevier which starts out near Bryce Canyon and flows north, then west and southwest into the dry lake. Most of the Nevada dry lakes, especially those closer to Las Vegas, are dry most of the time.
The most promising solution is desalination. I don't understand the reluctance to go after that full-on, in a rich country like America. When you look at what society and in particular government spends billions of dollars on now, why not make this a priority? It's more urgently needed than let's say wind energy where a lot of public money is basically wasted subsidizing an inefficient form of energy. It's certainly much more needed than trains to nowhere. It might not be more needed than weaponry, but if we are spending money on weapons we would export to unstable countries to perpetuate wars there (and feed a constant supply of refugees) then here again, I would say it's a better use of public money.
Also to get a large-scale desalination project up and running in the Salton Sea area, by the time you raise money through taxes and water bills, and balance that against higher tax revenues from a more robust economy that would follow, I don't know if there's even a net cost to it at all. There is also a food security gain to be considered.
Would love to hear your thoughts about all this. For example, is this a winning issue for Trump in 2024? Or should he avoid it? With a good water plan for the southwest he could perhaps add five states to his win column that he didn't have in 2020.
There are problems for which there are no easy or economical solutions.
This is one of them.
There are always more "wants" than there are resources.
Rain harvesting.
No idea why this isn’t the norm.
Cloud seeding I guess. Probably need clouds ☁️ to begin with.
Amos 4:7.
The problem of water in the southwest rests on two man made issues: too much population for the desert region and 2) fully half the water in California is wasted on pointless “environmental” priorities. Stupid people in charge lead to making problems worse..
In the meanwhile, build more pressurized water reactors. More nukes, less kooks.
Desalination plants, they have the added benefit of minerals that can be sold or traded to offset costs. Pump it back up into the rivers. They could cut LA off from using the flowing water, and require them to use the manufactured from sea stuff to water lawns, and fill their pools. IMO, they should just cut them off, that includes Vegas, from using of flowing waters. That city deserves nothing special, it is a den of iniquity and wastefulness. If you want to gamble, go to a lot of places including Vegas. Cut back on the amounts of water they may use to sustainable levels. Let it turn into dust.
It is madness that we look to having a sustainable future in energy, but subsidize lavish lifestyles in California and Nevada.
KISS principle seems to be in order. Acknowledging that there is no will to do it, any solution involving desalination would be to use that to provide water to coastal California populations.
They’re draining huge watersheds, and pumping Colorado River water in for hundreds of miles. Reducing the pull on the Colorado should be the first step. Las Vegas metro is bad enough.
You want the SW completely conquered. Conquered areas turn blue. Not a smart idea. Capitalism makes life easy. Easy life makes society want to dress in drag, be concerned with all types of stupid crap, and help the world.
Comets are mostly water. If we crash one into California, that should give them all the water they need. Just saying.
Has been nice not needing to water the garden here in the Northeast...
California could develop a combined electric generation and desalinization plant, similar to Dubai’s. It would require fuel of natural gas or associated gas, of which California has plenty of offshore reserves which are undeveloped. At some point they may have to decide which is more important, food and water, or their delusional green agenda.
I would suggest that someone get ahold of Lizzie Cooper and the Rain Man.
How about people don’t over build in the desert?
A pipeline from the Great Lakes to the DSW would work. The enviros would go nuts at not being able to protest it.
I have never understood why we don’t have more smaller reservoirs to collect water when CA has rain. It seems like we don’t like to build anything that would support a future population (even though we do everything we can to ensure that the population grows somewhere.)
Nuclear plants and desalination are valuable for CA. I just read that there are twelve such plants, but none are nuclear powered (? are they) Of course this is on the news that a new plant has been cancelled because we have too much water?
Finally, the fight over water with WA and OR is strange in this day. The Colombia runs fresh water into the ocean. An undersea pipeline could send this surplus into the SF delta and then pump it to sourthern CA to support additional agriculture.
I agree with this author, the water needs to be moved to places where it is needed and we should start now. It is as useful to the environment as solar and wind power, and is one thing that big government could do that I could support.
Are you insane? The whole state of Nevada gets 300,000 acre feet per year from the Colorado River system. This is with 40 millon visitors per year. Las Vegas uses less than it’s allocated amount every year and recycles every drop of water that hits a drain in the basin back into Lake Mead. The only place on earth that recycles as much water is Israel. Nevada is so good at water recycling they have banked water in Lake Mead vs their treaty allocated amounts of 300K for the last tens years running. California takes 7,000,000 acre feet per year and uses five of that to water alfalfa hay in the deserts. So now tell the class who is wasting water. Learn some facts before posting a scree.
I grew up in Southern California.
It is a Desert!
Much of southern Nevada is a Desert!
as is much of the USA southwest.
You people that chased me out should go back to where you came from, there is plenty of water there.
full disclosure; where I live now gets in excess of 70 inches per year of rain and has a much better climate than
most places. it is Hawaii. But we do have a desert!
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