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Posted on 06/07/2026 10:08:15 PM PDT by TheDon
New agreement could allow Arizona to access more Colorado River water by helping expand ocean desalination in Southern California.
For years, Arizona has explored the possibility of turning seawater into drinking water as a way to help offset shortages on the Colorado River.
Now, state water leaders say a new partnership with California could move that concept one step closer to reality.
This week, Arizona signed a memorandum of understanding with California water agencies to explore a first-of-its-kind water exchange involving desalinated ocean water from Southern California.
The agreement centers on the Claude "Bud" Lewis Carlsbad Desalination Plant in Carlsbad, California, which currently has the capacity to produce about 56,000 acre-feet of drinking water annually. According to the San Diego County Water Authority, the facility could be expanded by an additional 6,000 acre-feet.
Colorado River managers say the need for new water supplies has become increasingly urgent as the river continues to suffer from a decades-long drought.
"So on the Colorado River, we've been in a 26-year drought exacerbated by climate change. Our river is 20% smaller than it was just 25 years ago," said Brenda Burman, general manager of the Central Arizona Project.
Burman said conservation efforts remain important, but Arizona will also need new sources of water to meet future demand.
"We need to be looking at innovative ways to move water across country lines, across state lines," she said.
The proposal does not involve building a pipeline to transport desalinated water directly to Arizona. Instead, Arizona and other partners could help fund an expansion of desalinated water production in Southern California.
That additional desalinated water would be used by California water users, allowing them to reduce the amount of Colorado River water they withdraw. Arizona could then access a larger share of the conserved river water.
"By using an exchange, what we would do is more of the desalinated water would be used in Southern California, and that would allow their water users who take off from the Colorado River to take less, and then Arizona parties could take the Colorado River water," Burman said.
Officials with the San Diego County Water Authority say the arrangement would create a new tool for managing water shortages across the Southwest.
"This is something that's never been done before," Dan Denham said.
Desalinated water is significantly more expensive than traditional water supplies, but water managers argue the cost of inaction could be even higher.
"Your alternative is to not invest and not have water," Denham said.
The discussions come as the seven Colorado River Basin states continue negotiations over how water will be shared after current operating rules expire in 2026. Denham said they hope to have a formal agreement by the end of the water year.
Federal officials are expected to announce updated Colorado River operating guidelines later this summer.
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Solar powered Desalinization does seem to be the way to go in many places ‘round da Erf...
Perhaps, but im confused 3 quarters of the earth is covered by water, it the largest natural resource and now they are going to figure out a solution
And some how solar power is the answer
[Desalination is the way.]
They’ll have all of the salt 🧂🧂🧂
they’ll ever need!!
1000 acre feet of water is enough for 1 million people for one year if the average person uses 300 gallons a day. So, 56,000 acre feet of water is enough for 56 million people.
Not in California. They already have the environmental objections to it pre-planned and the lawsuits ready to file. This is not the first time this has been proposed.
I think they even had a plan with right of ways
Both Barry Goldwater and Mo Udall were strong proponents .
Too bad our country has lost such visionary giants
The Colorado river is 20% smaller because of all the demand placed on it. Not glowbull warming.
CC
"we've been in a 26-year drought exacerbated by climate change."Actually, it's the 225% increase in Arizona population in the last 50 years which has primarily caused the shortage.
Yes desal is the way everywhere all the time and with nukes as its heat and powers source.
It’s 400 miles from the mouth of the Colorado River on the Sea of Cortez to Parker Dam that forms Lake Havasu where the entire Arizona canal system takes it’s Colorado River water from at an inlet of 450 ft MSL.
2 twelve foot diameter pipes laid in parallel half buried so they cannot roll... moving water at 1.0 meter per second will deliver approximately 175.1 billion gallons (or 537,000 acre-feet) of water per year to Lake Havasu.
386 ft of friction head over 400 mile length plus 450’ static head = Total Dynamic Head (TDH) of 836 feet.
Operating this configuration 24/7 at an estimated 85% pump efficiency requires a continuous power demand of about 61.8 Megawatts (MW). This amounts to roughly 541,400 Megawatt-hours (MWh) of electricity annually.
The bulk of the cost is the energy needed to desal the seawater in the first place. RO is 3-5 kWh per cubic meter, MED or MEF is 50 ish kWh thermal and 2-3 kWh electric per M^3
In another post I did a analysis for a 4 pad nuke plant using Japanese ABWR tech which they can build in 39 months time. To take it’s waste steam heat@50C to run absorption coolers and vacuum triple point flash desal. With district cooling used to melt the massive tonnes of ice per hour. Ice freezes as fresh water ice and salty brine.
248 million gallons per day at 90% CF is 250,000 acre feet per year , you also ha e 4X 1350 MW sized reactors cranking out power full bore. At 5kWh per cubic meter is another 285 million gallons per day if you used all the electricity for RO desal as a dedicated desal plant. There is your 500,000 acre feet per year into those 12’ pipes you need 60 ish megawatts continuously in pumping power that’s a rounding error for even a single 1350 MWe sized reactor.
So yeah deal is the way.
“1000 acre feet of water is enough for 1 million people for one year”
No
1 AF is 325850 gallons
300 gal/day is 109500 gallons in a 365 day year.
One AF supports 3 people at 300 gpd
300 gpd is very high that’s 9150 gallons per month per person. Typical household use even in dry Texas where we water our yards is 6-8000 per month for a household of four people in it with a wife who takes 100 gallon baths every other day. Single I use 1500 gal/months or less but that’s another story.
At a more reasonable 6000gal month 1000 AF is 54,308 households
Arizona has quite a bit of saline groundwater
https://ne.water.usgs.gov/ogw/review/index.html
Combined with MIT tech for load following doesn’t matter where the power comes from as long as it’s cheap, off peak and / or curtailment power. As in under $50 MWh wholesale.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s44221-024-00213-w
The water tank is your battery so to speak water stores cheap , power does not. Fun fact you can run some ED cells backwards and turn freshwater and brine back into brackish water and electric current so the water tanks literally are your battery it’s a type of electrochemical flow cell.
You also can take salt water and turn it into NaOH and HCL in liquid tanks at a higher storage density than fresh and brackish water would store electrons. Then the debate is do you even want the power back as NaOH and HCL are both valuable chemicals themselves and the electrochemical cell with cheap curtailment power access is going to be the cheapest form of those commodity chemicals humans have come up with how to produce them.
Once you have bulk NaOH you can do all kinds of agricultural things, leaf protein recovery oh yeah in spades that’s prime chicken and hog feed then, wood scraps and crop scraps for cellulose pretreatment for cattle feed you bet. HCL treatment of anything with cellulose in it to make glucose syrup yeah that too. Every animal on earth’s primary cellular energy source is glucose your whole digestive tracks sole job is to turn what you eat into glucose in your blood stream. Every animal on earth can eat glucose natively. Every aerobic cell too be it yeast, fungi, bacterial. You can culture virtually anything organic in glucose. Want to make ethanol yeah boring, butanol is cool, propane or butane is better ask Lanzatech for the bacteria to do so with glucose or HCL turns hemicellulose to 5 carbon pentose which bacteria and yeast also love. Its how cheap is your HCL well electrochemical bimembrane HCL & NaOH from plane old salty water is cheap really cheap when you can use intermittent power to do so.
There has been similar projects proposed with Mexico.
The biggest consumer of water is actually agriculture and outdated water allotment which is based on historical claims.
Eg. one third of AZ Colorado water belongs to Colorado river Indian reservation, which uses it for subsistence farming.
People do not uses that much water and what they use is recycled.
They say that turning agricultural land into developments actually saves water!
Explain that to gov. Hobbs!
The plant will happen when the politicians from each state and the enviro-wackos figure out how to enriched themselves with tax payer money.
Kalifornia will demand water be sent into San Francisco Bay to protect smelt😎
Blocking the plant is *how* the enviro-wackos enrich themselves. They fundraise off their opposition.
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