Why pumping water from the ocean to save the Salton Sea is a bad idea

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Brandon Loomis, in an excellent recent piece on the problems of the Salton Sea, quoted a resident along the troubled inland California lake who thinks the answer to its decline is straightforward:

Rod Jeffries, a 64-year-old urban refugee from San Francisco, is confident the state will act….

His favored solution is to pipe seawater from the gulf, since the water is already so salty.

This idea has lingered for generations, but it’s a really terrible idea. The reason the Salton Sea is so salty is because the water flowing in currently, from Imperial and Coachella ag runoff has only a modest amount of salt, but evaporation leaves all that salt behind. If you add ocean water, which is much saltier than the current ag inflow, the evaporation would make the sea way saltier. So you’d have to not only pump salt water in from the ocean, but also pump salty water back out from the Salton Sea. The amount of water involved, and therefore the energy and infrastructure costs, are staggering. Michael Cohen at the Pacific Institute has put together a helpful video that explains all this:

 

Cohen has posted more useful info on the problems with “sea to sea” schemes here.

A note on my qualifications

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At the end of a marvelous twitter soliloquy on Hegel, Locke, Dewey, and the implications of last night’s meeting on sex education in Vegas schools, Las Vegas Sun politics editor Scott Lucas concluded with this:

 

Havin’ that carved on my tombstone.

A quiet end to the water year on the Rio Grande

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Water year 2014-15 is ending with low flows again on the Rio Grande through central New Mexico. (We’ve only had one year since 2000 with above-average flows.)

Lissa and I walked out to the Rio Grande in Bernalillo County’s far South Valley this afternoon. The water was low. Low is normal for this time of year, but the river’s lower than that (234 cubic feet per second at the Albuquerque gauge, with a median this time of year around 380). A flock of Canada geese was squatting on the sand bars (just pixels in this picture, but I know they’re there) and the water was low enough that the musty smell of Albuquerque’s sewage outfall, which is just a couple of miles up river from here. It’s not an awful smell, just a reminder amid the idyllic nature shot that this remains an urban, working river:

Rio Grande at Valle do Oro, Sept. 27, 2015. By John Fleck

Rio Grande at Valle do Oro, Sept. 27, 2015. By John Fleck

The “water year” ends Wednesday, and this is one of my favorite times along our river. The last cutting of alfalfa is still out on the fields east of the river (did I mention it’s a working river?), but the ditches will soon be shut down, the cottonwoods are showing their first glimmers of autumn yellow, and the river itself is a quiet thing.

Alfalfa, the Rio Grande as working river

Alfalfa, the Rio Grande as working river

After an abysmal start, with a warm, dry winter and a lousy snowpack, the water year turned around with big rains starting in May. They didn’t make up for the deficit, but they helped water managers glue together a decent season, delaying the annual drought year struggle to keep water in the river for the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow until September. The farmers and the affluent valley dwellers who get an agricultural tax exemption for their horse pasture got the water they needed. Albuquerque got the water it needed for municipal supply (and preliminary estimates suggest our per capita use this year will be down another 4 percent in 2015, meaning water use in my city continues to drop faster than population is growing, yay us).

But my preliminary calculations based on USGS data put the water year flow past the Central Avenue Bridge in Albuquerque at 608,000 acre feet, will below the long term average (1974 to the present in this case) of 893,000 acre feet. Only once since 2000 – in 2008 – has the flow past the Central Avenue gauge been above average.

Elephant Butte Reservoir, the next reservoir to the south of this point and the Rio Grande’s largest, shows it. The Butte remains abysmally empty, at just 8 percent of capacity.

Data source: USGS

Ken Salazar on California’s senior rights to Colorado River water

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From an interesting Sammy Roth interview with former Interior Secretary Ken Salazar:

Q: In Southern California, water managers often say they don’t have to worry about losing access to Colorado River water, because of the state’s “senior” water rights. During an extreme shortage, they believe, Arizona and Nevada would lose much of their river water before California loses a drop. Do you think that’s how an extreme shortage would actually play out?

A: I think California has to worry a lot about, because it has a major dependence on the Colorado River. It has to be one of the cardinal concerns of the state of California.

Salazar, who as Interior Secretary used to serve as the “watermaster” on the Lower Colorado and therefore presumably has some understanding of the legal nuances, doesn’t say how California might come to no longer enjoy those senior rights.

We’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

The purpose of rivers

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The century just ended will be recognized as the time when America’s water resources were attacked with all of the sophistication and power that one would expect of an economic and technological superpower. Unruly rivers were straightened and channelized , massive levees and dikes were thrown in the way of encroaching water, cheap electricity was wrung from falling water, harbors were carved from shallow inlets, locks and dams turned wild rivers into barge canals, salmon were butchered in turbines on their way down rivers – and are proving inconveniently resistant to lessons to teach them to climb ladders on their return journey , wetlands were drained to grow crops we probably did not need, and yes the “desert was made to bloom as the rose.” The nation grew rich as a few well-situated entrepreneurs prospered. The rivers were to foster commerce, and federal water policy was the single-minded pursuit of that goal with the nation’s taxpayers putting up the money.

Was this history a mistake? Of course not. To insist otherwise would be Whigish. Young nations have different needs from mature ones, and America is, alas like some of us, no longer young. Now it is time to re-direct the purpose of the rivers. Dams and dynamite now conjure a very different image than in the early years of the century. But what dynamite helped to create, dynamite can help to undo. Is this transition in water policy fair to those whose lives and livelihood are inextricably bound up with the shifting purpose of the rivers? There is no easy answer to that. A civilized nation cushions the inevitable transitions for those caught in the vise of shifting priorities and purposes. Perhaps Water War II will concern the nature and scope of policies to alleviate the social and economic harm of the new purpose of the rivers. How will the Axis and the Allies align themselves this time? (emphasis added)

Bromley, Daniel W. “Program evaluation and the purpose of rivers.” Journal of Contemporary Water Research and Education 116, no. 1 (2011): 3. (pdf)

thoughts on optimism in western water

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In which Sarah Tory interviews me for High Country News about stuff:

When John Fleck began covering water (among other things) in 1995 for New Mexico’s Albuquerque Journal, he assumed he’d be writing stories about dried out wells and cracked mud. After all, as a Los Angeles native who grew up in a suburb that had replaced an irrigated citrus orchard, he’d grown up reading books like A River No More, by Philip Fradkin, and Cadillac Desert, by Marc Reisner, essential reading for water nerds.

As a journalist, he went looking for the kinds of stories these authors promised: stories of “conflict, crisis, and doom.” But he found a very different narrative and after nearly 30 years spent covering some of the most pressing water issues in the West, Fleck is now writing a book, which is due to be published by Island Press next year. He recently spoke to HCN about the dilemma water journalists face these days— and why the West’s water problems aren’t as bad as we think.

Resilience, and pulling the cap on the new Las Vegas Lake Mead intake

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Southern Nevada Water Authority crews pulled the end cap off of the agency’s new, deeper Lake Mead intake today, and by this weekend they’ll be pumping water from the new system. This is a major milestone in a system that, when completed, provides critical water management breathing room for the entire Colorado River Basin.

Las Vegas Lake Mead intake schematic, courtesy SNWA

Las Vegas Lake Mead intake schematic, courtesy SNWA

Theorists of “resilience” have adopted ideas from the study of ecology to what they call “social-ecological systems”. One of the critical elements is the idea of “regime shifts” – points in the evolution in the system at which change becomes sudden rather than gradual. A drought-driven forest fire is an example of a “regime shift”, or the sudden dieoff of fish once a river’s water temperature or flow levels cross a critical threshold. The water supply to the greater Las Vegas metro area is one such clearly identifiable scenario where a Colorado River Basin regime shift could happen. As the reservoir from which Las Vegas gets its water, Lake Mead, drops, there reaches a point at reservoir surface elevation 1,000 at which Vegas simply can no longer get water out of the lake. As the lake approaches 1,000, Vegas gets increasingly serious water quality problems, but at 1,000 it’s a city of 2 million people largely without water. “Vegas without water” is the sudden forest fire of the Colorado River Basin. As I’ve argued previously, this has little to do with the use of water by Las Vegas itself, which has become a water conservation model. Agriculture and cities downstream are responsible for most of Lake Mead’s decline. Las Vegas is, in some sense, vulnerable to the water use of others.

“protect elevation 1,000”

This has created an interesting dynamic in Colorado River Basin water management. This high risk scenario – a city of 2 million people losing 90 percent of its water supply – ends up driving everything else, removing management flexibility because of a need to, in the jargon of the water managers, “protect elevation 1,000”. The risk removes resilience by creating an unacceptable risk of regime shift. It also means that those other downstream water users in California and Arizona are vulnerable to Las Vegas’s intake problems, because there’s still a lot of usable water below 1,000 feet that they would not be able to use without drying up Las Vegas in the process.

Opening the new intake, an $817 million project, solves half the problem. But SNWA still needs to finish a pumping plant to take full advantage of it. That $650 million project is projected to be completed by 2020. This is cutting it close. The latest Bureau of Reclamation model runs suggested a one in 25 chance that Lake Mead would fall below elevation 1,025 by 2019, which is pretty risky territory when you’re betting the water supply of a metro area of 2 million people. But imagine the risk scenario if Las Vegas had not been willing to spend the $1.5 billion on the new intake system.

Met eyeing sewage recycling for Southern California supply

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Southern California water policy is looking like a game of speed chess right now. Amid the moves to supplement its Colorado River flow with extra water from Las Vegas and Imperial (agenda pdf), Met’s board also is considering spending money on cleaning up and reusing more of the sewage effluent Southern California currently dumps in the ocean. Here’s Matt Stevens’ take:

The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California is in talks with Los Angeles County sanitation districts about developing what could be one of the largest recycled water programs in the world.

In a committee meeting Monday, the agency’s staff presented the framework of a plan to purify and reuse as much as 168,000 acre-feet of water a year – enough to serve about twice that number of households for a year.

Doing so would require MWD to build a treatment plant and delivery facilities and comply with various environmental regulations. Officials say similar projects have cost about $1 billion.

Sewage recycling a shift?

Stevens and one of the board members he quotes call this a shift away from water importation for Met, but I’d argue that shift has been underway for nearly 20 years, since the development of Met’s “Integrated Resources Plan” in the mid-1990s. It was the IRP’s emphasis on more reuse, conjunctive groundwater management, and similar measures that positioned Met to successfully cope with the 2003 Department of the Interior decision to slash the agency’s Colorado River Aqueduct supplies. (Buy my book! As soon as I finish writing it! I’m almost done!)

But Southern California still dumps a lot of treated effluent into the ocean, so this option still leaves the region more room yet to move on the recycling front.