The ag irrigation efficiency paradox

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A visit to Santo Domingo Pueblo yesterday morning to look at irrigation efficiency work funded by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and others offered a nice demonstration of the paradox of ag water conservation. From my story (behind a Google survey wall, sorry):

By using the pueblo’s irrigation supplies more efficiently, the project, funded by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, has allowed a resurgence in the traditionally agricultural community. “There’s more people farming again,” former pueblo Gov. Everett F. Chavez told Bureau Commissioner Mike Connor during a morning tour.

In other words, the water conserved is supporting an expansion of farming rather than, as is often assumed in public discussions of ag water savings, to reduce consumption. C.-Y. Cynthia Lin at UC Davis recently posted an interesting discussion of research into water conservation efforts in western Kansas:

In response to rapid depletion of the High Plains Aquifer, the state subsidized a widespread conversion to more efficient irrigation technology in the late 1990s through mid-2000s. Programs paid up to 75 percent of the cost of upgrading or installing new irrigation technology – primarily “dropped nozzles,” which attach to center-pivot irrigators and reduce the amount of water lost to evaporation and drift.

But after making the shift to dropped nozzles, farmers ended up applying more groundwater to fields – completely negating the conservation intent.

Rather than reducing consumption, many farmers used their efficiency “savings” to expand irrigation into poorer soils or grow thirstier higher-value crops such as corn, alfalfa and soybeans. Greater irrigation efficiency increased overall water use.

To be clear, I’m not arguing that this is a bad thing. More crop per drop makes sense. But it’s not what one might expect.

Brad Udall on the Colorado River and “the reality of the public”

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My name’s John, and I’m a water law junkie. I can’t get enough of Article III(d) of the Colorado River Compact. I love picking fights over the Upper Basin’s share of Mexico’s 1.5 million acre feet delivery obligation. I don’t care. I’ll argue either side.  Just give me my fix.

So I’ll happily stipulate that under the Law of the River, Arizona’s junior water rights mean that as climate change saps the Colorado’s flows, the Grand Canyon State will see its allotment cut to zero before California loses a drop. That’s what the water law says, right? Mainline.

Boulder Harbor, Lake Mead, Oct. 18, 2010

Boulder Harbor, Lake Mead, Oct. 18, 2010

This is why Friday’s talk by Brad Udall, head of the University of Colorado law school’s Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy, and the Environment, was the most interesting thing I heard in two very interesting days of talks on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s most significant water law ruling, period, in the case of Arizona v. California.

Udall stood up before a room full of lawyers, law school professors and water managers and said, in essence, that water law doesn’t matter. OK, that’s a rhetorical overstatement of a nuanced point. What Udall was really saying is that there’s a world inhabited by water law junkies like me that accepts the reality that, for example, Arizona’s junior rights mean its Central Arizona project, which represents half of its Colorado River entitlement and delivers water to Phoenix and Tucson, gets cut off completely before California loses a drop. And then there’s “the reality of the public” where people, faced with such a situation, are going to say, in essence, “WTF?” (my initialism, not Brad’s)

Udall’s “reality of the public,” as distinguished from the “reality of the water community”, is a world in which regular folk have no clue about all this Article III(d) and Colorado River Basin Storage Project Act and “doctrine of prior appropriation” stuff that we water nerds so venerate. They just want to turn on the tap and have the water come out. But they have some basic notions of fairness and good sense, imagining that the policies underlying our attempt to supply that water will consider questions of equity, sound economics and the environment. Water management actions that violate those notions will, to quote Udall, “violate the public’s sense of ‘rightness'”.

This means several things in terms of practical Colorado River Basin management.

It means that, whatever the Law of the River says, as a practical matter we’re not going to let the level of Lake Mead drop below 1,000 feet above sea level, the elevation at which Las Vegas can no longer get water from the reservoir. Udall had a slide in his talk quoting Mike King, head of the Colorado Department of Natural Resources: “I don’t care what you think about the Law of the River, we are not going to dry up a city of 2m people.” And even if/when Las Vegas gets its “third straw” built to protect its diversions at low lake levels, “the reality of the public” is not likely to tolerate drying up a lake that 8 million people enjoy every year.

It means, as I suggested above, that Udall thinks folks won’t tolerate a situation in which Arizona loses all its CAP water while California continues to take a full allotment.

And it means, Udall argued, that the states of the Upper Basin will not be left to take the full brunt of the river’s shrinkage because of climate change while the Lower Basin gets its full Compact share.

Udall offered some suggestions for what might happen in the alternative – creative new ways of sharing shortages; Californians, especially their big ag users, are going to have to do some of the sharing, and the three “E’s” – equity, economics and environment – will have to be on the table, even if they don’t have a specific “Law of the River” claim.

But here’s the key point: the solutions involve people who have no idea about all the “Law of the River’s” legal niceties: they’re going to want the water distributed in a way that make sense to them.

updated: To correct misstatement about Arizona’s priorities. Only CAP water is junior to California, not all Arizona’s river water.

the Colorado River doomsday clock

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Chatting on the sidelines of last week’s Clyde Martz Summer Water Conference in Boulder, Doug Kenney had a great suggestion. We need something along the lines of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ famous nuclear doomsday clock for Colorado River water management. Doug’s comment came when I was grabbing some quotes for my newspaper story on the Bureau of Reclamation’s announcement that releases from Lake Powell will be curtailed beginning Oct. 1.

“This is kind of like the Colorado River doomsday clock,” Kenney said. We didn’t really settle on the specifics of how many minutes closer to midnight we should set the clock after Friday’s Bureau announcement, and I’m no graphic artist. But I’ll leave you with an update of my sort-of-monthly graph of storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead, with estimated 2013 and 2014 water year-end numbers added:

Colorado River storage

Colorado River storage

The case for the Lake Powell announcement being no big deal

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To be clear: I think the Bureau of Reclamation’s announcement today that it is curtailing releases from Lake Powell in 2014 is a big deal. But one of the members of my brain trust (journalism is a mashup – I just repackage the ideas of people much smarter than myself) points out that there’s an interesting argument to be made that the shortfall that has us all doing the hair-on-fire thing is not really all that large.

Under the Law of the River (the hairball of rules governing Colorado River operations), the states of the Upper Basin are required to release 8.23 million acre feet per year* from Lake Powell. But because of year-to-year variability, it’s calculated as a ten year rolling average. That allows for excess water during wet times and reduced deliveries during dry times.

Here’s the actual deliveries over the last decade, including the estimated 2014 curtailment to 7.48 maf:

Powell releases

Powell releases

You can see that for nine of the ten years, deliveries have been at or above 8.23 maf. In 2011 and 2012, they were over by quite a bit. I like to call it “bonus water“. Here’s another way of looking at the numbers, a bar chart showing simply the over- or under-delivery relative to the 8.23 maf standard:

Powell over/under-delivery

Powell over/under-delivery

You can see that the sticky-up bits in 2011 and 2012 are a lot bigger than the sticky-down bit in 2014. So really, my brain truster has a point. The shortfall out of Lake Powell in 2014 is not all that large compared to the recent over-deliveries. Or maybe this really makes the case that the Lower Basin is not living within its means, where “its means” are defined as 8.23 maf per year. (Related snark here.)

* Stipulated that not everyone agrees the Upper Basin is required to deliver 8.23 maf. It might really only be 7.5 maf. Who knows? (pdf)

 

Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Shortage on the Colorado

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Via the Albuquerque Journal:

BOULDER – With the Colorado River Basin gripped by extreme drought, federal water managers Friday announced historic water conservation measures.

Supplies in New Mexico, one of seven states that depend on the river’s water, will be untouched by the moves. But experts said the move is a warning that demand is outstripping supply throughout the basin.

“What we’re facing here is a truly historic drought,” said Assistant Secretary of the Interior Anne Castle, speaking at a meeting of Colorado River managers at which the shortage declaration was a major topic of discussion.

Castle said natural drought, made worse by climate change, requires “new thinking” to deal with the region’s water problems.

Shortage on the Colorado River

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The Bureau of Reclamation is going to tell us Friday that there’s not very much water in Lake Powell, and that as a result releases from Powell will be curtailed in the coming year, which sets off a cascading set of effects downstream. I took a crack at explaining this here, but Brett Walton has really done the journalistic heavy lifting to explain what it all means. I don’t have much to add to Brett’s analysis, which is rich and detailed, except for this simple takeaway message: You’ll hear from and see a lot of people in coming days running around like their hair is on fire about this. Chill. As Brett’s piece explains, this is an orderly process.

Latest conservation technology, the “water meter”, sweeps British Isles

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From the Telegraph:

Water companies across a third of the country will be required to consider fitting all properties in their areas with a water meter and billing customers for every drop they use.

Under the order, approved this week by Owen Paterson, the Environment Secretary, some family water bills could double.

It follows warnings from the Government’s environment specialists that climate change and England’s growing population will put the future supply of water in reservoirs and rivers under “serious stress”.

This innovation is apparently based on some clever new work by a British academic named Adam Smith who has just recently discovered that consumption of a scarce good is influenced by the price charged. The striking implication is that if you charge people a flat rate for a commodity like water, regardless of how much they use, some people will install “power showers”.

Before we abandon LA because of water shortages, we’ll do this

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From Juliet McKenna, another example of the lengths to which southwestern municipalities will go to adapt to shrinking water supply:

LA’s plan calls for building one of the country’s largest groundwater treatment systems at one of its largest Superfund sites. Groundwater in the San Fernando basin has elevated levels of chromium, perchlorate, nitrates, and trichloroethylene — the result of decades of industrial operations. Ultimately, the two required treatment plants are expected to be operational by 2022. By 2035, the utility expects that this treated groundwater can be used to reduce the amount of water it imports by a factor of one-half.

Building treatment plants is a costly proposition, but the alternative — relying on imported supplies — is no bargain either. MWD’s water wholesale delivery rates, which have nearly doubled since 2006, will approach $900/AF in 2014. The project will be funded by ratepayers through low-interest bonds.