22 thoughts on “A Modest Thought Experiment”

1. Working on the equivalent of a meters rainfall a year, 20,000 cubic meters a second would irrigate 20,000 x 31.5 million (seconds in a year) = 630 billion square meters, nearly 2 1/2 times the area of Wyoming.

2. Now you just have to work out an economical way to get it there, I’ll leave that bit to you.

   1. It’s an engineering project, but it would have a lot of value, particularly during flood season in the upper Midwest. It would give the environmentalists fits, though.

3. Green River, Wyoming? That river flows basically south, to join the Colorado in Canyonlands national park, Utah, well upstream of lakes Powel and Mead.

   The environmental impact… it’d reverse the current draining of lakes Powel and MEad, at the cost of damaging (probably temporarily)some riparian habitat along the course of the much-lower-flow Green river. It’d also restore the Colorado Delta (the Colorado no longer reaches the sea).

   Infrastructure would taker a massive hit. You’d need to modify every dam on the route to handle the vastly higher flow, and raise quite a few bridges.

   That much water would be a major boon to the West.

   Obviously, it’s not the Mississippi that would be redirected. So where is the water to come from? The only two sources I can see are either, A, redirect the great lakes waterflow from the St. Lawrence to exit from lakes Superior of Michigan (there’s already a drainage route for Lake Michagan to the Mississippi) or tap one or more of the arctic rivers, such as the Mackenzie. My guess is the latter.

   It sounds like one heck of a mega-engineering project, whatever it is! Interesting.

   1. Glancing at Wikipedia, there were two such projects. First, the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA), a proposal to pull water from British Columbia and south Alaska down through a geological feature to the northern border of the US and from there south as far as Los Angeles and other destinations. That’s probably the water project that inspired Rand’s line of questioning since it was popularized in the book, Cadillac Desert (which is where I ran across a disparaging description of the project). To give an idea of the scale and timing of the project, parts of the system were proposed to be dug out via nuclear explosion.

      Second, there was the Great Recycling and Northern Development Canal (GRAND) which trapped a significant part of the outflow to the Hudson Bay and redirected it to the Great Lakes. From there, it might eventually reach LA by similar paths.

      1. At a minimum, it would be nice to have some place to put flood waters from the upper midwest in the spring.

4. Postulating a Yellowstone eruption?

   How do you get water up to 7000 ft at the headwaters of the green river?

   1. A big pipeline.

      1. How do you afford to power bill?

         1. Sorry, How do you afford the power bill?

         2. Fracked gas from North Dakota.

            You may find this shocking, but people west of the divide will pay for water. 🙂

            1. Someone can check my math, but ignoring wall friction in the pipeline, raising a gallon of water 6000 feet takes a head of about 0.02 kW-hrs (a little over 7 kJ). So a tiny fraction of a penny. At a speed of half a meter, for 2000 km, I get about 0.02 watts to move it up the hill (again, ignoring wall friction). Seems affordable to me from an energy standpoint. Rather than pipelines, actually, it would make more sense to have a series of aquaducts with pumping stations, for less friction, and probably lower construction cost.

            2. According to my math, and I hope yours too; It takes 20,000 J to lift a liter of water 2000 m, so the power required to lift the 20,000 cubics/s of water you’re talking about will be well over 400,000,000,000 J/s (400 GW) once you included frictional loses, pump inefficiency and whatever other inefficiencies, that’s about half of America’s electrical generation capacity. At say 10c/KW hr that’s a bill of 40 million dollars an hour (actually, that’s not as bad as I expected, maybe my math’s wrong).
               Putting aside the aqueducts and irrigation hardware, what sort of return are you expecting on that cost?

            3. Well, as I noted in comments, that amount of water might be overkill (plus, it might be hard to come up with it, absent grabbing much of the Hudson watershed). 10 percent of it might do the job. The return I’d expect on the cost would be huge economic growth west of the divide.

               The cost for that would only be about $35B a year. It would provide about two thirds of California’s current water usage. It would be less than two percent of the state’s economic output (about $2T/yr).

            4. I didn’t see your math before posting that.

               The reality check happens when you find out just how much water you need to grow a crop, irrigation water costs are usually in the region of five cents a cubic meter, with maybe 10,000 cubic meters a ha applied over a year.

            5. I think your power costs would be much lower than that if you didn’t use electricity, just use local natural gas to pump. I’m seeing future contracts on the NYME for about $3 per BTU. If the efficiency is 40%, that comes out to about $0.12 per cubic meter, unless I’m doing something wrong.

               Plus, you’ll recapture a significant amount of that energy on the way back down, in Glenn Canyon, Hoover and smaller dams.

               And there are many users who will pay a lot more for water than farmers.

5. Did the following classic SF story come to mind for anyone else?
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Nebraska_Sea

6. If Los Angeles needs water, build a nuclear-powered desalination plant on the coastline. (Expand the San Onofre site?) Local flows would return in short order to the pacific, keeping all environmental impact within a distance of a couple of hundred miles. This would also take the other western states out of the discussion. Water transport cost could also be kept to a minimum.

   1. They could do both. They could also desalinate with power from gas by fracking the Monterey shale, but it’s California.

7. If part of the concern is capturing/salvaging spring flood waters from the MidWest, how does that translate into any sort of usable source of water for the other 10 or 11 months of the year?

   Flooding in the MidWest is a matter of runoff and poor storage capacity, mixed with rain and snow pack melt. Some years there’s flooding, other years there is a drought. Design of (and building within) river valleys is one cause, farm “drain tiles” are another. Both are somewhat fixed by local capture of runoff and increased infiltration in the soil.

   Unless you plan on pumping water from our aquifers to feed this pipeline, in which case, you may need to reconsider, since the MidWest aquifers are aso suffering as a result of flooding. Too much runoff and too little infiltration means reduced recharging of our backup water supplies.

   1. If part of the concern is capturing/salvaging spring flood waters from the MidWest, how does that translate into any sort of usable source of water for the other 10 or 11 months of the year?

      The west has reservoirs.

      1. Storing water in reservoirs could be a huge environmental boon. It would create habitat for migratory birds, fish, and land animals. Perhaps large scale aquaculture could take place in some areas.

         Out West, lake life is very popular. Having a cabin or house on a lake is very desirable. This idea could create more of a limited, coveted, and expensive resource.

         It would be challenging to deal with water loss through evaporation and refilling reservoirs with an inconsistent supply. Some years may be great but others might not provide enough water to recharge the system.

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