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California’s Water

23 Comments

There’s one year left, if we don’t get a wet winter.

A sane electorate would start fracking the hell out of the Monterey Shale, opening up wells of shore, and use the energy to run desalinization plants, instead of wrecking the state economy with carbon mitigation that will have zero effect on the climate, and building high-speed rail.

So we won’t be doing that. Not yet, anyway.

23 thoughts on “California’s Water”

  1. There’s no reason why you couldn’t do both the oil drilling and the high speed train. The fracking seems kind of problematic to me since it relies of heavy water usage to begin with but the off-shore oil drilling should be fine. I think a more long term solution to the water problem would be to pass water conservation measures and diverting water from elsewhere. It’s not like the USA has a shortage of fresh water. It is just that the water isn’t where people live in.

    2. More reservoirs is the answer from 10 years ago, but when the fecal matter hits the fan I’m sure the reason there aren’t more of them (one guess) won’t be mentioned and “AGW” will be front and center.

      = Australia

    3. Godzilla, look at the actual numbers for the “high speed” train, and you’ll see that it makes no sense at all. It’s not high speed, and the cost per ticket would be so high that very few would bother using it.

  2. Really needed here? A market solution.

    First and foremost, water users (read: customers) should pay what the water actually costs to deliver. Perhaps then, farmers will realize that growing food in a desert, if not subsidized, is really not economical.

    Or maybe it is, but we won’t ever know for sure until the real costs are factored in.

  3. There are other strange things you might try. Looking at a precipitation map, the heavy rains fall about 1,600 miles south of California. If you had an inflatable collection area 15 miles on a side in the 13 mm/day tropical rainfall band, it would collect enough water to provide 170 gallons/day/household for California.

    You just have to deliver it. To do that, a giant tanker that can carry 700,000 tons of water would supply a million households with 170 gallons each, so California would need 11 such tankers arriving per day. If they averaged 15 knots they’d have a 9 day round-trip time, so a fleet of one hundred tankers should do it.

    Or build desalination plants.

  4. The wild idea I keep coming back to is coastal power stations using seaside ponds as cooling, the waste heat driving moisture into the air to be carried into the hills. Though I haven’t run the heat requirement to get much extra rain, and suspect it’s enormous.

  6. An acre-foot is 1233 m^3, so the shortfall of 12 million acre-feet (out of 40,000,000 acre feet going through the water system each year) is 14,796 million cubic meters or tonnes of water, now California has about 38 million people, so you’re short by about a m^3 / person / day.

    If you stop farming I’m sure you’d have enough for urban use. Like I mentioned a week or two ago, water for agriculture has to be cheap, around $0.05/m^3, to make economic sense, and there’s no way that’s achievable with desalination or very long distance piping.

    So bite the bullet California.

  7. We do fracking and wind power in Texas, but currently we are under a flash flood warning for the next 24 hours.

  8. Looks like the cost of desalinated water in Israel is around $0.60/m^3, a lot of their agricultural water supply is recycled water from the cities, but most is still from aquifers recharged through rainfall, mainly in the north of the country.

  9. I live in the desert in California. My water bill is about $35 per month, and about 10% of that is for water. Most of my bill is for infrastructure and a fixed monthly sewer fee. This cost-plus accounting doesn’t have much incentive to conserve.

    1. It seems I am paying about the same amount in the People’s Republic of Madison, and yes, most of that is for the fixed charges and very little is for the actual water usage.

      The electric company here just got approval to do that to the electric bill.

  10. Liberals need high-speed rail for mass transit because they don’t want to be seen riding the bus. It doesn’t matter to them all that much if it’s not technically high speed. It’s the appearances that count.

    1. Sure, I bet if we gave the Chinese $68 billion, they might give us a high speed rail worth a fraction of that. But what would be the point?

      1. Why would you want to give the Chinese $68 billion dollars if they were building it at their cost? Seems to defeat the whole reason for letting them build it.

  12. California doesn’t need desalination. California needs a rational water market, where water isn’t forced to be used for low-value agriculture but instead can be sold to users (read: everyone else) willing to pay more for it.

    1. That, too. That’s been a problem for decades, not just in California, but in the west in general. As the old saying goes, whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting.

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