Business, Economics, Technology and Society

The Midwest Flooding

18 Comments

Every year that this happens, I think about how nice it would be to have pipelines (or if the Boring Company works out, tunnels) into which the excess water from the Red, Missouri, and Mississippi Rivers could be put, and pumped up the hill and over South Pass to the Green River, to “green” up the Colorado watershed and American southwest. You could have feeder lines from Missouri, Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota and the Dakotas. With the fracking, there’s plenty of energy up there to run the pumps. You could do the same thing in the southern section from Texas flooding across New Mexico, but most of that water would flow south to Mexico. Though I can’t manage they’d mind; it could compensate for what they no longer get from the Colorado.

18 thoughts on “The Midwest Flooding”

  1. Wyoming probably wouldn’t mind the jobs either, though most of the earliest economic benefit would certainly go to out-of-state environmental litigators rather than to tunnel builders or pipeline builders.

  2. That desalination plant in San Diego could be copied for a lot less headache, and fewer people could try to get their hands on it.

  3. “With the fracking, there’s plenty of energy up there to run the pumps.”
    I don’t think alternative energy works, but it seems possible wind energy might work for pumping water.

      1. But if have large infrastructural system, it seems you want to use it 1/2 a year or more, rather than couple weeks every other year.

        So you have massive and powerful pumps that can pump a lot water in emergency and other systems which are used, which may or may not result in needing the emergency pumping or as much emergency pumping.

      2. You’d want intermediate reservoirs into which the water could be pumped.

        BTW, you’ve just proposed a very large pumped hydro energy storage system.

          1. You will want to look at some of the results that have been coming out of Australia on PHES:

            https://www.aph.gov.au/DocumentStore.ashx?id=71eb3dce-8829-4eaa-b1e2-2eeab78f7f46&subId=463275

            “We have modelled hourly energy balancing of the Australian National Electricity Market (NEM) in a 100% renewable energy scenario in which wind and photovoltaics (PV) provides 90% of the annual electricity and existing hydroelectricity and biomass provides 10%. The key outcome of our modelling is that the additional cost of balancing renewable energy supply with demand on an hourly rather than annual basis is modest: $25-30/MWh” (That’s AUS$, or about US$20/MWh.)

            That study assumed use of additional off-river pumped hydro for most of the energy storage. There is a superabundance of sites for this:

            https://energystoragealliance.com.au/site/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/170803-PHES-Atlas.pdf

            “Australia has many potential sites for [off river] pumped hydro energy storage (PHES). In our initial survey of South Australia, Queensland, Tasmaia and the Canberra district we have identified about 5,000 potential sites. Each site has an energy storage potential of at least 0.9 Gigawatt hours (GWh), and some have storage potential above 100 GWh. The sites identified so far have a combined energy storage potential of more than 15,000 GWh, which is
            35 times larger than required to support a 100 per cent renewable electricity grid in Australia. “

          2. “the additional cost of balancing renewable energy supply with demand on an hourly rather than annual basis is modest: $25-30/MWh”

            Um, that is $0.02 US/KWhr, to put it in more normal units. In other words, the incremental cost is more than the total cost of electricity for my building in downtown Chicago.

            So you can use “renewables” as baseline power for a “modest” doubling of the cost? Great news, that.

        2. I should note that I wasn’t thinking of using wind energy in terms of converting mechanic power into electrical energy which then converts electrical energy into mechanical energy to run pumps. But rather using mechanical energy of wind for the mechanical energy to power pumps.

          Though of course the hydro power could make electrical power which could used to balance a grid.

  5. I worked a summer in North Dakota, just a month or so after the Red River flood of 1997. Just do an image search on “Come hell and high water grand forks” if you want to see some biblical flood damage.

    But if Elon can bore a tunnel from the Red, Missouri, and Mississippi valleys to the Colorado River, some 1400 miles or so, then pumping need not enter into it. Just select some discharge point on the Colorado River that is a few hundred feet lower than the closest inlet portion in the Atlantic watershed and let gravity do the rest.

    Of course the problem is (as if it isn’t already economically impossible) that flooding is not a river-long event, but happens in specific areas due to, primarily, snow fall and rapid melt events in other specific areas. Therefore, you would probably have to run your drain tunnel alongside the target rivers for at least a few hundred miles with periodic flood drains along the way, at least one for each tributary, before turning west to run under the Rockies. But again, gravity could do all the work from there.

    Before proceeding with any such project, however, one would be wise to review the history of The Salton Sea.

    1. But if Elon can bore a tunnel from the Red, Missouri, and Mississippi valleys to the Colorado River, some 1400 miles or so, then pumping need not enter into it. Just select some discharge point on the Colorado River that is a few hundred feet lower than the closest inlet portion in the Atlantic watershed and let gravity do the rest.

      You are apparently unfamiliar with the relevant geography.

  6. This same idea occurred to me about a dozen years ago while trying to figure out some actually useful thing then-President Obama could do with the trillion dollars he proposed as a “stimulus plan.” In the event, he spent it on keeping a lot of female government employees in paychecks for an additional year before many of them got furloughed anyway.

    The main problem with this sort of new infrastructure program is the same as that for any program addressing more traditional infrastructure – too many outdoor jobs for burly males and nowhere near enough office work for female members of public employee unions. That’s why Obama didn’t spend his “stimulus” on roads and bridges at the time.

    Trump is at least rhetorically favorable to new infrastructure spending. A program of transcontinental water tunnel construction would be a signature effort of the Trump presidency in the same way the Interstate Highway System became one of the marquee accomplishments of the Eisenhower administration. It would also put a lot of his base to work and keep them at it for a decade or more, as was true of the Interstates.

    The male-skewing employment base required plus the Trump Monument nature of the exercise is likely enough to make the Dems oppose any such thing as vigorously as they now do The Wall.

    Apart from the inevitably fraught politics of such an initiative, there are also some practical considerations that would complicate the engineering.

    1) Silt. Especially as a flood control exercise, the water moved around would have a lot. There would have to be a non-trivially complex sieving/settling system incorporated. Intermediate pumped-storage reservoirs could be an important part of this, but not the whole solution.

    2) Biome mixing. Living things ranging from soil components, viruses and bacteria up to large fish would be part of the inflow volumes. Western rivers already host a fair number of non-native species. Adding more is probably not a good idea. So filtering this stuff out would be as important as doing likewise for the sand, gravel, uprooted trees, swept-away cars and pieces of erstwhile buildings that would already need to be addressed.

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