Last week’s release of the Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study was a headline-grabbing event – “Colorado River water supply to fall short of demand, study says“, to cite but one of a zillion examples of the core message getting big play. Barry Nelson argued the study “has the potential to mark a new era in the management of the West’s largest river basin.”

Lee’s Ferry

We will see. As with most massive undertakings of this nature, the angels and devils are in the Basin Study’s details. And a separate, routine little US Bureau of Reclamation report that came out last week helps illustrate the point.

There were two big talking points. The first, the supply-demand gap, comes as no surprise to anyone involved in Colorado River management. To the extent this a big deal, its importance is the way the Basin Study loudly points out something that’s been painfully obvious for some time.

The second point, a bit more surprising to some (and also worth loudly pointing out), is that plain old water conservation is far more cost-effective, and quicker to implement, than big engineering solutions like building a pipeline to the Missouri. I chose to highlight these two points with the precious few words available for my newspaper story about the study.

But there’s something deeper in the Basin Study that’s worth exploring. (click through for wonky details) Continue reading ‘With the Basin Study done, we can get back to draining Lake Mead’ »

As I’ve written previously, the Colorado Basin Study suggests that augmenting water supply in the region is the most expensive and least quick approach to closing the supply-demand gap. But if folks do want to pursue augmentation, Juliet McKenna is asking the right questions:

The consequences of implementing any water supply augmentation plan need to be considered in terms of not only economics, but also in terms of where and how the water would be used. For example:

1. An additional 600,000 AF/year of water in the basin could support 1 million people. Will this supply be used to plug a supply gap or will it double the population living in eastern Colorado? Which outcome is desirable?

2. Would the cost (billions of dollars) be shared by all uses – people, industry, and agriculture? Or would only a subset of users, or new users have to pay?

So, as I think the authors of the Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study would agree, its time to start talking.

If you’re not already following Juliet, a water professional down in Tucson, I recommend bookmarking/RSSing.

The Bureau of Reclamation’s study of supply and demand in the Colorado River Basin is due out tomorrow, and already it’s been getting a lot of attention. Bruce Finley at the Denver Post and Felicity Barringer at the New York Times have both highlighted the study’s consideration of the “pipeline to the Missouri” option, one of a host of water augmentation possibilities submitted by stakeholders and the public which has gotten some analysis over the course of the two year study.

The PTM option has some legs, because people in the non-water world can grasp it. But it’s an unfortunate framing for the release of this very important study, a piece of the puzzle that rightly ought to be confined to fine print along with towing icebergs down from the north (another idea that gets its due).

Most of the study’s findings are already public – the Bureau’s been releasing them steadily in a series of data dumps over the last year. What they show is a growing gap between supply and demand in the basin (with some legitimate argument over whether the Bureau let the states use pre-housing crash trajectories to high-ball their growth projections, making the gap look larger than it should). At whatever size it is, though, the study also shows that various types of “magic water” (icebergs! PTM!) can’t fix this problem. If you read carefully, it’s there in Barringer’s story:

It is unclear how much such a pipeline project would cost, though estimates run into the billions of dollars. That does not include the cost of the new electric power that would be needed (along with the construction of new generating capacity) to pump the water uphill from Leavenworth, Kan., to the front range reservoirs serving Denver, about a mile above sea level, according to Sharlene Leurig, an expert on water-project financing at Ceres, a nonprofit group based in Boston that works with investors to promote sustainability….

Ms. Leurig noted that local taxpayers and utility customers would be shouldering most of the expense of such a venture through their tax and water bills, which would make conservation a more palatable alternative.

What it shows, if I may be so humble as to generalize, is that the basin’s water users need to learn to live within their means. I’m confident they can, even if they’d rather just have the feds build them another pipe.

The All-American Canal, which grabs water from Imperial Dam and runs it along the north side of the California-Baja border before delivering it to Imperial Valley farmers, was built at some great expense to replace the original wandering route that took the water south into Mexico before curving back north to US farms. The folks behind the project pushed it because they tired of letting Mexican farmers have a cut of the water before it got to US lettuce crops.

But maybe it’s about more than an unwillingness to share? Maybe it’s who the sharing was with? From the LA Times last month, a fun piece by Tony Perry at the reaction to the fact that the new US-Mexico Colorado River water deal calls for some of Mexico’s share of the river’s water to be delivered by the canal with that very specific name:

The idea does not sit well with farmers and officials in the Imperial Valley who believe that powerful outsiders are again ignoring the valley’s hard-fought water rights, this time in an effort to improve relations with the Mexican government.

“There’s a reason it’s called the All-American Canal,” said Kevin Kelley, general manager of the Imperial Irrigation District, raising his voice for emphasis.