Peak Frozen Waffle?

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Is this how it begins?

Kelloggs said today production problems have led to a shortage of its popular Eggo frozen waffle products.

Eggo

Eggo

They say they will be able to restore full waffle production by the middle of next year. Of course that’s what they’re going to say – that it’s all OK, that this is just a short term hiccup in the supply of this vital global resource, and that a booming supply will return, and our lives can return to normal.

But will they? Or is this the beginning of the end of the era of cheap frozen waffles?

Arizona Returns to the Desert

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This weekend, I ran across a terrific piece Matt Jenkins wrote for High Country News back in 2005 about Phoenix’s water problems. It holds up well: much of the core issues he’s describing are still problems, especially the quirky loopholes in the water laws that were intended to ensure groundwater sustainability. But there’s a new variable in the equation that Jenkins could not have possibly foreseen:

That’s monthly housing starts in the greater Phoenix area. The water shortage we’ve all been expecting to serve as the southwest’s come-to-Jesus moment isn’t responsible for the shape of that curve. It’s the collapse of the housing market Ponzi scheme.

Just for grins, here’s Las Vegas:

(data courtesy St. Louis Fed)

Upgrading Hoover Dam

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Henry Brean observes that Hoover Dam’s ability to generate electricity is down 20 percent with low lake levels, a reminder of the tight integration of water and power questions along the Colorado River. The history of the big dams on the Colorado River, and the question of who gets their water, is inextricably linked with questions of who gets the power.

Hoover Dam

Hoover Dam

In a sort of a policy-based perpetual motion machine, a lot of the power generated by the dams’ big hydro plants is used to pump water uphill to farms and cities – down through the dam, then up again through big pumping plants to Phoenix and LA. Only, like most perpetual motion machines, the durn thing didn’t really work when they were building the last link in this chain, the Central Arizona Project. So they built a big coal plant instead which, as Shaun McKinnon recently reported, has turned out to be somewhat problematic.

Anyway, back to Brean, who notes that technology will save us, at least a little bit, with upgrades underway at Hoover Dam aimed at generating more electricity (which we seem to need) with less water (which seems to be what reality dictates in the long run):

The dam’s power customers plan to spend millions of dollars in the coming years to squeeze more electricity from the same amount of water and compensate for a loss of power capacity as a result of the shrinking lake.

The surface of the reservoir dropped 120 feet in the last decade, as the Colorado River came under the grip of the worst drought on record. The resulting loss of water pressure — known as power head — has reduced the dam’s power generating capacity by 20 percent.

The dam and its power customers can’t do anything about the lake level so they are trying to squeeze as much power as possible out of the water pressure they do have.

It’s About the Evaporation

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Daniel Collins (via haiku!) notes the important point that water folks are increasingly raising about climate change: it’s not just whether rainfall goes up or down. Increased evaporation and transpiration as the climate warms is the critical water supply variable. From Cai and others in GRL – since 1950, nearly half the reduction in soil moisture in Australia’s Murray Darling Basin can be attributed to increased temperatures:

A relationship exists between soil moisture and temperature independent of rainfall, particularly in austral spring and summer. Annually, a rise of 1°C leads to a 9% reduction in soil moisture over the southern MDB, contributing to the recent high sensitivity. Since 1950, the impact from rising temperature contributes to 45% of the total soil moisture reduction. In a warming climate, as the same process also leads to an inflow reduction, the reduced water availability can only be mitigated by increased rainfall. Other implications for future climate change are discussed.

In the long emergency, how far will we ship our lettuce?

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A couple of months ago, Coco raised a great question when I was riffing about the amusing implications of shipping lettuce from the Imperial Valley to Albuquerque so I could feed it to ants:

Not enough water to grow lettuce in the Middle Rio Grande? Maybe someday. Depends.

Someday, not enough cheap oil for schlepping lettuce from the imperial Valley. That’s more certain.

lettuce

lettuce

So here’s my lazyweb question. What portion of the cost of a head of lettuce at the local UberMart can be attributed to the fuel needed to ship it from California to Albuquerque? And how sensitive, therefore, is the cost of that lettuce to, say, a doubling of the cost of that fuel?

(image courtesy U.S. Department of Energy)

The Book

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The Book

Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck.

So here’s the book. Box arrived today.

I’d wrestled with its words and pictures separately, seen the proofs, but there’s something about holding it in my hands….

Available for pre-order on Amazon (click the link in the right-hand rail) if you’ve got middle-school aged kids in your orbit who you think might get excited by a book about some science that’s all around them.

A Clarification on the Mead-Powell Data

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A lack of precision in the way I worded a post last week on reservoir levels in Lake Powell and Lake Mead seems to have led to some confusion.

I was writing about the rising levels in Lake Powell as Lake Mead was dropping, and suggested this was the result of a management decision rather than natural forces. But I did not mean to imply, as David argues, that this is the result of the two reservoirs being managed by two different Bureau of Reclamation offices.

Under the Colorado River Basin Project Act of 1968, the Secretary of the Interior is given the responsibility for joint management of the two reservoirs in a coordinated fashion. Operating rules have been developed for the joint operation of the two reservoirs, most recently codified in the Record of Decision for the 2007 shortage sharing agreement. That document sets the triggers for how much water is kept in Powell, and how much released to Mead. It’s operation under those rules, which Pat Mulroy and the other lower basin stakeholders helped develop, that has led to the see-saw of rising Powell and dropping Mead.

The disconnect is not in the river’s management, but in the resulting political conversation. In thinking about the river as a whole, it is most useful to think about the total amount water stored in both reservoirs. But in building a sense of urgency in Las Vegas, it is in Pat Mulroy’s interest that her community focus on Mead’s dropping levels.

Desal Tough Nut to Crack

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Here in the Albuquerque metro area, there’s been a great deal of discussion about desalination of waster from deep brackish aquifers to provide new sources of supply. A lot of talk. But not much action, other than an interesting pilot-scale project now underway west of the community of Rio Rancho. The area is growing rapidly, but as the state’s newest city, it is last in line in terms of water rights. So the area’s county government, with financial support from developers, has drilled a well and is trying to develop the technology to make a go of it. But as my colleague Rosalie Rayburn reports (sub/ad req), the folks working on the project are trying to cope with some really tough problems:

Sandoval County officials are bullish on a brackish aquifer west of Rio Rancho.

They believe tests on desalination technology will show that the aquifer could be a catalyst for urban and rural economic development.

But they face big challenges.

The water has high levels of dissolved salts and minerals. Desalination to render it potable is an energy-intensive and costly process. Disposing of the waste byproducts is pricey, too.

While coastal desal is becoming increasingly important in the United States, the only other large inland desal plant (at least that I’m aware of) is in El Paso. Some of the same folks who did the El Paso plant are working with our project, and they note that the concentration of contaminants here is far higher:

CDM has engineering experience at a desalination plant in El Paso which can process 27 million gallons of water daily. But the Rio Puerco water has higher levels of salts and contains high levels of arsenic and radio-nucleides.

“I think it’s fair to say that the waste product at El Paso, the brine, is probably slightly higher quality than the water we’re starting with here,” CDM senior vice president Paul Gorder said.