Last week I received a call from one of our legislative liaisons who told me he would forward me an email inquiring about selling Oregon water in the international market. "Uh-huh," I thought. I received the email, in which the author, a prominent Oregonian, speculated that if Oregon could annually sell 1 MAF of its water, presumably taken from the mighty Columbia River, for the paltry sum of 1 cent per gallon, that would generate about $3.26B annually for Oregon's coffers.
For a state with limited financial resources, that's quite a sum. Our legislative person asked if he could supply my name and email to the individual, and I said "Sure". Haven't heard anything yet.
I said to no one in particular, "Why sell our water on the international market? Just sell it to Las Vegas." But I also thought, "Oh boy, it's happening. It's coming back - the Pacific Northwest as 'water farm.' " As Yogi Berra reputedly said, "It's like deja-vu all over again."
Then yesterday, colleague Lisa Gaines sent me this article by Alex Breitler that appeared in the 1 June 2008 Stockton Record. The title was provocative: Northwest may hold secret to water woes. It detailed a California talk given by one of my colleagues, hydrologist Gordon Grant, about whom I posted last fall. It's his pitch that the ground water of the Pacific Northwest may supply the parched Californians and other Westerners as temperatures rise.
In the article below, the material in italics is from the article; the non-italicized material is mine.
In a few days, most rivers and streams draining from the Sierra Nevada will have peaked for the season, channeling snowmelt from the granite-specked highlands to reservoirs, the ocean, your kitchen tap.
The melt came early this year. Just like last year.
Climate change threatens California's longtime reliance on the spiny Sierra for most of its water, experts agree.
And that, one scientist says, is likely to increase interest in a more reliable source: the porous lava flows of the Cascade Range in Oregon and Washington, which hide away enough water to cover California in a pool 3 inches deep.
So? Lake Tahoe holds enough water to cover California to a depth of 14 inches. Should we drain the lake?
As water supplies tighten in coming decades, the Northwest's groundwater surplus is likely to garner new attention from around the western United States, said Gordon Grant, a hydrologist for the U.S. Forest Service in Corvallis, Ore. Grant presented his research earlier this spring to fisheries experts gathered for a conference in Lodi.
"It is almost inevitable that the areas that store large quantities of groundwater will become increasingly looked at to provide water," Grant said.
As early as the mid-1960s there was talk in California of tapping the Pacific Northwest by diverting the Columbia River and pumping flows south through a massive system of canals, tunneling through mountain ranges on the way to Los Angeles..
The original proposal died in 1968, was resurrected in the early 1990s but ultimately was not politically viable. Even if it had been, officials at the time said, conserving water and allowing farmland to lie fallow would be far cheaper than building an extensive network of canals.
Yeah, I remember hearing my professors at the University of Arizona talk about this in the early 1970s. I also remember the NAWAPA project. More recently, I heard about the NARA project (see this post, too)
Today, California is occupied with figuring out how to convey water within its own boundaries, including whether to build a canal around the Delta to feed freshwater to other regions.
But climate change is looming.
The Cascades hold up to seven times more water underground than the range stores in its snowpack each year, Grant said. That's enough groundwater to fill Utah's Great Salt Lake.
Again - so?
Snowflakes melt and trickle into the ground, emerging perhaps several decades later in lush forested springs. For this reason, waterways there flow steadily even late into the summer.
On the other hand, snow drains off the rocky Sierra Nevada like water off a grocery store parking lot. Frank Gehrke, who coordinates measurements of California's snowpack each winter for the state Department of Water Resources, said there is some groundwater storage in parts of the range, but not nearly enough to cancel out the loss of snowpack as temperatures warm.
The Sierra are granitic, whereas the Cascades are volcanic (mostly basalt). In general, basalts possess far more permeability and storage than granitic rocks.
As a result, rivers and streams begin to dry up earlier in the summer.
California does benefit from groundwater toward the southern end of the Cascades, including spring-fed rivers that drain into the Sacramento River.
"At a minimum, the value of those rivers will only increase," Grant said.
Water may eventually become the most valuable product harvested from national forest lands, he said. This could mean changes in demographics - where people live and work.
"If you project forward into a climate-warm world, the places where water is available, particularly in the late summer, those places are going to be disproportionately attractive to human beings," Grant said.
Exactly how that's going to play out, he said, he doesn't know.
In the post last October, I gave my opinion of Dr. Grant's premise. It's premature to make such statements, given our lack of knowledge of the volcanic ground water systems in the Cascades. For one thing, it's more than just a matter of permeability and porosity. We need to know the large-scale storage properties, the recoverability of the ground water, and the effects of withdrawals on hydrologic systems and ecosystems.
It's tempting to say that there is a lot of available ground water beneath the Cascades, but we just don't know at this point.
“Life does not consist mainly, or even largely, of facts and happenings. It consists of the storm of thoughts that is forever blowing through one’s head.” – Mark Twain
Rep. John Linder (R-GA), who represents Georgia's 7th District, the northeast suburbs of Atlanta (Gwinnett County and environs), has seen his bill H.R. 135 to establish a "21st Century Water Commission" get voted out of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure's Subcommittee on Water and Environment. 
It currently is being offered for 20% off at the publisher's WWW site. 
Recent Comments