The Colorado River Basin is in the midst of a sustainability crisis. Climate change and severe drought, coupled with historic overallocation of the river, have caused water users to rapidly drain the system’s major reservoirs to their lowest levels since construction.
When it comes to the view of desalination as a tool to drought-proof local water systems in California, 2022 has been a roller-coaster year. In May, the California Coastal Commission, a 12-member appointed board responsible for overseeing the state’s 1,100 miles of coastline, rejected on environmental grounds a $1.4 billion desalination facility proposed for Huntington Beach.
Scientists have discovered that the pace of groundwater depletion in California’s Central Valley has accelerated dramatically during the drought as heavy agricultural pumping has drawn down aquifer levels to new lows and now threatens to devastate the underground water reserves. The research shows that chronic declines in groundwater levels, which have plagued the Central Valley for decades, have worsened significantly in recent years, with particularly rapid declines occurring since 2019.
On a crisp day this fall I drove southeast from Grand Junction, Colorado, into the Uncompahgre Valley, a rich basin of row crops and hayfields. A snow line hung like a bowl cut around the upper cliffs of the Grand Mesa, while in the valley some farmers were taking their last deliveries of water, sowing winter wheat and onions. I turned south at the farm town of Delta onto Route 348, a shoulder-less two-lane road lined with irrigation ditches and dent corn still hanging crisp on their browned stalks. The road crossed the Uncompahgre River, and it was thin, nearly dry.
With climate change and drought, the state of California is incentivizing not using farmland or fallowing it. The move comes as irrigation in some areas is damaging residential wells. Katie Staack farms 3,500 acres of almonds in Stanislaus County. She is one of the hundreds interested in the newly created LandFlex program. “The program is really unique because it’s focused on wet water, making sure we have wet water for our communities and aquifers, our ecosystems and farms,” Aubrey Bettencourt said.
The outskirts of Kingman, Arizona, used to be a place where pilots would train and recreationists tested their all-terrain vehicles. The dry and empty landscape has since morphed into something much more green that supports pistachio and almond orchards, and garlic and potato fields in a climate similar to California’s Central Valley. The crops are fed by groundwater that also serves the city of Kingman.
A state board tasked with vetting water supply augmentation proposals for Arizona on Tuesday passed a nonbinding resolution in support of a potentially massive seawater desalination plant in Mexico’s Sea of Cortez. A partnership led by Israeli desalination specialists IDE Technologies pitched the multibillion-dollar plan to the Water Infrastructure Finance Authority of Arizona’s board, saying it could replace or complement declining Colorado River water that flows through the Central Arizona Project’s canal. The plant would remove salt from seawater and pump it north into the canal, where it would flow through Maricopa, Pinal and Pima counties.
As California is preparing for their fourth year of drought, the Bureau of Reclamation warns Central Valley Project water contractors of lessened water allocations. Two months after the start of the new water year on Oct. 1, the Shasta Reservoir, the state’s largest reservoir and cornerstone of the Central Valley Project (CVP), is currently at 31% capacity.
The Southern Nevada Water Authority has a plan for how the seven states that rely on the Colorado River can protect Lake Mead and Lake Powell. But whether the other six states have any interest in backing that plan remains to be seen. The water authority on Tuesday outlined how it thinks the Colorado River basin states and the federal government can drastically cut back on water use along the dwindling Colorado next year in order to keep water levels at its two major reservoirs from crashing further and threatening putting their ability to deliver water downstream and generate hydropower.
The speeches at the Colorado River summit in Las Vegas last week ranged all the way from pessimistic to panicked. Ted Cooke, the outgoing director of the Central Arizona Project, summed it up: “(T)here’s a real possibility of an effective dead pool“ at Lake Mead, making it impossible to release water through Hoover Dam for downstream delivery to Arizona and California.
