Obviously this wouldn’t relieve the issues caused by low snowpack and decreasing precipitation, but it could supplement the water used for everyday living or agriculture during times of drought right?
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Agriculture is only profitable if the water used is super cheap. Piping in water from far away is really expensive, with the cost going up the farther away the water has to come from. Oil is pretty expensive already and people are OK paying a few extra dollars per barrel to pipe it far away, but a few extra dollars per barrel of water would be uneconomical for agriculture.
We do actually pipe water for agriculture and residential use but past a certain distance it doesn’t make economical sense. It would become so expensive that it would make more sense to invest in ways to reduce water consumption like more efficient irrigation, aquifer injection of treated wastewater, etc.
Where I live there are hundreds of kilometers of channels dug into the mountainside to bring fresh water from the colder and more humid north side to the hotter and drier south. Your idea does exist
We kind of have. California has an aqueduct that takes water from the San Joaquin/Sacramento basin to drier parts of SoCal, near Santa Barbara and LA.
It’s really expensive, and as others have noted, it’s pretty detrimental to the environment. Also, the places they’re taking from actually need it, too. Northern and Southern CA fight about water almost constantly, because the whole state is really ag-heavy, and generally pretty dry.
Also, it should be noted that “everyday living” and “agriculture” are vastly different. Ag takes a whole heckuva lot more than the average municipality uses for things like drinking water, cooking, sanitation, and yes, even the average homeowner watering their stupid useless lawn.
We would do this if it was affordable. There is plenty of water, but not at the “almost free” price people want to pay. When a pipeline is the right answer, there is just no water, because you can’t run the pumps to pump water through the pipeline for what it sells for. There are giant pipelines in CA and tunnels in NY, with prices to match.
I have a similar question: Why can’t we build ways to transport people from drier areas to wetter areas so that people who want water can move to where it is?
We do on a smaller scale. There are multiple several hundred mile long pipelines/aqueducts all over the country that transport water.
Like our aqueducts literally do, or?
We can. There have actually been proposals to bring water from the Great Lakes to the SW of the country. States in the Great Lakes region have created laws that prevent this from occurring. No one wants to give up precious water supplies, ecosystems are fragile, water rights different depending on location, and problems with cost/price/profitability make it unattractive.
Explaining with my smol brain.
1. Costs. Oil has more value than water and people are more willing to pay for the electricity, maintenance, and construction of pipelines for oil because of money.
2. Water is much heavier than Oil meaning it would need a more powerful pump to move the liquids from one place to another, circling to the first one which is cost. More fuel or electricity would be burned off by transporting water.
I read some articles about the US planning to create an Interstate water system where they transport water around their country and it is doable but right now, oil is just ‘more important’ for everyone. a dollar in price increase gets the whole world racking their brains.
The amount of water necessary in drier areas wouldn’t be satisfied and the fresh water source would dry up.
Fresh water lakes all over the world (most notably the Aral Sea) are drying up as it is, without adding additional stress.
The cost for installing this is also incredibly high. The investment in gas pipes makes sense for businesses, as they profit immensely from selling gas. However, water is a rather cheap commodity, so spending all that money to transport water that you’ll need to sell at higher rates will never fly.
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