Every year the east side of the country seems to have historic flooding, meanwhile there is always historic drought out west.
Why can’t we just build a pipeline to pump flood zones to drought zones?
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Physically there are two fundamental problems.
a) Water is very heavy
b) We use a lot of water
The truth is that well before you reach the west coast, there are already significant problems in the mid-West. The US agricultural system in that area is fairly rapidly draining the aquifers in the region. So there is more than enough demand for an inexpensive, regular, sustainable water source without going to the West coast.
For it to even start making sense, it has to be regular. And that means relying on flood waters is not going to work. Then to hold on to the water, there needs to be more dams and massive reservoirs along the way to hold on to the water.
Once the water is collected (assuming that all these dams and new reservoirs are even built) there is the problem of moving it. Water is heavy and we use so much that moving it would cost a great amount of energy and infrastructure. A few pipes won’t do since it probably works out to tens of billions of cubic meters of water a year. (basically a major river’s worth – the Colorado’s flow is around 20 billion cubic meters annually)
For the West Coast there is another big problem and that is the Rocky Mountains. Any water from the East to the West would need to be elevated by at least a mile or two to get across. It could take as much as 5% of the current total electricity consumption of the US just to do this. (US annual electricity consumption about 4000 TwH, just raising 20 billion cubic meters of water by 3000 meters would take around 6 TWh and there hasn’t been pumping and efficiency losses taken into account)
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