Why can’t we pipe water to southwest US?

Question

We pipeline oil from Canada to Texas, why can’t we pipeline water from the Great lakes to the south?

Edit: thank you all who replied, I’ve gathered that it is technically possible, but would come with a huge amount of legal, environmental, and practical issues due to the amount of water that would actually be needed. It sounds like there are far more practical solutions available if the need became dire enough.

In: 45

Answer 1

The volume of water required would be phenomenal. Like… Colorado River volume. I mean, the Colorado used to be sufficient to naturally irrigate a chunk of southeastern California and northwestern Mexico, but now so much of it is diverted for agriculture, it virtually disappears.

Anyways, so the Colorado is about 640k L/s. For context this roughly double what goes over the American falls at Niagara (341k L/s).
The closest place to connect our Colorado River Replenish Channel would be Lake Granby just outside of Denver. On the other end, 1400 km away is Duluth MN at 214 ft. above sea level.

Denver is 5200 ft above sea level. The American niagara falls is about 100 ft.

So basically we’d need to pump TWO colorado rivers 870 miles and UP the distance of 52 American Niagara Falls.

I don’t know about you, but that will require a lot of really big pumps and a metric craptonn of power that I don’t think even exists yet. I ain’t no hydroengineer, but lets see if I can’t bodge some numbers:

Googling some pump power curves sez that a 1 hp pump can move 20 gpm up 125′. 20 gpm is 5.3 L/m… so 41 times the height and 121k pumps…. we need a shade under 5M horsepower – per second – of pump action to drive a colorado river uphill from Minnesota to Denver.

A fully loaded 1 hp motor ~0.75kWh. So we need 3.75 _million_ kilowatt hours of power. For reference, the United States consumes _on average_ and depending on season, time of day and state, about 500 million kilowatt hours. So, you know, only like 1% of our current demand. No problem, we can dig that up just about anywhere. And all this of course is assuming ideal pump/motor efficiency etc.