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.
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SW desert would evaporate and waste a lot of the water being sent to it. If the ground was worked and animals fertilized it, it would hold its own rain much better.
I think it’s a good idea though, I wouldn’t mind pumping some from our lake to you guys
It’s also illegal. Check out the Great Lakes compact. It protect the water from being diverted out of the Great Lakes Basin. It’s an agreement between 8 states that surround the Great Lakes and Quebec and Ontario.
It’s possible but would be very expensive. Eventually it will probably need to be done, unless they can find a cheaper way to desalinate ocean water.
Just the extreme cost.
So, there’s costs involved to move things in a pipeline. And it’s not hard to recoup those costs with oil. Right now, the market price for a gallon of crude oil is about $2.65.
The market price for a gallon of water is less than a penny. In fact, a penny would get you about six gallons of water at wholesale prices.
On average, it costs about $5/barrel to move oil in a pipeline. Of course this will depend on distance, but it’s a convenient number. That’s about 12 cents per gallon.
The cost of pipeline transport for oil is about 4% of the cost of the oil. If we had that cost for transporting water, it would raise the cost of the water by 7200%.
>We pipeline oil from Canada to Texas, why can’t we pipeline water from the Great lakes to the south?
In theory we could, but oil isn’t a good comparison. Americans use more than 550 gallons of water per person per week. The difference in volume of water to be piped versus oil would be massive.
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.
Technically possible. There isn’t anything super difficult about doing it.
a) Humans use far more water than oil (converted to energy) per day. If agricultural use is factored in, it is many times more water per person per day. So there would need to be a lot of pipes.
b) Expensive. Oil is sold at $50-100 or more per barrel (42 gallons). One barrel of water, in most markets, would cost several cents. Pumping water a great distance uses lots of energy so the cost of water would need to be much much higher than any normal consumer would be willing to pay.
c) Capital cost. As above – lots of pipes, lots of pumps very very high capital costs. Who’d pay for it? Which taxpayer or consumer would be willing to fork out thousands of dollars a year to pay back loans to build this infrastructure? It would be hard to convince folks in, say, New York state, to pay for water to the Southwest so the cost would have to be borne by a fairly small population.
d) Source of (fresh) water? Most of the mid-west relies on aquifers which are already drying up. Most of the West coast states are water starved until up to areas near the north. The amount of water needed would affect the local ecology – it would be politically impossible to get permission to pump the amount needed.
fun piece of history….
read this: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Aqueduct](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Aqueduct)
then, you’re ready to watch this: [https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/chinatown](https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/chinatown)
We could easily build desalination plants along the Pacific coast and pipe water to all Western states…but ‘Murica just can’t seem to do what European & Asian countries have been doing for decades.
Aside from major cost and legality, there’s also environmental concerns. Large geoengineering projects like that WILL have impacts on the environment and proper analysis needs to be done or else it can have extreme consequences.
Take for example China’s water pipelines from the water-rich south to the arid north. They’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars building dams and canals/pipes to get water from their major rivers like the Yellow River to the north. The problem is that they did all this without any proper environmental evaluations. As a result, downstream of the rivers in cities that used to have massive rivers flowing through them find themselves with basically a dry riverbed. They literally lose their entire water supply. To make things worse, the dams are making floods upstream significantly worse. They had massive floods the last 2 years that flooded major inland cities like Zhengzhou.
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