Yves here. This Colorado River water crunch is a microcosm of the conflicts that will only become more intense in coming years. We had warned in the very earliest days of this website that potable water was the critical resource set to go into shortage first. As you can see from Links, water is increasingly fueling kinetic wars, so absent a severe crash that postpones a lot of water-hogging resource extraction and use (think data centers), prospects for relief on this front are poor.
By Kurt Cobb, a freelance writer and communications consultant who writes frequently about energy and environment whose work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Resilience, Le Monde Diplomatique, TalkMarkets, Investing.com, Business Insider and many other places. He is the author of an oil-themed novel entitled Prelude and has a widely followed blog called Resource Insights. Originally published at Resource Insights
- Federal pressure is increasing as the seven basin states and tribal nations struggle to reach agreement on how to divide a shrinking Colorado River.
- Agriculture, cities, and hydropower have already made significant efficiency gains, leaving increasingly difficult choices about future water reductions.
- New demands from critical mineral mining, particularly lithium, are emerging just as water supplies become increasingly constrained.
Depending on whom you talk to, the Colorado River serves either 35 million or 40 million people, all of whom are having to reconsider how much water they use and how they use it in the wake of an ongoing megadrought that arrived at the beginning of this century. The changes are no longer in the “let’s-discuss-this” phase as the federal government threatens to impose up to a 40 percent cut in river water allocations over the next 10 years if the seven western states—Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and California—and the 30 recognized tribal jurisdictions with water rights don’t agree among themselves about how to divvy up the dwindling Colorado River.
There isn’t as much water as there used to be, and that means that not everything people are using water for now will get its previous allotment. No doubt, the volume of water representing 52 percent of the total river withdrawals currently taken for agriculture could be reduced through conservation and efficiency measures. But it turns out that “conservation” in some instances might mean simply leaving fields unplanted for lack of water. And, it’s not as if efficiency measures haven’t already been implemented, as irrigated agriculture in the Colorado basin has been transitioning to the much more efficient drip irrigation away from traditional surface irrigation. I could not find any statistics for this, however. So, it’s not clear how much more water savings could be achieved through the installation of additional drip irrigation in place of surface irrigation.
Then, there is the 18 percent of the water withdrawals currently going to municipal water systems. The people in those cities have taken seriously the need to reduce water use. Even though those systems now serve 24 percent more residents than in the year 2000, those systems use 18 percent LESS water. How much further could these cities reduce water consumption? It’s almost certain that the easiest forms of reduction have already taken place. The next leg down in water consumption will be harder.
About 11 percent of the current withdrawals from the Colorado River are in the form of evaporation, mostly from reservoirs created by dams along the river. The total amount of evaporation has been going up due to higher temperatures and fewer rainy days. Absent some vast sci-fi fantasy geoengineering project to somehow harness or slow down the evaporation, evaporative loss will continue to increase.
Which brings us to the hydroelectric stations embedded in major dams along the river. Water levels behind those dams have fallen so much already that current trends imply reaching so-called “minimum power pool” early next year for Glen Canyon Dam, which forms Lake Powell. Falling below the minimum power pool level means that no water could reach the dam’s turbines, and so no electricity could be generated. Glen Canyon Dam produces some of the cheapest electric power in the country, and a loss of this source of electricity would mean much higher prices for the 5 million utility customers who currently rely on the dam’s output. In addition, such a loss would strain the reliability of the rest of the electric grid as grid operators try to make up for that loss.
As if all this were not enough to worry about, the push for finding and mining more critical metals in the United States—to reduce the country’s dependence on China and others for these metals—means that another voracious user of water is coming for the Colorado’s water. The most promising deposits of lithium in the United States are being discovered in the drought-parched southwest just when water availability is dropping to crisis levels. The irony, of course, is that climate change—which lithium, a key green energy metal, is needed to help address—is drying up the very water resources needed to mine the metal.
In the coming months and years, something in the Colorado River basin has to give. Probably all parties will give up something, city-dwellers, farmers, and electricity customers. That implies something even more basic, namely, that the unbridled growth in population and agricultural and mining activities in the Colorado basin will dwindle and perhaps reverse for the first time in the history of the modern West.
Any word on projected Datacenter water usage along this river path? Yet another pressure.
There are some evaporative counter measures using floating solar panels being scaled by China currently but all these types of measures don’t produce more water.
There are methods for extracting moisture from the air (powered via Solar?) we might start seeing spring up in the desert before long?
Datacenters represent just one kind of the large industrial consumers of water.
What about those new chips manufacturing plants? What about mining — not just lithium? What about fracking?
Datacentres and mining represent only a negligible water use of the Colorado River. In any event, both can use non-potable water, so its not necessarily a direct competition for human/agricultural use.
What the article doesn’t state is that the majority of the agricultural use – around 60% – goes to alfalfa and other cattle feed crops. In other words, the problem is overwhelmingly caused by burger consumption, or specifically cheap beef raised on crops grown specifically for feed. Between 25-30% of Colorado River total flow goes for this purpose alone – i.e. nearly twice as much as used in municipal supply (which for the most part includes commercial use, including data centres).
So the simple short term solution would be regulation and/or taxes on non-grass reared cattle, or just ban all crops in the basin that are not for direct human consumption.
The other significant loss is evaporation – around 11%. Contrary to what the article states, there is a straightforward solution to this – one widely implemented in India, Europe, China and across central Asia. Floating solar farms. The particular attraction of these is that in cooling the water below they they encourage more fish life, and the necessary electrical infrastructure is already in place (i.e. the hydro plants). Plus, the solar panels are more efficient due to the cooling impact of the water.
The Central Arizona Project canal crosses burning Arizona all the way from the Western border at Lake Havasu to Tuscon nearer to the eastern. It does supply some water to Phoenix but was mostly built for agricultural interests. AZ is a major target of the Fed government’s proposed imposed solution and arguably it should be.
And it’s not just the river. Saudi alfalfa farms are sucking up the ancient aquifer water.
I live in Imperial county.
People here have known that you are absolutely correct for years.
Stop growing alfalfa in the Imperial Valley and all of the problems with the urban use of Colorado river water go away.
The handful of families that control that water will force us to pry that control away from them.
They have become quite controversial in AZ which has a lot of them.
It’s clear to everyone that unsustainable Big Ag is the biggest consumer of water. 🌽
Cut Big Ag off. ✂️
Then ban all the ugly lawns and anything else that requires pumped water but does not produce food. Plant native shrubs and trees and grow vegetable gardens on those previous lawns. 🌳
Mandate rooftop solar for power production, consolidate dams & hydro power and implement floating solar to reduce evaporative loss. ☀️
I agree. Raising grain and hay for cattle is a huge waste. No one NEEDs beef. Raise beef where there is adequate water or don’t raise them at all. ‘Funny how native bison never needed hay–they ate the drought tolerant grasses of the plains.
The wisdom of Cactus Ed Abbey prevails, as anyone with half a brain understands.
The alfalfa “farms” in Arizona and California are absurd, with Saudi Arabia a big player in that scam. In the Southeast, alfalfa and other hay do not require irrigation. Some years are drier than others, but center pivot agriculture is common only in a few places that get the most money from federal agriculture subsidies originating in the Farm Bill. Southwest Georgia is the champion of that, with more than a few “small farmers” raking in more than a million dollars a year, which is also absurd.
Isn’t another huge waste of water the almond industry in CA?
The USDA and Farm Bills should start actually dictating wise use systems for food production in the US. Water-intensive crops in areas with large annual rainfall, preference and support for family farms, eliminating corporate welfare to big ag, etc.
Indeed. The Farm Bill has very little to do with actual farming and much to do with making Big Ag and Big Food rich at the expense of the people and the ecosphere that is essential for all life to thrive.
As an AZian (and former Wyomingite) I get to see this stuff all the time. To say it is complicated would be a huge understatement.
The dams and irrigation projects were built for the ag industry originally. This does mean something.
52% of the river water is used by agriculture
33% of the river goes to growing forage crops (alphalfa, etc). In a bunch of different states.
26% of the river goes just to alphalfa (a lot of which is shipped to Saudi Arabia as they own the farms)
13% of the river goes to growing cotton – yikes!
19% of the river goes to growing direct human food
19% goes to industry
29% goes to city consumption (which is too complicated to divide up). Lawns!!! anyone?? Golf!
11% is lost to evaporation (at great pain this can be reduced to about 5% straightforwardly)
Notably the evil data centers around here were allowed to use evaporative cooling and most do NOT use recycled water – which should be going into the river anyway for downstream users. Make them convert to a closed cooling system and you save LOTS of water.
Losses to evaporation can be cut by about half by eliminating Glen Canyon dam as then you only have evaporation from 1 lake vice 2 lakes. Power generation is also more efficient due to Lake Mead having much deeper water. You also recover (over a long time) one of the greatest natural wonders on the planets as Glen Canyon returns to its natural state. Tourism (the big economic driver of this issue) would convert/revert to something besides water skiing. It would also result in the river in the Grand Canyon running down to wading depth at times during the year – like it is supposed too. There are places out here that saying this paragraph out loud could earn you a beating.
There are plenty of people here in AZ who would gladly run me in the ditch for writing the above post. Some of my old ranching friends in Wyo would just take you to the train station, a la Yellowstone. As they say about whiskey and water.
Oops. And just like we always see here my numbers don’t add up either. It all depends on what you count. I ended up with 111% because, like many here, I didn’t properly count the evaporation as part of the total – is it, or not? Hard to say I guess. We are pretty screwed.
At my house we have had about 1 inch of rain since Dec 1. That just does not work well.
I like the math!
A western reality: water is over-claimed, and over-appropriated… so the over 100% is fabulous.
Read “Cadillac Desert.”
The problem always comes back the inability of Capitalist countries to plan for anything beyond the next earnings call.
The original Colorado River distibution plan was based on the ‘wettest years’.
Definitely need a rethink.
A must-read. Reisner’s humor is as dry as the desert SW.
Navajo Generating Station, 2.2 GW, was shut down in 2019. Glen Canyon Dam, 1.3 GW, is not that big a loss. There are other power plants in AZ that can supply the loads currently supplied by Glen Canyon. There are three coal fired plants in northeast AZ that are currently or planning on converting to gas fired generation. The author infers that 5m people will be without power, when in reality they will simply have different sources of power. Not as ‘cheap’ as GCD, at least until the huge repairs required to keep the dam viable are taken into account.
Does the “Federal pressure” hint that since the whole system agreement is effectively going bankrupt, that the future is something like a bankruptcy court where the whole thing will get thrown out and replaced by a judge? Seems like a great place to start would be saying no to water for data centers. Tell data centers to use AC like everyone else, and put solar on your roof to make it!
If we have a BIG El Nino winter, we could get some snowpack snow-melt help.
Big if, and just fingers in the dike, or dam….
Things all over the world are pretty dire
Try turning off the HAARP…
Nobody wants to face the fact that we are going to have to power down to get through this, and that means the lithium is just gonna have to stay in the ground, and the big cities of the SW US are going to end up dry and empty.