> The extraction of water beneath the lake bottom won’t last forever. The state of California has adopted a new law that finally regulates the pumping. When it goes into full effect, in a decade or two, more than a million acres of cropland across the valley will have to be retired.
Every time I read something like this, it just baffles me. Not only are we technologically capable of producing the water we need for aggreculture via desalination, but we also have a delivery system already in place. Instead of funneling water from northern rivers, those same systems can be filled with water sourced from the ocean.
Power can be sourced sustainably as well, as it doesn’t matter what time of day the water flows or if there are fluctuations, so long as it averages out and can be balanced in the overall system.
A project like this could not only fuel CA economy for years to come, but also make farming something that not only mega-business can sustain. As is, the finances are fairly precarious and you need serious cash flows to be able to withstand the bad years. However, we can avoid these bad years all together.
Costs, ultimately, relate to the resources (and opportunity costs) required to provide or provision something.
Desalinisation costs energy, and even with advances in technology, reverse-osmosis processes require moving water across membranes that it doesn't want to move across.
And that's on top of everything else, so that you have to deal with pre-filtering and straining (probably through gradations of rock, gravel, and sand filters), and the flushing of those periodically, and other effects.
Technology is not some majickal bottomless bag of tricks from which you can extract endless efficiencies. There are limits, constraints within those, risks, and side-effects.
And the volumes of water required for crops is large. The more so for tree crops, as mentioned in the article, as they must be watered for their entire lives. (There are orange orchards still producing in Southern California which date from Mission times -- over 200 years ago. Though most orchards have an effective life of about 15 - 40 years or so, if I recall my research on this a few years back.)
Contrast alfalfa, another high-water crop, in which, in a predicted dry year, a farmer can simply forgo planting the crop (or allow it to die), without incurring a long-term liability, as the next year's crop would have to be planted afresh anyway.
Article states their entire operation uses 400,000 acre-feet of water a year. That’s 645,332,372 cubic-yards. Israel today produces 785 million cubic yards of water per year, using it for agriculture, among other things. [1]
From the same article:
“Desalination used to be an expensive energy hog, but the kind of advanced technologies being employed at Sorek have been a game changer. Water produced by desalination costs just a third of what it did in the 1990s. Sorek can produce a thousand liters of drinking water for 58 cents. Israeli households pay about US$30 a month for their water — similar to households in most U.S. cities, and far less than Las Vegas (US$47) or Los Angeles (US$58).”
At the $0.58 per 1000 liters, that farming operation would require $286 million to pay for the water needed. The article quoted profitability scratching a billion, so it seems that it is both within technological means and economically viable. For sure not as profitable as free water, but still viable.
The acre-foot in the desal prices would be $715. All you are proving is that $17 is an unsustainable price and not what non-ag consumers pay at all. California as a landmass has sunk measurably during the few years because of these unsustainable practices.
If you were to buy water at real unsubsidized prices in any metro area, you would not be able to find $17/acre-foot.
I am noting that present levels of ag activity are in fact predicated on that price. And that (as is prominently noted in the article) water is the limiting factor for virtually all California ag.
And that any significant increase (other contemporary news articles are talking of "only" 10x increases in water costs) would be devastating to existing operations.
I'm finding your views charmingly optimistic. But highly unrealistic.
The price isn’t the only limiting factor. Right now there isn’t water at any price that you can buy in unlimited quantities through the current watering system.
As the result, new land development of more sustainable ag is effectively blocked by more senior water rights.
We even legislate into our consumer laws that you cannot use water for your landscaping at any price beyond a certain amount or risk being completely cut off.
I find this absolute limit situation highly questionable, because as we have a physical ability to not have these limits in a much more sustainable sense.
Just look at pumping costs. There's a reason we generate hydroelectric power from water flowing downstream. Doing the reverse is incredibly energy costly.
Also scale only gets you so far. Once you max out the limits of the technology available, increasing scale provides very little extra return.
Every time I read something like this, it just baffles me. Not only are we technologically capable of producing the water we need for aggreculture via desalination, but we also have a delivery system already in place. Instead of funneling water from northern rivers, those same systems can be filled with water sourced from the ocean.
Power can be sourced sustainably as well, as it doesn’t matter what time of day the water flows or if there are fluctuations, so long as it averages out and can be balanced in the overall system.
A project like this could not only fuel CA economy for years to come, but also make farming something that not only mega-business can sustain. As is, the finances are fairly precarious and you need serious cash flows to be able to withstand the bad years. However, we can avoid these bad years all together.