4 ms·
In terms of where the water comes from, sourcing at Old River Control makes a lot of sense. From there the water really does pretty much run into the Gulf of
by walnutclosefarm 4y ago
In terms of where the water comes from, sourcing at Old River Control makes a lot of sense. From there the water really does pretty much run into the Gulf of Mexico, and there is no downstream irrigation, power generation, or shipping impact from a 5% diversion. But the writer makes the engineering sound trivial, when it's really not. The first thousand miles are all uphill, so you're not talking about a canal, as the author implies, but rather a pipe. And not a small pipe either. If you move the water at a velocity of a meter per second through a single pipe, you're looking at a pipe 40 meters in diameter. And you have to push that against a head of 4000 ft net. Obviously, you'd want to pump at multiple points with intermediate reservoirs to stage the pressure gradient - otherwise you'd have a static pressure of 1800 psi in the pipe at the source. But when you roll up the pipe, the reservoirs, the pumps, and the multiple power plants to run it all, you're talking about a lot more than the garden hose across Texas the author wants to make this sound like.
And much of this is across already arid, water starved land. I'm guessing West Texas and New Mexico will want their own cut of water in return for permitting the project to cut their states in two. You might need to double your total take to satisfy everybody.
- kristjansson 4y ago> power plants I was curious, so some rough estimates: About 1m kg of water per second, lifted about 1km implies about 10GW of continuous power, or about 86 TWh annually assuming the scheme runs continuously, which is about 2% of annual generation. So enormous, but on the scale of feasible, a bit to my surprise.
- dr_dshiv 4y agoCould the pumping uphill also be turned in reverse to serve as a battery? Like, you don’t want to power this with coal, but solar. Maybe this could produce a lot of energy storage potential (albeit in the “wrong” place—but if you have local water, energy and job, it could create some new places!)
- akiselev 4y agoThose sound like big numbers but unless my napkin math is very wrong it's not even an order of magnitude more than existing Californian water projects like the California Aqueduct [1]. 1 m/s flow through a 40 m diameter pipe is 1256 m^3/s which is less than four times that of the CA aqueduct at 370 m^3/s and the distance is five to six times depending on how you measure it at 2000-2400 miles compared to 440 miles. Just one of the pumping stations along the CA aqueduct pumps that water up about 2,000 feet at 2,000 PSI so the elevation change is barely a factor of two more. The California Aqueduct was a megaproject that started over 70 years ago and the aforementioned Edmonston Pumping Station was turned on in 1973. At this point, the biggest challenge would be the right of way and litigation since the engineering has long been a solved problem. Those in California can go see the aqueduct exit the Sierra Nevada mountains at the edge of Bakersfield [2] and hiking trails around Lake Isabella intersect with open parts of the aqueduct where you can see all the water rushing by (don't fall in!). Imagine that, but like five or six times bigger. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Aqueduct https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Aqueduct [2] https://a.scpr.org/69978_86cbed2aa8b2e426383678de0f659072_original.jpg https://a.scpr.org/69978_86cbed2aa8b2e426383678de0f659072_or...
- walnutclosefarm 4y agoI don't doubt it's doable. But I don't think "barely an order of magnitude" quite captures the scale of the engineering. The Edmonston pumps, e.g., while they do raise water nearly 2000 feet, only move it a couple of miles, and have a capacity roughly 1/8 of what this proposal requires. Most of the California project can be gravity "pumped" canals. But there isn't much of the route from Louisiana to NE New Mexico that is or can be made to be downhill. There is way more than an order of magnitude more pipe and pumping to be built and provisioned in this proposal.
- cwt137 4y ago> the biggest challenge would be the right of way and litigation I totally agree. I live in SoCal and there are some infrastructure projects that took forever (ie creating the I105 and finish connecting the I210), or will probably never get completed (ie. finish connecting the I710 and California High Speed Rail) all because of right of way issues and lots of law suits.