6 ms·

Wouldn't the cheapest way to move water about just be a big pipe from somewhere with water to spare?

by oigursh 12y ago

misnome 12y ago
This comes up every time there is a drought in the south of the UK compared to the north. It really is hard to mentally comprehend the colossal amounts of water that a river is moving.
- eclipxe 12y ago
  Just make the pipe colossal. Or multiple smaller pipes that distribute the load. Throw a node.js server behind it and you'll get scale! Don't forget to use Mongo also.
  - afandian 12y ago
    That could just work! You could probably serve every tap in the North of England. As long as only one person wants turns their tap on at once.
- nextw33k 12y ago
  I think the difference is that in the UK we have a heritage of building canals that can service as a utility. The Canal system has largely been forgotten but it could be a useful network again. A canal system wouldn't work for the USA but for a smaller landmass like England it could work.
HillRat 12y ago
There just aren't that many available water sources to draw large amounts of water from, and El Paso is going to be pretty much at the bottom of the list when it comes to irrigation supply. The Colorado is already oversubscribed, and tapping new water sources creates political backlash from locals who don't want to see their water going to other counties or states. Finally, pipelines are expensive beasts in a time when the federal government isn't interested in eating the costs and state governments can't easily wait for counties to pay back out of water sales. Water is a bit odd in that it's ridiculously cheap even where it's scarce, so the financial incentive to build massive water-diversion projects isn't all that great absent a specific political or governmental imperative. It's also dubious that it's worth diverting water to places that are naturally scarce (or where wasteful policies have drawn down aquifers and other groundwater sources). Pushing the carrying capacity of a region well beyond its natural levels is a fraught enterprise, especially if the regions haven't shown themselves to be particularly good at managing their current water stocks. Personally, I'm betting that in 20 years the Great Lakes rust belt is going to be enjoying a hell of a resurgence.
- up_and_up 12y ago
  I moved to Michigan partly for this reason. Plenty of water. Long term. We wanted room to stretch out and grow a huge garden. > going to be enjoying a hell of a resurgence Its already happening. A lot of young people are moving here, buying a nice house for cheap and working remotely. Lot's of small entrepreneurs cropping up.
logfromblammo 12y ago
Water has a mass of 1 g/cm^3, or 1 kg/L, or 1 Mg/m^3. Covering a 440-acre farm (about the median farm size in the US) to a depth of one inch requires over 44000 metric tons of water. Oil pipelines have a transport capacity of millions of metric tons per year. A water pipeline of the same order of magnitude in capacity could give 227 farms the irrigation water equivalent of just one extra inch of rain per year. The energy cost of moving that water downhill is actually negative. But rivers already do that. So your pipeline is probably moving that water uphill. Using the approximation that lifting 1 kg to a height of 1 meter is about 10 joules, lifting 10 million metric tons 100 meters is 10 Tj, or about the output of a tractor-trailer engine, running continuously, all year long. Pumping it up from the elevation of St. Louis to the elevation of Denver is about 1500m vertically, and costs about the output of a diesel locomotive, running continuously, all year long. That commodity typically costs $0.40 per ton in the US, only after it is completely processed for potability and delivered to the customer. Agricultural users expect to pay less. This is probably well within the realm of our current technological possibilities, and may even be profitable economically, but you cannot even approach this politically. The cheapest way to move water is therefore to foment an armed rebellion with water rights as the casus belli. Then you can install an all new regime which likewise cannot be changed because too many millions of people depend on it remaining the same.

Wouldn't the cheapest way to move water about just be a big pipe from somewhere with water to spare?

by oigursh 12y ago

Wouldn't the cheapest way to move water about just be a big pipe from somewhere with water to spare?

This comes up every time there is a drought in the south of the UK compared to the north. It really is hard to mentally comprehend the colossal amounts of water that a river is moving.

eclipxe 12y ago
Just make the pipe colossal. Or multiple smaller pipes that distribute the load. Throw a node.js server behind it and you'll get scale! Don't forget to use Mongo also.
- afandian 12y ago
  That could just work! You could probably serve every tap in the North of England. As long as only one person wants turns their tap on at once.
nextw33k 12y ago
I think the difference is that in the UK we have a heritage of building canals that can service as a utility. The Canal system has largely been forgotten but it could be a useful network again. A canal system wouldn't work for the USA but for a smaller landmass like England it could work.

HillRat 12y ago

There just aren't that many available water sources to draw large amounts of water from, and El Paso is going to be pretty much at the bottom of the list when it comes to irrigation supply. The Colorado is already oversubscribed, and tapping new water sources creates political backlash from locals who don't want to see their water going to other counties or states. Finally, pipelines are expensive beasts in a time when the federal government isn't interested in eating the costs and state governments can't easily wait for counties to pay back out of water sales. Water is a bit odd in that it's ridiculously cheap even where it's scarce, so the financial incentive to build massive water-diversion projects isn't all that great absent a specific political or governmental imperative. It's also dubious that it's worth diverting water to places that are naturally scarce (or where wasteful policies have drawn down aquifers and other groundwater sources). Pushing the carrying capacity of a region well beyond its natural levels is a fraught enterprise, especially if the regions haven't shown themselves to be particularly good at managing their current water stocks. Personally, I'm betting that in 20 years the Great Lakes rust belt is going to be enjoying a hell of a resurgence.

up_and_up 12y ago
I moved to Michigan partly for this reason. Plenty of water. Long term. We wanted room to stretch out and grow a huge garden. > going to be enjoying a hell of a resurgence Its already happening. A lot of young people are moving here, buying a nice house for cheap and working remotely. Lot's of small entrepreneurs cropping up.

logfromblammo 12y ago

Water has a mass of 1 g/cm^3, or 1 kg/L, or 1 Mg/m^3. Covering a 440-acre farm (about the median farm size in the US) to a depth of one inch requires over 44000 metric tons of water. Oil pipelines have a transport capacity of millions of metric tons per year. A water pipeline of the same order of magnitude in capacity could give 227 farms the irrigation water equivalent of just one extra inch of rain per year. The energy cost of moving that water downhill is actually negative. But rivers already do that. So your pipeline is probably moving that water uphill. Using the approximation that lifting 1 kg to a height of 1 meter is about 10 joules, lifting 10 million metric tons 100 meters is 10 Tj, or about the output of a tractor-trailer engine, running continuously, all year long. Pumping it up from the elevation of St. Louis to the elevation of Denver is about 1500m vertically, and costs about the output of a diesel locomotive, running continuously, all year long. That commodity typically costs $0.40 per ton in the US, only after it is completely processed for potability and delivered to the customer. Agricultural users expect to pay less. This is probably well within the realm of our current technological possibilities, and may even be profitable economically, but you cannot even approach this politically. The cheapest way to move water is therefore to foment an armed rebellion with water rights as the casus belli. Then you can install an all new regime which likewise cannot be changed because too many millions of people depend on it remaining the same.