Aug
22
Watering the Southern High Plains Aquifer
August 22, 2010 | Posted by Michael "Aquadoc" Campana
1 Comment
In May 2009 I posted an item Saving the Ogallala (aka High Plains) Aquifer, in which I reported on an article from the March 2009 Scientific American.
The southern portion of the High Plains Aquifer is well-known for drastically lowered groundwater levels because of unsustainable pumping. Schemes have been proposed to recharge the aquifer, generally involving pumping water from the Mississippi River, which Pat Mulroy mentioned last summer, or other regions.
When I was in graduate school almost 40 years ago, a number of large-scale water importation schemes were being bandied about. In addition to importing water from the Columbia River or Canada (NAWAPA or NARA), a plan to use nuclear-powered pumping plants to pipe water uphill from the Mississippi River was being kicked around.
Thanks to reader Ken, here is one such plan that invokes a 1984 Journal of Hydrology paper: “Preliminary study of the diversion of 283 m3/sec (10,000 cfs) from Lake Superior to the Missouri River Basin” by J.W. Bulkley, S.J. Wiright, and D. Wright at the University of Michigan’s Department of Civil Engineering.
The paper’s introduction has a brief summary of some proposed large-scale water diversions and cites the 1976 High Plains Study authorized by Congress. (Download S79BANKS-2)
But the title of the paper describes a non-starter. In 1984, the Great Lakes Compact was not in existence. Trying to import water from the Great Lakes theses days would run afoul (an understatement) of the governors of the eight states and premiers of the two Canadian provinces in the basin.
Back to Ken’s comment: he posted a link to a site in which he reviews a plan to recharge the High Plains Aquifer and a possible way to add water to the Canadian River. He has used information from the aforementioned paper. He’s done a lot of work, including some interactive spreadsheets accessible from the site:
His plan to add water to the Canadian River requires taking water from the Rio Grande. There is no unallocated water in the RG and if there were, I am unsure the Rio Grande Compact would permit this interbasin transfer. So the engineering exercise may be futile.
As a final item, it is instructive to note that the Bulkley et al. paper came from a special issue devoted to Global Water: Science and Engineering – The Ven Te Chow Memorial Volume. Wonder if anyone would dare propose such a special issue these days. Maybe it’s time.
Since I wrote this in Ashland while taking in some Shakespeare, what better way to close this than a quote from the Bard of Avon:
“Lord, what fools these mortals be!” –Puck, in William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream
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RIO GRANDE COMPACT
http://wrri.nmsu.edu/wrdis/compacts/Rio-Grande-Compact.pdf
Some one may be able to understand it.
Wikepedia link to the compact.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_Grande_Compact
Ken