Storing Water In Underground Aquifers Becoming Hot SoCal Issue - LA Times

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A group of cities in southeast Los Angeles County, including Downey and Lakewood, are asserting their rights over the vast aquifers and hope to eventually use the porous sediments to store portions of their water supply. They believe they can save money by pumping imported water into the ground rather than pay for expensive water storage facilities and pipelines. Water storage can be expensive: The Metropolitan Water District, the region's main water wholesaler, spent $2 billion completing Diamond Valley Lake, a reservoir that holds 800,000 acre-feet of water and required flooding a valley in Riverside County. An acre-foot is enough water to supply two average families for a year.

"I could spend a lot of money, find land, build a pipeline to that land because there's no land around here, but it would be very expensive," said Desi Alvarez, the director of public works in Downey. "Why would I give up a relatively inexpensive resource right under our jurisdictional boundaries?"

But exactly who controls the valuable aquifers is a matter of dispute. The Water Replenishment District of Southern California also claims authority over what happens in the aquifers. The district was formed in 1959 because local agencies had drawn out so much water that the aquifers were dangerously low. It was charged with refilling the aquifers so that agencies with rights to the water could continue pumping.

Water district officials fear that cities or other groups with water rights, such as private water companies, want to use the fragile water system to generate revenue. They worry about the aquifers being leased out to the highest bidder or agencies that will distribute the water elsewhere. That, they said, could result in misuse of the system. "It's like deregulating energy," replenishment district General Manager Robb Whitaker said. "You saw what happened. If people put water in whenever they want to put it in and we have no ultimate authority over what occurs, we'd be left to clean up the mess."

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http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-aquifer17may17,1,1572924.story

It's a way to store water without damming up rivers. Gets rid of the evaporation loss, too.

Water, even underground water, flows downhill. If you pump 5 million gallons of water into an aquifier, it is going to immediately start flowing (albeit slowly) along the least restrictive path available. Given enough time, it will also spread out laterally into any dry earth it comes into contact with. Depending on the topography of the area, water losses from aquifier storage can run up to 50%, but are typically in the 10% to 20% range. That's higher than evaporative losses from resorvoirs, but most water districts consider the loss worthwhile due to the reduced costs.

Many areas also don't necessarily plan on pulling "their" water back out at a later time. If you inject a million gallons into an existing aquifier, the belief is that you can take a million gallons back out later and the whole thing is a wash. The reality, unfortunatly, is that water tables tend to be seasonal and this practice simply contributes to aquifier depletion in dry seasons.

But that's the desert southwest. That reservoir also loses laterally into the sandstone. I suppose any "natural" storage method is going to incur some kind of loss into the surroundings.

As I understand it, Powell does lose a large percentage of its storage, but I believe that 30% number is the combination of both absorption into the sandstone AND evaporation combined.

Powell is a bit of an oddity though. It's extreme temperatures, large surface area, and the local geography combine to create an area that simply isn't well suited to a dam its size. As a hiker, I wish they'd just drain the damned thing and bring the canyons back.

The only real solution to water shortages is for mankind to stop depending on natural water flow to meet our needs. We need to initiate large scale desalinization and sink pipelines to send the water where it's needed. We then need to tear down the dams and let the rivers flow.

to provide all of mankind's current water usage via desalinisation. Bet it's quite an imposing figure.

Essentually you are making water, which is a renewable resource, from a non-renewable resource. If you think using "fossil" aquifers is bad, desalinization is generally worse.

The only way it makes any kind of sense is if you use some "renewable" power source to desalinate water. (Or maybe nuclear power...)

Until we develop a nonpolluting and renewable energy source, any attempt to manufacture our own water wouldn't work. But, it IS the ideal solution if we ever DO manage to break free of a fossil fuel based society.

I'm not opposed to nuclear power, but I don't think that modern nuclear plants are the solution. There isn't enough uranium on the planet to power enough reactors to purify the amount of water that we need for drinking, agriculture, and other uses.

The energy demands for desalination on a scale to replace natural water flows would be enormous.

It is true that for the process of effecting it, much of the energy now discarded as "waste heat" can theoretically be used. Note that this heat does not need result from temperatures higher than the boiling point of water. Many such systems used reduced pressures and are called "flash distillation" devices. Cogeneration systems of this type have been built and used commercially.

But it's not that simple. Brines resulting from the removal of water from seawater are typically very corrosive. Typically they also contain a considerable fraction of organic matter, resulting from all the the things that have died upon intake of the seawater and from heating it. Moreover, the distillation reservoirs are subject to "scaling" from the crystallization of magnesium and calcium salts, including their intractable organic salts of these elements. Scaling in turn, profoundly effects the efficiency of the heat exchangers; without special treatment or design, ordinary heat exchangers can become close to useless. Scaling is not just a problem in desalination systems; many types of boilers have rigid specifications on the composition of the water they use.

The Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in the Morro Bay area of California has one of the world's largest desalination facilities. All of the water produced there is for captive use. The nearby city of Morro Bay, which also relies on desalination gets almost no water from Diablo Canyon, although it does use off peak electricity from the plant for its system. (The plant also uses off peak electricity.)

The first desalination plant at Diablo Canyon was a flash system. However, it had operational difficulties and was shutdown. The new desalination facility at the plant, like the one for the city of Morro Bay is a reverse osmosis system, which works by pumping water through an ion selective membrane. This, of course, is not co-generation, it is simply energy consumption.

The issue of boiler scale is an area of active research in materials science and chemical engineering, but it would be a serious misrepresentation to claim that it is solved problem for the purposes of desalination. I make no secret of my opinion that no matter what kind of promise is represented by various types of systems, the crisis is NOW, and therefore we must use technology that exists NOW.

Unrestricted desalination can also be expected to cause a number of problems with habitat degradation as brines are added to coastal waters that are extremely important to the biosphere and which are already under profound stress.

I don't think desalination is the answer.

The real problem is, as always, the world is dangerously overpopulated. We must do what we can to reverse this unfortunate trend. The best solution, as I often repeat, is to reduce our population through the traditional liberal agenda of reducing poverty, providing health care, reducing infant mortality, providing for the elderly, increasing the respect for women's rights, for gay rights, etc, etc. Some of these things may sound on the surface counterintuitive, but I assure you they are not.

When municipalities suck up water faster than it is replenished, a cone of depression develops underneath it. That cone means that municipalities must dig deeper to get their water, or find a stream/river/lake/etc... The problem with putting water back into the aquifer artificially is that the water is usually treated with some sort of chemical before storage. The chemicals are not necessarily bad by themselves, but if the rocks, air, and chemicals react together, they can form some pretty nasty things such as arsenic. It isn't always the case, but it can happen.

Seems to me that no one does, and we all do. Like the earth, or the atmosphere. We only chose, by convention, to divide it up according to 'property rights', and 'titles'.

I think that california aught claim every bit of surface and ground water within it's states, and require anyone who wishes to use the state's water to pay for it. Use that to pay for government.

Two things are out of balance: way too many people living in SoCal, and way too much irrigation.

If people want to live there, and there is no more water, I guess they'll have to buy it from the people of NV, AZ, CO, etc.

Long assed article for those of you with an interest in economics, and why the 'free market' in water rights doesn't work: http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0254/is_n4_v56/ai_20381870