Part of our negotiation on the Keystone pipeline should be an additional pipeline to bring water down from Alaska to the lower 48.

The water and oil pipeline could run straight down thru MT, WY into CO and then on south.

Cost effective and painless to all except our Enviorenmentalist Friends.

One place is at the Bureau of Reclamation’s website: http://www.usbr.gov/lc/region/programs/crbstudy.html.

My friend Ken Neubecker, who lives in Carbondale, is a very good source, and he has a website called Western Rivers Institute. http://westernriversinstitute.org

In Colorado, the lead state water agency is the Colorado WAter Conservation Board.

On the Western Slope, the key organization is the Colorado River Water Conservation District. Quick googles will find you websites for each. At the latter, as regards the Colorado River, you want to check out a paper by Eric Kuhn, the general manger. It’s on the bar at the right side of the page. Oh heck, here it is: http://www.crwcd.org/page_253

John Orr, who works for Westminster, tracks Colroado water matters at a website called Coyote Gulch.

As for where the water goes to these various cities, that’s just something I gleaned from my writing about water during the last 12 years. In that time, I did much writing about water for Colorado Biz Magazine, Headwaters, the Vail Daily, Planning Magazine and I forget who else.

Desalination has always seemed like a “natural fix” to me since we have adequate shoreline from which to pull seawater. Although the costs you quoted for desalination of seawater from the Gulf of California at $2100/acre foot are high.

I googled Israel desalination since they have a few (maybe 4) plants doing this with their mostly costly plant desalting for approximately $740/acre foot. Other countries such as Cyprus, Trinidad, Algeria, and Australia are desalting their water and Tampa, Florida has a plant working in conjunction with Tampa Electric’s Big Bend Power Plant.

The Chairman of Water Desalination Administration in Israel, Abraham Tenne, feels it is necessary to expand desalination capacity in Israel in light of potential climate change (warming) in order to have a dependable water supply. Google Israel desalination and his name and you can see his paper and the costs of water production for his and other countries’ plants although the costs are in cubic meters of water (good math practice).

If California and Nevada need more water they should start building ocean water desalination plants and either use our abundant natural gas to power the process or renewable energy – solar, wind, wave action, geothermal etc.

Water is a precious commodity and looks to become more so as evidenced by the reduced flow in the Mississippi and the lower level in the great lakes. We should learn a lesson from those countries located in dry areas that have already built desalination plants and consider their business model.

Dennis Martin
Centennial