Thread: $18 BILLION to divert Missouri River to irrigate farms

Study: $18B to divert Missouri River to irrigate farms

Study: $18 billion needed to build aqueduct to divert Missouri River to irrigate Kansas farms

By Heather Hollingsworth, Associated Press7 hours ago

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) -- Building a 360-mile aqueduct to reroute water from the Missouri River to irrigate crops in western Kansas where underwater stores are being exhausted would cost $18 billion and require an additional $1 billion each year to operate, a new draft report shows.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers estimates that building an aqueduct to transport excess water from the river would take 20 years and cost $12.2 billion, plus $5.8 billion in interest. The estimate doesn't include the costs of permits or restoring habitat lost as a result of the project, which could boost the cost "significantly higher," said John Grothaus, chief of the water planning section for the corps' Kansas City district.

The proposed concrete-lined canal and 15 pump stations would start near White Cloud, along the Nebraska border, and end near Utica. A similar 1982 analysis, undertaken at the request of Congress, estimated construction would cost $3.7 billion and interest $4.2 billion.

"Nothing materialized, and it looks like they kicked the can down the road at the very least," Grothaus said.

The Kansas Water Office posted a draft summary, which included the corps' findings, online this month and will present the complete analysis Jan. 29 to an advisory entity called the Kansas Water Authority. A state committee tasked with updating the 1982 analysis asked for the study because water levels are declining in the Ogallala Aquifer, a vast network of underground water locked in the porous limestone deep below the surface in the High Plains region of the U.S., stretching from Wyoming and South Dakota to the Texas and Oklahoma panhandle regions. It is the primary source of fresh water for the entire area.

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback has said that Ogallala's storage could be nearly 70 percent spent in 50 years if nothing changes.

"This is a lot of money," said Kansas Senate Natural Resources Committee Chairman Larry Powell. He estimated that, with the report showing that water from the aqueduct would cost farmers $450 per-acre foot in today's dollars, it would cost upward of $90,000 to irrigate 100 acres of corn.

At that price, he asked, "is it going to be feasible to raise corn to feed cattle? It might not be."

The project already has received some pushback, with Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon calling it "ill-advised" in a November 2013 letter to Brownback. Nixon spokesman Scott Holste said in an email Wednesday that the governor's position remained the same.

Earl Lewis, assistant director of the Kansas Water Office, said, he didn't know the chances for the project being pursued and acknowledged that concerns had been raised.

"Anytime you talk about a significant amount of water and you are talking about moving water from one place to another, you are going to create some controversy," Lewis said. "Even the study of looking at it, there is controversy being created with it right now."

But he said that in Western states where water-transfer projects have been completed, the benefits are "significant." The aqueduct, he said, "becomes a policy question. What do we want to see happen in the future? And how do we want to see it happen?"

http://news.yahoo.com/study-18b-dive...213846685.html

Guess Who Proposed the Missouri River Pipeline in the Federal Government’s Colorado River Basin Study?

TUESDAY, 12 NOVEMBER 2013 13:55

Hint: It’s not who you might think, says Circle of Blue reporter Brett Walton.

Photo via Shutterstock

Gross Reservoir, 35 kilometers (22 miles) northwest of downtown Denver, stores water from the Colorado River Basin that is diverted in a tunnel through the Rocky Mountains. A water manager in Kansas proposes a pipeline from the Missouri River to Denver and other cities along Colorado’s Front Range. Click image to enlarge.

Last December, the federal Bureau of Reclamation published a landmark study of water supply and demand in the Colorado River Basin. Included as a supply option was a pipeline from the Missouri River in Kansas to Colorado’s Front Range.

Neither Kansas nor the Front Range, a string of cities east of the Continental Divide, lies within the natural boundaries of the Colorado River, which flows west out of the Rocky Mountains.

As it turns out, the man who proposed the pipeline does not live in the river’s watershed either. Yet all three — Kansas, the Front Range, and the pipeline advocate — are connected by Colorado River water.

That connection is the wonder and the marvel and the madness of the American West, a region whose diverse economies and ecosystems are linked by concrete and steel conduits that move water beyond borders.

End of the Line

“We created the largest artificial watershed in the world,” says Pat Mulroy, the powerful head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, a wholesaler that supplies Las Vegas.

Water from the Colorado River is piped across deserts, channeled through mountains, and — after being treated in local sewage plants — winds up in rivers that flow to the southern ends of the country:

• Some of New Mexico’s share goes into the Rio Grande, eventually flowing south and east through Texas and into the Gulf of Mexico.
• What Denver returns to nature flows into the South Platte, a tributary of the Missouri River.
• The coastal cities of Southern California dump a good bit of their diversion into the Pacific Ocean.

None of these water bodies is the logical end of the line for the Colorado River, whose natural terminus is a delta at the northern crook of the Gulf of California. A delta that is, ironically, all dried up.

Expanding the Web

The river’s web, if some have their way, could become even larger. John Kaufman, the man who proposed the Missouri River pipeline, wants to see the artificial boundaries expand.

Kaufman is the general manager of Leavenworth Water, which serves 50,000 people in a town that welcomed Lewis and Clark in 1804 during the duo’s westward exploration.

The identity of the pipeline’s proponent, who was anonymous during the Bureau of Reclamation study and is for the first time being named in the media, is important because of where he lives — outside of the natural Colorado River Basin, or in the extended web.

“It’s not about providing water to the Front Range. It’s about providing water to the West.”

–John Kaufman, general manager
Leavenworth Water

In Kaufman’s vision, Kansas becomes a hydrological keystone for the West, facilitating water transfers that could affect at least 10 states and Mexico.

“We’d hopscotch water across Kansas and sell it to communities in the state,” Kaufman told me during a phone interview last month, explaining the benefit to his home territory. Construction of the pipeline would also supply jobs to Leavenworth, where the intake facilities would be located. At least one groundwater district in western Kansas is advocating for a similar concept, a Missouri River pipeline to the High Plains to compensate for declines in the Ogallala Aquifer, an essential source for irrigation. Kaufman has presented his idea to state and local officials several times this year.

Once the water flows past Kansas, “it’s a horse trade,” Kaufman said. Water delivered to the Front Range would be earmarked for the South Platte River Basin, which includes Denver. (The South Platte, remember, is part of the Missouri River Basin.) A pipeline would close the circle, sending South Platte water, via the Missouri, back uphill. Of course a few drops of the Colorado would be in the pipe, too.

“It’s a reuse project, really,” said Kaufman, who serves on Kansas governor Sam Brownback’s Missouri River advisory committee.

Kansas: Interstate Highways and Interstate Waterways?

Then there are the swaps. Front Range cities get roughly 72 percent of their supplies from the Colorado River, according to a 2009 study commissioned by the Front Range Water Council. If water from the Missouri were imported, then some of the trans-Rocky diversions could remain within the Colorado River Basin.

Kaufman’s idea — he calls it the Eisenhower Pipeline, in honor of the sponsor of the interstate highway system, which got its start in Kansas — was included in the Bureau of Reclamation’s final report, but top federal officials distanced themselves from the project, once word leaked a few days before the report’s official release last December.

“In my view, [water import] solutions are impractical and not feasible,” said Ken Salazar, Secretary of the Interior at the time. The study actually gave the pipeline high marks for technical feasibility, but the $US 8.6 billion price tag and the high energy costs pushed the pipeline to the bottom of the pile.

Conservation was the big winner, deemed to be significantly cheaper and able to deliver more water.

Kaufman knows the scheme is expensive, which is why he says that he needs financial buy-in from the states in the Colorado’s Lower Basin and cooperative agreements among all the Basin states in order to shuffle water supplies.

“It’s not about providing water to the Front Range,” he said.

“It’s about providing water to the West.”

Clipping Wings or Taking Flight?

Kaufman may be tilting at water pipes here. The cost is enough to clip the pipeline’s wings, especially when the federal government is shying away from investing in these types of projects unless they involve tribal water settlements. Just as daunting are the interstate political and permitting mazes.

But we should still pay attention to these ideas.

Conservation and reuse are the dominant narratives today and most cities still have significant improvements to make, but Big Infrastructure is not going away, as I’ll soon report for Circle of Blue.

The projects being built, however, are a lot smaller than what Kaufman proposes and do not cross state lines.

Do you live in either the Missouri or Colorado river basin? What do you think about this plan? Let me know at brett@circleofblue.org or on Twitter @waltonwater or by commenting below.
–Brett Walton, Circle of Blue reporter

http://www.circleofblue.org/waternew...r-basin-study/