Ringside: The Easy Impossible Path to Water Abundance

Coming up with a plan to find sufficient water to maintain 100 percent of existing irrigated farm acreage in the San Joaquin Valley the next time a multi-year drought strikes is not impossible. We can pipe water from Lake Roosevelt in Washington all the way down to Lake Mead in Nevada. From there, modest expansion of already existing canals and storage facilities can get Los Angeles, Orange, and San Diego counties, along with Imperial Valley farms and the Salton Sea, all the water they need. After all, the Colombia River has an average annual flow of nearly 200 million acre feet. So why not divert 10 million acre feet a year, a mere 5 percent of its flow?

This will free up about 1.5 million acre feet per year that currently goes over the Tehachapis to Los Angeles to stay in the San Joaquin Valley for farm irrigation.

While this proposal has earned ridicule every time it’s come up in recent decades, it’s a project that could have been realized back in the 1950s. If we can build a 400 mile long canal, we can build a 1,000 mile long canal. If we can lift water 3,000 feet to pump it over the Tehachapis in California, we can do the same in Oregon and Nevada. If we could commit six times more money than our general fund budget was in 1957 to implement the State Water Project, we could find the money today for a similarly massive undertaking.

The reason to bring this up is not just to point out that we’ve lost the ability to think big. It’s to explore the real obstacles to this, or any project, even if it isn’t a mega-project. And here they are, courtesy of a skeptic, who, just a few years ago, opined on his perceived absurdity of a Colombian River diversion scheme. He wrote:

“Consider the multiple billions it would cost, the innumerable permits that would be needed, the challenges of engineering, financing and construction, the impacts to Columbia and Snake river fish, both upriver and in the estuary, including more than a dozen species listed as threatened or endangered, the inevitable massive amount of litigation, and the unlikely acquiescence of Columbia River states, tribes, irrigators and municipalities to give up their rights to Columbia River water.”

Innumerable permits. Impacts to fish including listed species. Massive litigation. The unlikely acquiescence of multiple “stakeholders.”

Does this sound familiar? It should. For any big project now, as opposed to in the 1950s, the engineering and the financing are the easy parts. But building a consensus is nearly impossible, and even when a consensus forms, the bureaucrats and the litigators will stop you.

There are plenty of great projects that could be built but never will be — until regulations and litigation are brought down to reasonable levels. And if that happened, there are also solutions in plain sight that don’t require massive new projects.

Solutions in Plain Sight

The delta pumps – state and federal combined – have the capacity to move over 900,000 acre feet of water per month, but they never operate at capacity. During the four months from December 1, 2022 through March 31, 2023, 15.8 MAF flowed into the Delta, but of that, only 1.8 MAF (12%) was pumped into the Delta Mendota Canal and California Aqueduct; only 50 percent of the capacity of the state and federal pumps. During the same four months in 2023-24, another extremely wet year, 12.2 MAF flowed into the Delta, and only 1.3 MAF (11%) was pumped south; only 37 percent of pump capacity.

Over the two most recent full months, December 2024 through January 31, 2025, 4.3 MAF has flowed through the Delta and of that, only 744,000 acre feet (17%) was pumped south, only 40 percent of capacity.

It’s hard to answer why more water wasn’t sent south. In the preceding dry years, water was pumped south at higher percentages of inflow. From 12/2019 through 3/2020, 34 percent of Delta inflow was pumped south, from 12/2020 through 3/2021, 24 percent, and from 12/2021 through 3/2022, 19 percent.

Why, during these drought years, was it tolerable to send a higher percentage of total inflow south than during the last two wet years? Why, during wet years, aren’t we taking the so-called big gulp?

Part of the reason is a bureaucracy that is relentlessly making it harder to run the pumps. But the other reason is there aren’t enough places for the water to go. And this is an opportunity. This water can be diverted to percolation basins.

In ideal conditions, water percolates surprisingly fast, up to a foot every four days. Some basins can percolate water much faster, up to a foot per day. And those vaunted “paleochannels” can potentially soak up water as fast as it can be delivered. Even without developing paleochannels, at the rate of a foot of percolation every four days, if you allocated 100,000 acres for new floodplains and could keep them filled and percolating for 40 days, you would bank 1,000,000 acre feet of water each year that might otherwise go unused. If you can keep them filled for 120 days, which might be possible in some years, you would only need 33,000 acres of basins.

If during the four wettest months of the last two years the Delta pumps had operated at capacity, it would have only increased the percent of Delta inflow being diverted south to 26 percent, and just the amount of these additional diversions would have allowed farmers to bank over 4 million acre feet. It could have been stored underground.

Not all of the water that percolates can come back up in the same year, since until aquifer levels recover, more has to go in than comes out. But allocating a small additional fraction of San Joaquin Valley farmland for percolation via aqueduct deliveries is a solution that ought to be possible without inviting a crippling regulatory onslaught. And since nobody pays for water that otherwise runs out to the Pacific, the price if it’s instead pumped south should be low enough to incentivize farmers to buy it.

The battle then turns back to the pumps. Turning them on is easy. Convincing the bureaucrats to do it is impossible.

Until we can change the rules that allow out-of-control bureaucrats and litigators to throttle down those pumps to a fraction of their capacity even during wet winters, new projects to increase water supply also have no chance, whether they’re grandiose schemes like a Colombia River diversion, mega-projects like the Delta Tunnel, or other big ideas like large scale desalination, wastewater reuse, runoff capture, and more surface storage.