Climate change is making extreme weather conditions worse, making famously dry regions, even drier,
and areas that usually receive tons of rain even more prone to flooding.
This costs us hundreds of lives and millions of dollars in damages every year.
But what if we could turn this negative aspect of climate change into something positive
by just pumping water away from regions prone to flooding to regions prone to drought before
a flood comes?
That’s precisely what we’re looking at today.
I’m Ricky, and this is Two Bit da Vinci.
Image Source [3] I’ve often thought about desalination as
the ideal solution to alleviate the need for freshwater supply near the coastline, and
I made a video called “Why aren’t Desalination Plants everywhere,” which recently started
to surge (link in the description).
But then I thought, climate change hasn’t only brought drought to places like Southern
California, where I live.
It has also worsened storms, leading to massive floods that send millions of gallons of fresh
water to waste in the ocean.
We have flood management infrastructure in place like dams and reservoirs designed to
hold as much of the excess water that’s coming in, but when these systems are already
at full capacity and a massive storm comes by, there’s no other choice but to open
the dam doors and let the water out, flooding the lowlands downstream and spilling all that
freshwater into the ocean.
This got me thinking…
Instead of spending hundreds of millions of dollars on a desalination plant, doesn’t
it make more sense to just pump water out of those full reservoirs to regions prone
to drought, before the storm hits?
That way, when the storm comes, there’ll be enough capacity in the reservoir, avoiding
the flood and making use of all that freshwater.
The answer to this question is more complex than it seems at first glance and there are
several things to consider.
Let’s start with where all the water is.
Water is the lifeblood of every town, city, farm, and ecosystem on Earth.
However, even though 71% of Earth’s surface is covered in water, fresh drinking water
is very scarce.
In fact, we only have access to about 0.5% of the Earth’s total water.
If we rolled up all the freshwater in all of the rivers and lakes into a single sphere,
like a gigantic water droplet, it would only be about 34.94 miles (56.2 kilometers) wide
[4].
It feels strange to think that you could drive by all of the Earth’s drinkable surface
water in only half an hour, doing 70 mi/h (112.7 km/h) and it really puts things into
perspective.
Image Source [4] Besides being scarce, fresh drinking water
is also very unevenly distributed around the world, and in some places, it’s very hard
to come by.
Luckily for us, we’ve known how to move water around for hundreds of years.
Take California for example, the most hydrologically altered landmass on the planet and an increasingly
water-thirsty state that is running out of water.
California currently houses nearly 40 million residents, which is almost 12% of the entire
US population.
Of those 40 million residents, about 23.8 million live in the driest parts of the state
in Southern California, where most of the water demand is, while most of the water comes
from the northern third of the state.
To make this work, California has multiple aqueducts that bring water from the Colorado
River and northern California to the south.
But why is California running out
of water?
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There
are three main reasons:
Number one, most of the precipitation in California throughout the year falls as snow in the northern
Sierra Nevada mountains.
Because of climate change we’re getting far less snow during the winter each year.
The snowpack acts as a natural reservoir that feeds all the streams, rivers, and lakes as
temperatures rise and the snows melt.
Less snowpack means less available water during the warmer months of the year.
Number two, Lake Mead, which supplies one-quarter of California’s water and is a lifeline
for Southern California, is drying up.
The lake that provides up to 4.4 million acre-feet of water each year to this state alone is
at its lowest historical water level since 1937.
And since we’re drawing more water from it than what the Colorado River can put back
in, levels are still falling.
Number three, only about 40% of California’s water goes to domestic and industrial use,
while the other 60% goes to farming.
And farming is BIG in California!
The state is the breadbasket of the country, single-handedly producing 13.5% of the total
US agricultural production, including one-third of America’s vegetables and two-thirds of
all fruits and nuts.
California also produces 80% of the world’s almonds, all of it in a 5.68 million acres
(23 thousand km2) stretch of farmland in the fertile Central Valley region that is only
a little bigger than the state of New Jersey and a tad smaller than New Hampshire.
Very fertile land, yes, but also very dry.
As the American population increases, so does the demand for food from California´s farms
and, therefore, the demand for water.
Severe droughts like the one we’re going through now have devastating consequences.
According to a study by UC Merced, in 2021, the ongoing drought caused losses of upward
of $1.1 billion in the agriculture industry alone, along with 14,634 lost jobs across
all industries [5].
Add to that the indirect material and human losses caused by wildfires and related disasters,
and we can easily see just how bad things can get, and they’ll continue to get worse.
So what can we do about droughts?
The city of Las Vegas can point us in the right direction.
Through smart policies, water conservation, recycling, and reuse strategies, the city
was able to reduce its water consumption by 26%, even though its population has increased
by over 750,000 residents in the past 20 years?
[6].
Success stories like these are why I’m working on all sorts of home tech to better utilize
and eventually create water on my net zero home series.
Feel free to check out some of those videos.
Links in the description.
However, while we could cut down consumption in the big urban hubs, we can’t cut down
food production in California; there’s just too much at stake.So, there must be another
way to solve this issue without looking for more sources of water.
This is where the next key point of this video comes in.
Floods!
Apart from all the human and material losses, floods spill millions of gallons of fresh
drinking water to the ocean, water we could use to alleviate droughts elsewhere.
You see, the way things are set up now in most places like California is through flood
control systems made up of a series of canals, alluviums, dykes, dams, reservoirs, or holding
tanks to store or divert extra water when it rains heavily.
But what if we did things differently?
What if, instead of thinking of ways to improve flood control by building more dams (which
are crazy expensive), we took a more proactive approach and switched to flood risk management?
Here’s how this would work:
Suppose you know that a severe storm is about to hit, and you realize that all of your flood
control reservoirs and extra holding tanks are full.
So, you start pumping water out of those reservoirs in a controlled way in preparation for the
extra rainfall.
But you don’t simply release it downstream, but pump it to a neighboring state or wherever
there is a water shortage.
That will help you kill two birds with the same stone.
The empty reservoir (or reservoirs) will be able to accommodate the extra water when the
storm hits without opening the floodgates, thereby avoiding the flood itself and avoiding
losing all that precious water.
This could prove to be a new form of water management that works similarly to an energy
microgrid, by balancing water supply and demand to make the most of this precious resource
when it falls naturally as rain.
Now, in order for this to work, there are two major obstacles we’ll need to address:
The first is knowing in advance when there’s going to be heavy rainfall and where, so we
can mitigate the risk by pumping water out.
We´ll also need to know if there’s enough capacity to store all the water we need to
pump out at the desired destination.
This is by no means a simple problem.
Still, it’s one that Nvidia, the world’s leading GPU manufacturer and a force to be
reckoned with in Artificial Intelligence Computing, is ready to tackle.
I talked to Karthik Kashinath from Nvidia, where they’re working on an amazing machine
learning and AI project called Earth II, a Digital Twin of the Earth designed to study
the Earth’s climate.
This
project is particularly relevant to today’s topic,
but I’ll let Karthik himself explain what it’s all about.
INTERVIEW GOES HERE So, through Earth II and the Omniverse Platform,
Nvidia is able to tackle the uncertainty behind the weather by making extremely fast predictions
with superb resolution, good accuracy, and stretching further into the future than ever
before.
By coupling these predictions with digital twins of our hypothetical “hydro-microgrids”
to optimize water distribution and flood risk management, we can practically ensure the
system’s success, provided we have the necessary infrastructure in place to move water around
as needed.
This brings us to the second major obstacle.
The cost of the infrastructure’s construction and operation.
This is the single biggest hurdle, and it’s not an easy fix.
In fact, Australians tried to do something similar at the beginning of the 20th century,
but the project never took off, primarily because of costs.
The project was called The Bradfield Scheme.
Its aim was to take flood waters from the coastal regions of Australia and pump them
inland, where it would allegedly transform the arid terrain into a sort of green Oasis
with milder, cooler weather through a sort of rainforest effect.
The project was turned down after several independent assessments concluded that costs
were prohibitive and that the plan wouldn’t work either way.
But what if we already had the gross of the infrastructure in place, but we just didn’t
know it yet?
Well, it turns out we do!
As we move away from fossil fuels, we could repurpose oil and gas pipelines when we don’t
need them anymore and use them to pump water instead.
This alone could make such a project not only feasible but comparatively cheap.
Now, the first thing that pops into most people’s heads when thinking about reusing oil pipelines
for pumping water is water pollution.
Oil is full of carcinogenic aromatic compounds that are hazardous both to our health and
the environment.
This means that we’d need to clean them pretty well in order to be able to reuse them
as aqueducts.
So, is this even possible?
Can we clean oil pipelines well enough to repurpose them for pumping clean, fresh drinking
water?
Or is this just another pipedream?
(get it?
Pipe… dream… oh, never mind!).
The short answer is yes!
And, in fact, it’s already been done before.
According to Pipeline Equities, a company that engages in pipeline mergers and acquisitions
as well as pipeline salvaging, a “30-mile section of [an oil pipe] line was recovered
and shipped to Vietnam to be used as a water transportation pipeline near what is now Ho
Chi Minh City,” where it would likely serve for an additional 40 years after being repurposed!
[7].
Ok, ok, I know what you’re thinking.
Cleaning 30 miles of pipe is one thing.
That’s peanuts.
What about cleaning over 2,000 miles of pipes free of oil?
It turns out that engineers already thought of that.
They use special tools dubbed Pipeline Inspection Gadgets or PIGs to clean and inspect pipelines
all the time, and we could adapt them to wipe pipes clean of oil.
If this still doesn’t convince you, though, there are also plenty of natural gas pipelines
that have never come into contact with crude oil and would therefore require almost no
cleaning whatsoever.
The point is, we have options, and plenty of them without having to build the infrastructure
from scratch.
Image Source [8]
There are around 3 million miles (4.83 million kilometers) of oil and natural gas pipelines
across the nation, and they already connect America’s most important cities.
By reusing pipes that are already there, we eliminate the need to salvage and remove all
those pipelines when they’re decommissioned, and we eliminate the need to build new aqueducts,
avoiding, among other things, further damage to ecosystems, landscapes, and more.
Now, I can almost hear you asking, how much would it cost to run this thing?
This would be very hard to assess since the cost of pumping water around depends on topography
and many other factors.
If we need to pump water up a hill, we’ll need bigger pumps that represent a higher
upfront cost and consume more energy, making its operation more expensive.
But we can at least get a rough idea of how much energy consumption this would imply by
looking at the energy costs of water in Southern California.
Here, more than 50% of the water comes either from Northern California 400 miles away or
from Lake Mead.
Pumping water these long distances requires approximately 3,000 kilowatt-hours per acre-foot
of water pumped (2.432 kilowatt-hours per cubic meter).
That’s the same amount of energy required to charge a Tesla Model 3 standard range 60
times, or roughly the energy that an average Californian household uses in 5 months, and
is enough water for that same household for 6 to 12 months.
Energy costs aside, the savings in damages from preventing floods and droughts year after
year could be enough to offset the costs of building and operating the system.
Worldwide flood damages in 2021 produced combined economic losses of $82 billion, $41 billion
of which were in Europe [9].
And we already saw how much last year’s drought cost California’s economy (about
$1.1 billion).
Ok.
There’s only one thing left for us to analyze regarding our pipeline-repurposing ambition.
How much water could we pump through the currently available pipelines, assuming we were able
to convert them completely to aqueducts?
We’ll take the notorious Keystone pipeline, famous for pumping one of the world’s dirtiest
fuels, tar sand, from Alberta, Canada, to Texas’s Gulf coast.
Image source [11] This 2,687 miles (4,324 km) long, 36-inch
(91.44 cm) wide stretch of pipe can pump almost 600,000 barrels (roughly 100,000 m3) of tar
sands per day, at about 150°F (65.6°C).
At this temperature, the tar sand’s main component, bitumen’s viscosity will be close
to 1,100 centipoises, which is over 1000 times higher than water’s.
Source [12] Therefore, if we replace tar sand with water,
we should be able to get flow rates about 1,000 times that of tar sand at the same operating
pressure.
So, those 600,000 barrels per day of tar turn into 600 Million barrels of water per day,
or 77,336 acre-feet per day (95.4 million m3/day).
That means we’d be able to pump enough water in a day from Alberta to Texas to cover the
annual water demand of close to 80,000 average Californian homes, or the daily consumption
of close to 30 million homes, single handedly covering all of Southern California’s water
demand.
Will we have to pump that much water out?
I don’t know.
That depends on how much rain we get.
But what’s important is that we can if we ever need to.
So there you have it!
Predicting floods with Nvidia’s Earth II platform and pumping water from areas prone
to floods in preparation for heavy rainfall to areas in drought, while repurposing natural
gas and oil pipelines could be an amazing, economically-feasible, and smart way to
Make better use of an already scarce resource Avoid the devastation caused by floods, and
Alleviate the effects of drought in dry but fertile lands like the Central Valley
of the state of California.
But what do you think?
Did we miss anything when exploring this new solution?
Shout out in the comments section below, as you always do!
Thanks for watching!