New Thinking for California Water

1. New Thinking for California Water Henry Vaux Peter Gleick Frank Rijsberman

2. How Much Water do People Use?

3. What price water? * Some SWP and CVP water still at this range – others 10-20X higher.

4. Water scarcity in 2030 based on the Falkenmark Indicator Source: Wallace 2000 4

5. Physical and Economic Water Scarcity:a third of the population will suffer from stress in 2025 • Physical scarcity: Not enough water. • Economic Scarcity: Not infrastructure to make water available to people. Source: IWMI, 2000

6. Environmental Water Stress Source: CA study by IWMI, WRI, Kassel University, CA RR #2

7. 2006 Update: a third of the population already suffered from water scarcity Water Scarcity 2000 Little or no water scarcity Physical water scarcity Approaching physical water scarcity Economic water scarcity Not estimated Source: De Fraiture et al., IWMI

8. Closed / closing basins: build until there is no more water left • Basins are over-allocated, little left for environmental flows, more pollution • Re-allocation – new developments lead to reallocation – robbing Peter to pay Paul • New entitlements require re-negotiation of rights Closing and closed, for example: Yellow, Colorado, Amu/Syr Darya, Murray-Darling, Egypt’s Nile, Lerma-Chapala, Jordan, Gediz, Zayanda Rud, Indus, Cauvery, Krishna, Chao Phraya,…. Conclusion: new infrastructure no longer produces new water Need to move to More Crop Per Drop

9. New Thinking for California Water • Monitor all water use in California, both surface and groundwater. • Improve the productivity of urban and agricultural water use by 20%. • Provide incentives for the development of alternative, regional sources that directly offset water withdrawals via the State Water Project. • Provide an additional incentive if the incremental energy demand associated with producing this water is produced by renewable energy sources. • Co-ordinate with the federal government to offer similar incentives for reducing water withdrawals from the Delta by the Central Valley Project. • Evaluate the re-operation of California’s existing infrastructure to cope with impacts associated with climate change.

10. Monitor All Water Use Monitor all water use in California, both surface and groundwater. • Post-1992 residences have meters. Pre-1992 residences and remaining other urban users must be metered by Jan 1, 2025 – this date can be moved up, e.g. to 2013. • Groundwater accounts for as much as 40% of all irrigation water used in California, but is not metered. This hampers any assessment of water use in California and any effort to provide incentives to farmers to increase productivity. Require metering within 5 years, e.g. by 2013.

11. Improve productivity by 20% Improve the productivity of urban water use by 20%, as measured by reductions in per capita water use. Improve the productivity of agricultural water uses by 20%, as measured by reduction in applied water per acre irrigated. Figure 1. California’s water use (green line), population (red line), and gross state product (blue line) between 1975 and 2001. Note: Data are indexed to 1975; GSP has gone up more than 2.5 times, while water use has actually declined. Source: Water use from the U.S. Geological Survey. Analysis by the Pacific Institute.

12. Incentives to offset SWP withdrawals Provide incentives for the development of alternative, regional sources that directly offset water withdrawals via the State Water Project, including water recycling, conjunctive use, storm water management, and desalination (both brackish and seawater), on the condition that all new sources would offset Delta withdrawals on a one-to-one basis. • Modern desalination plants can serve up to a million people, at costs of around $1 per cubic meter (250 gallons). Successful plants have been built for Singapore, Israel and various Middle Eastern states. London will build one in coming years. • For urban water in Southern California desalination has become a realistic option. • We do not provide an estimate here of the size of the incentive, but MWD recently offered a $250 per acre-foot incentive for seawater desalination.

13. Increased Incentives for Renewable Energy Provide an additional incentive if the incremental energy demand associated with producing this water is produced by renewable energy sources. Table 1. Energy Intensity of Water Sources in San Diego County

14. Coordinate to reduce CVP withdrawals Figure 5. Delta Water Exports, 1956-2007. Note: CCC = Contra Costa Canal; NBAQ = North Bay Aqueduct; SWP = State Water Project; CVP = Central Valley Project Source: Data from DAYFLOW

15. Evaluate Re-operationof Existing Infrastructure to cope with CC • California is home to one of the largest and most complex water storage and delivery systems in the world. • Current operational standards are based on historical climate conditions. • Changing how we operate this system may offer the potential to dramatically reduce vulnerability to climate change impacts without new capital expenditures.

16. Appendix

17. Desal • Wall Street Journal of Jan 17 2008 reported that there are now 13.080 desal plants in the world, producing 12 billion gallons per day. • Until about 10 years ago the bulk of it all was in the Middle East, particularly Saudi Arabia, and the dominating technology was MSF (multi stage flash distillation) - the cost per cubic meter used to be around $3-4. • The next technology was/is RO (reverse osmosis; a membrane technology), most modern / newly built plants are now RO - except for some of the really large ones in the Middle East that still do MSF. • RO works from very large plants for cities (producing up to 100 million gallons per day), to a 20 or 40 ft container sized pre-packaged (for up to 1-2 million gallon per day or so) , straight off the ship plug and play plant for a hotel, to a small unit you can use in your house. • Cheapest (large) RO plants now are said to produce water at about $0.50 per cubic meter, i.e. affordable for urban water, but value in ag is usually still only couple of cents per m3 range for cereals, up to 10-20 cents per m3 for high value crops - i.e. way too expensive (except for some greenhouse intensive stuff). • The total water technology market is around $500billion per year; GE (apparently $5B/year), Dow, Siemens are all big players for the off the shelf stuff (as opposed to the large, engineered one-off plants. • Te next geneation technology will be nanotechnology filtration - said to be a few years out (quite a few innovators / start ups in the Bay area) - that is expected to take energy cost down by (some people say) 2x to 3 x - not sure if it will scale up to large plants that soon.

18. Desal projects • Tampa Bay plant - largest plant in the US - problem history - bankrupt contractors, cost overruns, billed as cheapest plant in the world at $0.49/m3 in 1998, but eventually more expensive (maybe $1/m3). http://www.water-technology.net/projects/tampa/ Size: 95 thousand m3/day (25 K gallons/day) • Tuas - Singapore - largest in Asia - finished in 2005 - said to deliver at $0.50/m3 http://www.water-technology.net/projects/tuas/ Size: 110 thousand m3/day • Ashkelon, Israel - largest RO plant - also 2005, also $0.50/m3 Size: 320 thousand m3/day • Shoaiba - Saudi - very large plant - MSF. http://www.water-technology.net/projects/shuaiba/ Size: 400K thousand m3/day • Interestingly, even (pretty wet) London has decided to build a desal plant on the Thames, to be completed in 2009 or so - also large one - 140 thousand m3/day. http://www.water-technology.net/projects/water-desalination/

19. Krishna basin, India – closed basin • very large variation in water productivity among crops • water productivity in industry an order of magnitude higher 40 Rs=1US$ Veggies 13-19 Rs/m3 Spices 12 Sugarcane 4.6 Fruits 3-10 Animal Products 0.5-6 Rice 1.6 Grains 0.7-2.2 Rs/m3 c.f. Industrial water productivity: 328 Rs/m3 Source: IWMI

20. China, developed 40 million acres of new irrigated fruits/veg in 15 years Shifting to Higher Valued Crops – Will the poor benefit?

21. Water Balance Jordan River basin From Venot, Courcier and Molle (CA RR 9)

22. Water Balance Jordan River basin

23. Water Balance Jordan River basin

24. Water Balance Jordan River basin

25. Irrigation in Australia

26. Over-development of surface water resources

27. Virtual water trade 2000 – part of the solution Major exporter (> 10km3) Minor exporter (<10 km3) Self-sufficient (< 0.1 km3 net trade) Importer Not estimated August 2006 Australia is a major virtual water exporter, with the US, France and Argentina in 2004 some 27 km3 of water were exported – or over 13 thousand m3 per person

28. Virtual water exports, 10 km3, embedded in 17 Million ton of wheat in 2004 1.2 1.7 1.1 1.3 1.7 0.8

29. Virtual water exports, 15 km3, embedded in 1.5 Million ton of beef in 2004 4.0 3.6