Depending on whom you talk to the Colorado River serves either 35 million or 40 million people, all of whom are having to reconsider how much water they use and how they use it in the wake of an ongoing megadrought that arrived at the beginning of this century. The changes are no longer in the "let's-discuss-this" phase as the federal government threatens to impose up to a 40 percent cut in river water allocations over the next 10 years if the seven western states—Colorado, New Mexico, Wyoming, Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and California—and the 30 recognized tribal jurisdictions with water rights don't agree among themselves about how to divvy up the dwindling Colorado River.
There isn't as much water as there used to be and that means that not everything people are using water for now will get its previous allotment. No doubt the volume of water representing the 52 percent of the total river withdrawals currently taken for agriculture could be reduced through conservation and efficiency measures. But it turns out that "conservation" in some instances might mean simply leaving fields unplanted for lack of water. And, it's not as if efficiency measures haven't already been implemented as irrigated agriculture in the Colorado basin has been transitioning to the much more efficient drip irrigation away from traditional surface irrigation. I could not find any statistics for this, however. So, it's not clear how much more water savings could be achieved through the installation of additional drip irrigation in place of surface irrigation.
Then, there is the 18 percent of the water withdrawals currently going to municipal water systems. The people in those cities have taken seriously the need to reduce water use. Even though those systems now serve 24 percent more residents today than in the year 2000, those systems use 18 percent LESS water. How much further could these cities reduce water consumption? It's almost certain that the easiest forms of reduction have already taken place. The next leg down in water consumption will be harder.
About 11 percent of the current withdrawals from the Colorado River are in the form of evaporation, mostly from reservoirs created by dams along the river. The total amount of evaporation has been going up due to higher temperatures and fewer rainy days. Absent some vast sci-fi fantasy geoengineering project to somehow harness or slow down the evaporation, evaporative loss will continue to increase.
Which brings us to the hydroelectric stations embedded in major dams along the river. Water levels behind those dams have fallen so much already that current trends imply reaching so-called "minimum power pool" early next year for Glen Canyon Dam which forms Lake Powell. Falling below the minimum power pool level means that no water could reach the dam's turbines and so no electricity could be generated. Glen Canyon Dam produces some of the cheapest electric power in the country and a loss of this source of electricity would mean much higher prices for the 5 million utility customers who currently rely on the dam's output. In addition, such a loss would strain the reliability of the rest of the electric grid as grid operators try to make up for that loss.
As if all this were not enough to worry about, the push for finding and mining more critical metals in the United States—to reduce the country's dependence on China and others for these metals—means that another voracious user of water is coming for the Colorado's water. The most promising deposits of lithium in the United States are being discovered in the drought-parched southwest just when water availability is dropping to crisis levels. The irony, of course, is that climate change—which lithium, a key green energy metal, is needed to help address—is drying up the very water resources needed to mine the metal.
In the coming months and years, something in the Colorado River basin has to give. Probably all parties will give up something, city-dwellers, farmers and electricity customers. That implies something even more basic, namely, that the unbridled growth in population and agricultural and mining activities in the Colorado basin will dwindle and perhaps reverse for the first time in the history of the modern West.
Kurt Cobb is a freelance writer and communications consultant who writes frequently about energy and environment. His work has appeared in The Christian Science Monitor, Resilience, Common Dreams, Naked Capitalism, Le Monde Diplomatique, Oilprice.com, OilVoice, TalkMarkets, Investing.com, Business Insider and many other places. He is the author of an oil-themed novel entitled Prelude and has a widely followed blog called Resource Insights. He can be contacted at kurtcobb2001@yahoo.com.
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