Could desalinated ocean water be used to fix the dwindling Colorado River?

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As the Colorado River dries up, experts look at whether desalinating ocean water could be a solution to keep the water source flowing.

First, Israel’s success with desalination wouldn’t translate the same way for the Colorado River Basin, according to Jay Famiglietti, director of the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan. More than four times as many people depend on the Colorado River and, even then, human water consumption pales in comparison to the amount of water needed for agriculture in the basin, which feeds people across the world.

“This would be a long-term challenge,” Beard said. “You couldn’t just flip a switch and start a desalting plant.” Desalinating water also requires huge amounts of energy, Beard said. Not only are the plants costly to run but that, in turn, makes the water they produce expensive as well.from Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey would build a desalination plant that could take water out of the Gulf of California and transform it into 200,000 acre-feet of usable water a year, but at an estimated price of $2,000 per acre-foot, a rate about ten times higher than current costs in the area.

After all that, the desalination process has to do something with the byproduct of the filtration process, called brine, Famiglietti said. Wherever that brine is dumped will inevitably be damaged by its high salt content, potentially ruining entire ecosystems.

 

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