Pumped Hydro to Replenish the Salton Sea and Bring Death Valley to Life

Energy is the master resource. Energy can draw water from the sea and pump it up mountains. Sending water down mountains to deep valley deserts generates energy and take the salt out along the way. Pumped hydro can be a valuable service for intermittent energy sources like wind and solar whose peak production doesn’t match consumer demand. Power generated from seawater descending into inland valleys can finance bringing deserts to life.

California’s Salton Sea is 226 feet below sea level and Death Valley is deeper at 282 feet below sea level. Sending seawater to the Salton Sea and Death Valley would generate power, provided pumped hydro storage services and create inland lakes and wetlands for billions of birds and lots of people.

Seawater pumped hydro storage would help California balance expanding but intermittent wind and solar power. An earlier Economic Thinking post, Bringing Death Valley to Life as a Marine Natural Resource (October 27, 2016)

Water For Algae Farms post (Journal for Energy Independence, undated) focused on pumped hydro and algae biofuels. Sun across America’s southwest powers solar panel, but could also power modified algae in ponds to be converted to biofuels:

Water For Algae Farms describes a plan for the construction of public seawater aqueducts, pipelines and canals to distribute seawater from the ocean to arid and drought susceptible regions of the United States. The desalination of the seawater will be done at the destination, using solar energy to power the desalination equipment.

There are various options to route seawater to the Salton Sea and Death Valley where seawater can be desalinated for people, birds, and for algae biofuel ponds. Routing straight up into the Laguna Mountains east of San Diego offers a valuable energy storage opportunities:

An alternative to a canal from the Gulf of California would be an aqueduct directly from the Pacific Ocean near the city of San Diego. The water could be pumped up to a storage reservoir in the Laguna Mountains. Then the gravity potential of the reservoir could serve as a pumped hydro storage facility for peak time electricity generation. San Diego County could receive as much as 500 megawatts of peak time electrical power from the facility. During low electricity demand periods late at night, cheap electricity would be used to pump ocean water from the Pacific up to the Laguna reservoir. Then, during the peak-time hours of the day, the stored ocean water would be released from the reservoir and allowed to flow through a pipe down to the Anza-Borrego Desert floor, located on the east side of the Laguna Mountains, where the force of the water pressure would turn a conventional hydroelectric generator. Then, after the sea water is released from the hydroelectric water turbine it would flow through an open canal to the Salton Sea, which is at a lower elevation than the Anza-Borrego Desert floor.

Water For Algae Farms

Wherever below sea-level deserts are near oceans, entrepreneurs and engineers can generate electricity and bring deserts to life. Watering desert land not only helps people but also birds, plants, fish, and animals. Plus algae can flourish turning CO2 plant food to valuable biofuels.

[post below from earlier Bringing Life to Death Valley]

To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.
– William Blake, Auguries of Innocence

There are a great many worlds to explore in nearby mud puddles and under rocks at the beach. With microscopes we can see microbe worlds and silicon sand grains that power computers and smartphones. With telescopes we can survey the surface of Mars, and from airplane windows at 30,000 feet we can see what looks like similarly desolate martian landscapes.

Worlds in space can be warmed with blankets of carbon dioxide and water vapor, and can support life with melted ice (more on martian terraforming here). Water supports life across a wide range of landscapes and temperatures, from Mars to the Mojave Desert to Death Valley and the Salton Sea. A trench of California desert became the Salton Sea after a levee break in 1905. This accidental sea expanded to 45 miles by 17 miles and 83 feet deep (Audubon Society page). It’s no accident the Audubon Society profiles the Salton Sea. Millions of birds began arriving as soon as the water settled. Floods have occurred in this region over thousands of years, and a long-term sea went dry just 500 years ago.

California land developers, tourists and vacationers arrived in large numbers a few decades later:

By 1960, Salton Sea had developed into a resort with Salton City, Salton Sea Beach, and Desert Shores on the western shore and Desert Beach, North Shore, and Bombay Beach built on the eastern shore. Several multi-million dollar marinas and yacht clubs sprung up around the shoreline. Golf courses began to appear everywhere. Thousands showed up to watch the Salton Sea 500, a 500 mile powerboat endurance race. (Amusing Planet page, with links to resorts.)

If engineers can make an inland sea out of a California desert by accident, it should be possible to create inland seas on purpose. Why not redirect more life-giving water to the deserts of southern California, Arizona, and New Mexico? The birds will thank us and the Audubon Society would cheer (or should cheer).

Terraforming is more than just a world-changing idea for Mars. Reason‘s Ronald Bailey discusses the debate over terraforming Mars in “Does Mars Have Rights?” Environmental developers could work on less-expensive terraforming of desolate places on planet Earth.

Flying from San Antonio to Los Angeles, I looked out across 1,400 miles of mostly dry landscapes. Google says the route would take 449 hours by foot (though it seems like a long way for 40 days walking 12 hours a day). By air the dry landscape was crossed in a few rapt hours. Out the window were endless vistas of rough lands with little life. Yet water would transform this stretch into one of the most prosperous and ecologically rich places on Earth.

Does this desolation have rights? Well, owners of the property do, or would if the land had owners. Instead, most of the land across the deserts east of Los Angeles and San Diego are still in the hands (or under the thumbs) of federal government agencies. The various government agencies involved are listed by color and shown on the maps below.

Maps show southern California and southern Arizona. Lots of vibrant colors mark the land on these maps, but without water the actual land is mostly barren brown.

This December 7, 2013 Los Angeles Times article reports on plans government agencies have to save the Salton Sea.

 With an ominous deadline approaching, two feuding Imperial Valley agencies have put aside their differences and developed a plan they hope can save the ailing Salton Sea, the state’s largest body of water and often considered its most vexing environmental problem.    The Imperial Irrigation District and the Imperial County Board of Supervisors have agreed to push for additional geothermal energy exploration on the eastern edge of the sea. (Source)

Google Maps shows the Salton Sea with Palm Desert and Palm Springs to the northwest, deserts to the east and west, and the Imperial Valley to the south. The Audubon Society says agricultural runoff caused much of the pollution damage to the Salton Sea. And to this pollution cost we can add millions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies that fund billions of gallons of fresh water each year to grow alfalfa that’s sent to feed cows in China

State and federal policies prevent or limit efforts to expand the quantity and quality of inland seas. In north and east Africa and the Middle East, as well as the U.S., water from the ocean could flow into lowland areas to create vast new inland seas for bird nesting and migration grounds, fisheries, housing and recreation, maybe algae farms, plus agriculture and aquaculture. 

Flooding Death Valley is one proposal that turns up every so often. Debate.org has this resolution: The USFG should help save the planet by flooding Death Valley with sea water. (with some useful comments). This page (referenced above) by American Energy Independence suggests that solar energy could power algae farms and desalination along a replenished Salton Sea and flooded Death valley. Though energy independence is less an issue since fast-rising shale oil and gas production has turned the U.S. into an energy exporter, this project should be fun to consider (and debate!). [And with more solar and wind power in California, the pumped hydro storage has more value.]

The Salton Sea, located south of the famous Death Valley in the desert region of Southern California, is over 200 feet below sea level. The United States could provide unlimited water to the southwestern deserts if the federal government would build a canal between the Pacific Ocean and the Salton Sea. (Source)

The federal government doesn’t need to try building a giant canal, but could focus instead on transferring stewardship and granting permits for project investors. One way to transform millions of acres of government-owned deserts to marine resources would be to tap the Pacific Ocean:

An alternative to a canal from the Gulf of California would be an aqueduct directly from the Pacific Ocean near the city of San Diego. The water could be pumped up to a storage reservoir in the Laguna Mountains. Then the gravity potential of the reservoir could serve as a pumped hydro storage facility for peak time electricity generation. San Diego County could receive as much as 500 mega-watts of peak time electrical power from the facility. During low electricity demand periods late at night, cheap electricity would be used to pump ocean water from the Pacific up to the Laguna reservoir. Then, during the peak-time hours of the day, the stored ocean water would be released from the reservoir and allowed to flow through a pipe down to the Anza-Borrego Desert floor, located on the east side of the Laguna Mountains, where the force of the water pressure would turn a conventional hydro-electric generator. Then, after the sea water is released from the hydro-electric water turbine it would flow through an open canal to the Salton Sea, which is at a lower elevation than the Anza-Borrego Desert floor. (Source)

Maybe giant tunnels under the mountains would be less expensive that pumping water over. Tunneling is less expensive than they used to be (except in Seattle).

Would such a project taking water over, under, or through the mountains require lots of government funding? No, just lots of freedom from regulations. The federal government could make money the old-fashion way, selling land to settlers and developers, just as it did before federal fingers got sticky in the early 1900s.

Interested adventurers can read more tales of shipwrecked galleons full of Spanish doubloons said to be now buried deep in the sands around an lost inland stretch of the Gulf of California.

It seems that hundreds of years ago, when the waters of the Gulf of California came up into the desert, a pirate ship sailed up the Gulf. It was caught in some cross currents and went aground on a sand bar. The crew died, and the ship was left stranded there with almost a million doubloons and pieces of eight in her hulk. It’s only when the wind blows and the sand clears that you can get a good look at her, and then the same wind comes along and covers her up again. The Star locates the wreck about ten miles from Dos Palmas. The newspaper gives a graphic description of the time when the Gulf occupied the entire valley, and, in fact, connected up with the Pacific Ocean through San Gorgonio Pass and Los Angeles. The Star did a series of articles speculating that the ship might have been one of the units of King Solomon’s navy, or the craft that carried the ten lost tribes of Israel to America; and for the latter offered proof that the tribes never reached America but died of diptheria in the Sandwich Islands! Another idea advanced was that a war-like people from the Indian Sea took a tempestuous voyage to the Gulf of California. Here their ship, Bully Boy, sank in treacherous quicksands. Her hull was made of teakwood and did not rot. The Digger Indians of California are descendants of this Shoo-fly tribe. (from Chapter 2: Lost Ships of the Desert in The Salton Sea: California’s Overlooked Treasure)

And, more historical adventure:

Subsequently, a boy named Manquerna, from Sinaloa, said dig in 1774 he was taken by Captain Juan Bautista de Anza as a mule-driver on the exploring trip from Sonora to the California coast. When they started crossing the desert westward from the Colorado River, he was sent out to the right of the course traveled by the main body of explorers, to seek a different route. While he was traveling at night to avoid the heat, he stumbled upon an ancient ship, and in its hold were so many pearls that they were beyond imagination. He took what he could carry, deserted de Anza, and finally reached the Mission of San Luis Rey. Later, he spent many years trying to find the ship again.

Chapter 1 in this online book describes two early Salton Sea proposals, The Wozencraft Plan and The Widney Sea, both to divert the Colorado river to fill lakes and provide irrigation to California lands only occasionally flooded by the Colorado.

—- More recent articles on saving the Salton Sea —

• Can the Salton Sea be saved? (The Week, March 20, 2018) has this history:

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Salton Sea was a playground for celebrities like Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, who flocked there to go fishing, boating, and waterskiing. There were hotels on the shoreline, and people purchased land by flying over in a helicopter and choosing their parcels from the air.

But as the Salton Sea became saltier and more polluted, the celebrities stopped coming out, and storms in the 1970s flooded homes and businesses around the water. In the aftermath, many restaurants and hotels closed, and houses were abandoned.

• Now is California’s chance to save the Salton Sea (The Desert Sun, March 18, 2019) offers suggestions for politicians, saying $10 million a year should be budgeted to Salton Sea restoration.

• Column: A persuasive case for saving the Salton Sea, California’s biggest lake (LA Times, September 17, 2014):

Even in its reduced and unlovely circumstances, the Salton Sea is the biggest lake in California. It may also pose the biggest quandary for the Southern California ecosystem. Its champions declare that California needs to spend several billion dollars now to save the saltwater sea, or pay dozens of billions — $29 billion to $70 billion — down the road in lost economic values, lost environmental values and lost lives.

• Creating a Better Future for the Salton Sea (Walton Family Foundation, March 23, 2018) reports on California government plans and adds:

The Walton Family Foundation supports Audubon California in its work to plan and develop the proposed Salton Sea wetlands. The foundation also recently joined the S. D. Bechtel Jr. Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Water Foundation and other philanthropic organizations to set a goal of providing $10 million over five years to support projects that protect public health and the environment. The commitments are part of the foundation’s effort to secure a stable water supply throughout the Colorado River basin.

A related approach would save money rather than spend it, by ending agricultural subsidies that costly lead crop subsidies around the Salton Sea. Can California Farmers Save Water and the Dying Salton Sea? (National Geographic, February 18, 2014). Some of the Colorado River water sent to the Imperial Valley helps crops that make economic sense (that is, could pay for the value of the water). Other crops, like summer alfalfa for feeding cows in China don’t make sense.

The Imperial Valley thus uses 20 percent of the Colorado River’s total water allotment. With that water, farmers in the valley grow about 80 percent of the nation’s winter crops, including lettuce, broccoli, cauliflower, carrots, sweet corn, watermelons, cantaloupe, and onions. Farmers also produce alfalfa and Bermuda grass hay, which is used as dairy feed in the U.S. and abroad. (Related: “Exporting the Colorado River to Asia, Through Hay.”)

See also (from the agriculture debate topic): Water for What: California Oysters or Chinese Beef? (Economic Thinking, September 7, 2013).