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

2. How Much Water do People Use?
Liters of Water
Daily Drinking Water
2 – 5 Liters of Water
Daily Household Use
20 – 400 Liters of Water
1 kg of Grain (cereals)
1,000 Liters of Evapotranspiration (ET)
Vegetarian diet / day
Grain-fed meat diet / day
2,600 Liters of ET
5,400 Liters of ET
Growing food requires roughly one liter of water for every calorie - some 70 times more water than people use for domestic purposes.

3. What price water? Water “products” US$ / cubic meter
(1000 liters, or 250 gallons)
Retail water
Up to 10,000
Bulk bottled water
(5-gallon refillable)
Tap water
1-2
(California 2006: $0.85/m3)
Irrigation water
(=$12-24/AF)*
Tap water is a hundred times more expensive than irrigation water; bottled a hundred times more than tap.
* 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 scarcity: Not enough water.
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
Growth in withdrawals for irrigation though has led to another problem – stress on the environment. This global map shows environmental water stress. The areas in red represent those basins where withdrawals for human needs have stressed river systems to a degree that there is not enough water to meet other environmental functions.
The map shows a view of “environmental” water scarcity.
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
Water Source
Energy Intensity (kWh/AF)
Seawater Desalination
4,200
State Water Project
3,240
Colorado River Aqueduct
2,000
Local groundwater
570
Recycling
400
Local surface water 80

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

15. Evaluate Re-operation of 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 reported that there are now 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 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).
Size: 95 thousand m3/day (25 K gallons/day)
Tuas - Singapore - largest in Asia - finished in said to deliver at $0.50/m3
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.
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 thousand m3/day.

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 Rs/m3
Spices 12
Sugarcane 4.6
Fruits 3-10
Animal
Products
0.5-6
Rice 1.6
Grains Rs/m3
c.f. Industrial water productivity: 328 Rs/m3
Source: IWMI

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

21. From Venot, Courcier and Molle (CA RR 9)
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
Why can lessons from Australia help – similar history of irrigation development, leading to over-allocation that has occurred in many parts of India, such as Krishna basin. Both countries developed water for irrigation on a strong ag production and social equity agenda, which remains in India due to high population pressures and continued dominance of agriculture in the rural and national economy. Australia now on course to maximise productivity and economic efficiency as agriculture progressively accounts for less and less of total GDP.

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