California Has Bold Plans to Address Water Security and Boost Supply — but Will They Succeed?

Reservoirs aren’t the field of dreams: Even when we build them, the water doesn’t necessarily come. Statewide reservoir storage plunged to 69% below average by the end of September 2022, on the heels of the state’s driest three-year stretch on record.

Proposition 1, approved in 2014, set aside $2.7 billion to fund water storage projects. The three projects eligible to receive funding, which include the controversial Sites reservoir, would increase storage capacity by more than 1.75 million acre-feet, enough to supply more than 6 million households.

How much they would increase the water supply available each year, however, is unclear. Lengthy droughts deplete reservoir storage, and “the average volume of new water from these facilities is small, and costs are high,” the Public Policy Institute of California (PDF) warned in 2018.

Many reservoirs in California do double duty as flood control which means that space for potential floods must be maintained even in dry years.

But state, federal and local water managers are working with scientists on strategies to reduce flood risk while reserving more water in California’s reservoirs. Water managers at Lake Mendocino, for instance, are incorporating new weather forecasting tools to update decades-old guidelines governing when to hold onto water and when to release it. The strategy increased the lake’s storage by nearly 20% in 2020, with most of the water going to agriculture (PDF).

Recharge groundwater basins

California’s underground aquifers can hold vastly more water than its reservoirs — between 850 million and 1.3 billion acre-feet of capacity below ground, compared to about 38.1 million acre-feet above ground, according to the Department of Water Resources.

Local districts have been carefully tending groundwater for decades. The Orange County Water District, for instance, pumps highly treated water underground to keep seawater at bay and to replenish local drinking-water stores. In the Southern San Joaquin Valley, water suppliers funnel surface water into underground storage at the controversial Kern Water Bank, largely for agricultural irrigation.

The Newsom administration has called for increasing groundwater recharge yearly by at least 500,000 acre-feet. But ongoing challenges remain to widespread groundwater recharge.

“There’s a lot more empty aquifers than there are unclaimed sources of water in California,” said Michael Kiparsky, Water Program Director at the Center for Law, Energy & the Environment at UC Berkeley School of Law.

It’s not just about the amount of water, Kiparsky said, it’s also about the logistics. California will need to ensure there’s enough capacity to quickly move flood flows to the right basins for recharge during California’s brief rainy season.

Unless that bottleneck is widened, plans to end the overdraft of depleted aquifers in the San Joaquin Valley are calling for more groundwater recharge than is likely realistic, according to the Public Policy Institute of California (PDF).

Control greenhouse gases

Climate change is worsening droughts and is expected to fuel even more extreme swings from dry to deluge. The Newsom administration warns that climate change could deplete state water supplies by up to 10% by 2040 (PDF).

Curbing use of fossil fuels globally can blunt some of the severity of future droughts, researchers reported. But even California, which prides itself on its green image, will need to pick up the pace to meet state goals for cutting greenhouse gases.

“Much larger reductions are needed to reach the ambitious 2030 target — an additional 40% reduction below the original 2020 limit,” Air Resources Board Chair Liane Randolph said in July, 2021. 

California’s clean air regulators are ramping up their efforts in the state’s updated climate roadmap. But parts of the plan, including its reliance on technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or capture it from smokestacks, remain contentious.

Reform water rights

California’s water supplies are governed by an arcane and complex rights system based on the Gold Rush-era philosophy of “first in time, first in right.” Generally, those with the oldest claims are the last to be cut back during shortages.

Environmental justice advocates and legal experts point out that this system of seniority is plagued with inequalities and based on a history of violence and systematic exclusion of Native peoples and people of color. Legislative analysts also warned more than a decade ago (PDF) that, in some cases, water rights are “oversubscribed,” meaning they allocate more water than is available.

The latest drought prompted California officials to periodically curtail water rights across the state as supplies dwindled. But a scuffle in the Shasta Valley, when some ranchers temporarily refused to comply, revealed that the state’s enforcement muscle is slow to flex and hamstrung by restrictions on penalties.

Water law experts have been pushing for changes (PDF). Recommendations include increasing funding to help Native tribes and other underrepresented groups participate in state water proceedings, and granting state water regulators more authority (PDF) to act swiftly when people violate curtailment orders.

A water board spokesperson said that they are developing pilot projects to collect real-time data about water diversions, and are considering “adopting regulations that would allow for curtailments of water rights in years when there is not a declared drought emergency.”

More cloud seeding and solar panels

A couple strategies sound like science fiction, but they are already being used and hold some promise.

Santa Barbara County has been practicing cloud seeding for decades — releasing tiny particles of silver iodide into the atmosphere during certain storms to coax water vapor into forming ice crystals and falling to earth. Researchers say it’s difficult to evaluate how well it works, partly because precipitation is so variable, but one analysis pointed to increased precipitation of 9% to 21% in two target areas.

The Desert Research Institute has led this effort, seeding clouds in California’s San Joaquin Valley, Nevada, Wyoming, Montana, Colorado and Australia. In Wyoming, its 10-year experiment in mountain regions increased snowpack from winter storms by 5% to 15%.

One Central Valley town has turned to another unusual strategy: solar-powered “hydropanels” that draw water vapor from the air. In Allensworth, a historic Black town, hydropanels are expected to produce enough water to fill nearly 44,000 bottles over their lifetime — although not enough to replace the town’s contaminated groundwater.

These panels have been used around the world in places that lack clean water, including a Navajo reservation in Arizona, and in Australia, India and Kenya. Actor Robert Downey Jr. even included them when he built his eco-friendly house in Malibu.

Pipe dreams: pipelines to the Midwest and towing icebergs

Some strategies are as outlandish as they sound. Actors and political candidates alike (PDF) have proposed piping water from wetter places, like the Mississippi River. Some have talked for decades about tapping into the Great Lakes.

California has a long, storied history of moving water — some say stealing — from one place to another within the state. It’s even inspired at least one movie.

“If history has taught us anything,” Idaho state Sen. Brian Donesley, a former Angeleno, told the Los Angeles Times, “it is that when Californians get thirsty, they will use cash, the law, raw political power and, if necessary, the point of a gun barrel to satisfy their thirst.”

But nowadays there are many legal and logistical roadblocks that would stop California from taking water from Alaska, the Midwest or Canada. For one, other regions would be unlikely to allow it. Diverting large volumes of water from the Great Lakes, for instance, is prohibited without the approval of all eight states in the U.S. and two provinces in Canada under a compact signed into law by President George W. Bush.

Pipe dreams of pipelines have been floated often enough that the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation evaluated them (PDF), reporting that a pipeline to the Mississippi River, for instance, would cost billions, use up a lot of energy to pump the water, require decades of construction and face a quagmire of legal and policy issues.

Even California lawmakers have eyed icier reaches of the world for new water supplies: In 1978, the Legislature passed a resolution calling for federal support of a pilot program (PDF) to tow icebergs from Antarctica.

Towing icebergs and filling up tankers with freshwater from Alaska drew mentions from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, as well as this diplomatic verdict (PDF): These ideas “have either significant technical feasibility challenges or significant questions regarding their reliability.”

A small iceberg, for instance, would contain only 250 to 850 acre-feet of water and would require new port terminals, pipelines and pumps to transport the melted ice to a reservoir. The process would take “at least 20 years.”

As for tankers, even the largest would hold only about 80 million gallons — barely a drop in the bucket for California.

Still, the ideas endure. At a press conference in summer 2022, Newsom fielded a question about whether pipelines and tankers taking water from faraway places might be the quickest ways to get more water to California.

“What you’re talking about are break-the-glass scenarios,” Newsom answered. ”And I assure you, we have some more novel ones than the one you even approached and that are more interesting. But that’s for later.”

We’re still waiting.