Evaporated water is wasted water, the company says.įor three decades, Cadiz has operated a small agriculture business, growing lemons, grapes and melons on as much as 1,200 acres. Cadiz says it intends to “save” the millenia-old water by capturing it before it reaches the dry lake beds. The company sued Cadiz in 2012 over its Cadiz Valley Water Conservation, Recovery and Storage Project. Bulldozers dig troughs through the sand, which fill with water that then evaporates, leaving the brine behind.
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“It’s so corrosive it’ll take the skin off your arm,” said Terry Foreman, a senior hydrogeologist for CH2M Hill who has worked on the Cadiz project.įor the past century, Delaware Tetra Technologies has mined the dry lake beds for salt and other minerals. So dense is the sodium chloride – with smaller amounts of calcium, magnesium and sulfate – that the hypersaline water can burn your skin. The water beneath is a pale, bright Caribbean blue, which looks the perfect color to cool your feet or dip a sweaty hand, especially in the hundred-plus degree heat of the Mojave Desert. The project: Intercept the groundwater before it reaches the dry lake beds and pipe it 43 miles underneath an existing railroad track to the Colorado River Aqueduct, and from there to Southern California showers and lawns. A third iteration of the project costing $200 million could break ground as soon as 2016, assuming lawsuits fall in Cadiz’s favor.
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A speculative play in the water market turned into a series of highly litigated proposals in the 1990s and 2000s. started buying up 45,000 acres of land in eastern San Bernardino County. But, like many grand water schemes, this one is attracting its share of detractors. Mining desert groundwater, as far-fetched as it may seem, seems among the most plausible additions to the region’s existing sources of imported water: the Colorado River, and State Water Project – which transfers water from Northern California to Southern California. Environmentalists question the wisdom of tapping new sources – such as drawing fresh water from the ocean – when so much is currently wasted. There, it evaporates into the dry air at a rate of 32,000 acre-feet a year.Īs California’s drought enters its fourth summer, government officials and enterprising citizens are looking further and further afield for new water supplies. Thousands of years pass between the time snow falls on the 7,000-foot-high mountains in the Mojave Desert and when the water rises to the sand’s surface about 600 feet above sea level. About 175 miles east of Riverside, billions gallons of water percolate through 1,300 square miles of dirt to a pair of dry lake beds.
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