Much of the water in the West is transported across vast geographical areas by large infrastructure projects known as interbasin water transfers.
Much of the water in the West is transported across vast geographical areas by large infrastructure projects known as interbasin water transfers. Two of these projects in particular make up 85% of all energy-related greenhouse gas emissions associated with U.S. interbasin transfers — one in Arizona and the other in California — according to the new research published this week in the journal Nature Water.
The project in Arizona is known as the Central Arizona Project and in California it’s the State Water Project.
“You hear a lot about these big projects and how much energy they use,” said Avery Driscoll, a doctoral student in CSU’s Department of Soil and Crop Sciences and the paper’s lead author. “We were curious how much of that was actually attributable to agriculture and what the emissions impact was.”
In gathering and analyzing data from 2018 to 2022, Driscoll excluded the portions of interbasin transfers that are used for non-irrigation sources such as municipal water supplies. During the five years of data Driscoll reviewed, approximately 41% of the Central Arizona Project and about 34% of California’s State Water Project went to ag. The analysis also accounted for hydropower generated by these projects.
Read more at Colorado State University
Photo Credit: OrnaW via Pixabay
