Climate change is making extreme weather conditions
worse, making famously dry regions, even drier, and areas that usually receive tons of rain
even more prone to flooding. This costs us hundreds of lives and millions
of dollars in damages every year. But what if we could turn this negative aspect
of climate change into something positive by just pumping water away from regions prone
to flooding to regions prone to drought before a flood comes? That’s precisely what we’re looking at
today. I’m Ricky, and this is Two Bit da Vinci. Image Source [3]
I’ve often thought about desalination as the ideal solution to alleviate the need for
freshwater supply near the coastline, and I made a video called “Why aren’t Desalination
Plants everywhere,” which recently started to surge (link in the description). But then I thought, climate change hasn’t
only brought drought to places like Southern California, where I live. It has also worsened storms, leading to massive
floods that send millions of gallons of fresh water to waste in the ocean. We have flood management infrastructure in
place like dams and reservoirs designed to hold as much of the excess water that’s
coming in, but when these systems are already at full capacity and a massive storm comes
by, there’s no other choice but to open the dam doors and let the water out, flooding
the lowlands downstream and spilling all that freshwater into the ocean. This got me thinking… Instead of spending hundreds of millions of
dollars on a desalination plant, doesn’t it make more sense to just pump water out
of those full reservoirs to regions prone to drought, before the storm hits? That way, when the storm comes, there’ll
be enough capacity in the reservoir, avoiding the flood and making use of all that freshwater. The answer to this question is more complex
than it seems at first glance and there are several things to consider. Let’s start with where all the water is. Water is the lifeblood of every town, city,
farm, and ecosystem on Earth. However, even though 71% of Earth’s surface
is covered in water, fresh drinking water is very scarce. In fact, we only have access to about 0.5%
of the Earth’s total water. If we rolled up all the freshwater in all
of the rivers and lakes into a single sphere, like a gigantic water droplet, it would only
be about 34.94 miles (56.2 kilometers) wide [4]. It feels strange to think that you could drive
by all of the Earth’s drinkable surface water in only half an hour, doing 70 mi/h
(112.7 km/h) and it really puts things into perspective. Image Source [4]
Besides being scarce, fresh drinking water is also very unevenly distributed around the
world, and in some places, it’s very hard to come by. Luckily for us, we’ve known how to move
water around for hundreds of years. Take California for example, the most hydrologically
altered landmass on the planet and an increasingly water-thirsty state that is running out of
water. California currently houses nearly 40 million
residents, which is almost 12% of the entire US population. Of those 40 million residents, about 23.8
million live in the driest parts of the state in Southern California, where most of the
water demand is, while most of the water comes from the northern third of the state. To make this work, California has multiple
aqueducts that bring water from the Colorado River and northern California to the south. But why is California running
out of water? [Ad Break] There are
three main reasons: Number one, most of the precipitation in California
throughout the year falls as snow in the northern Sierra Nevada mountains. Because of climate change we’re getting
far less snow during the winter each year. The snowpack acts as a natural reservoir that
feeds all the streams, rivers, and lakes as temperatures rise and the snows melt. Less snowpack means less available water during
the warmer months of the year. Number two, Lake Mead, which supplies one-quarter
of California’s water and is a lifeline for Southern California, is drying up. The lake that provides up to 4.4 million acre-feet
of water each year to this state alone is at its lowest historical water level since
1937. And since we’re drawing more water from
it than what the Colorado River can put back in, levels are still falling. Number three, only about 40% of California’s
water goes to domestic and industrial use, while the other 60% goes to farming. And farming is BIG in California! The state is the breadbasket of the country,
single-handedly producing 13.5% of the total US agricultural production, including one-third
of America’s vegetables and two-thirds of all fruits and nuts. California also produces 80% of the world’s
almonds, all of it in a 5.68 million acres (23 thousand km2) stretch of farmland in the
fertile Central Valley region that is only a little bigger than the state of New Jersey
and a tad smaller than New Hampshire. Very fertile land, yes, but also very dry. As the American population increases, so does
the demand for food from California´s farms and, therefore, the demand for water. Severe droughts like the one we’re going
through now have devastating consequences. According to a study by UC Merced, in 2021,
the ongoing drought caused losses of upward of $1.1 billion in the agriculture industry
alone, along with 14,634 lost jobs across all industries [5]. Add to that the indirect material and human
losses caused by wildfires and related disasters, and we can easily see just how bad things
can get, and they’ll continue to get worse. So what can we do about droughts? The city of Las Vegas can point us in the
right direction. Through smart policies, water conservation,
recycling, and reuse strategies, the city was able to reduce its water consumption by
26%, even though its population has increased by over 750,000 residents in the past 20 years? [6]. Success stories like these are why I’m working
on all sorts of home tech to better utilize and eventually create water on my net zero
home series. Feel free to check out some of those videos. Links in the description. However, while we could cut down consumption
in the big urban hubs, we can’t cut down food production in California; there’s just
too much at stake.So, there must be another way to solve this issue without looking for
more sources of water. This is where the next key point of this video
comes in. Floods! Apart from all the human and material losses,
floods spill millions of gallons of fresh drinking water to the ocean, water we could
use to alleviate droughts elsewhere. You see, the way things are set up now in
most places like California is through flood control systems made up of a series of canals,
alluviums, dykes, dams, reservoirs, or holding tanks to store or divert extra water when
it rains heavily. But what if we did things differently? What if, instead of thinking of ways to improve
flood control by building more dams (which are crazy expensive), we took a more proactive
approach and switched to flood risk management? Here’s how this would work: Suppose you know that a severe storm is about
to hit, and you realize that all of your flood control reservoirs and extra holding tanks
are full. So, you start pumping water out of those reservoirs
in a controlled way in preparation for the extra rainfall. But you don’t simply release it downstream,
but pump it to a neighboring state or wherever there is a water shortage. That will help you kill two birds with the
same stone. The empty reservoir (or reservoirs) will be
able to accommodate the extra water when the storm hits without opening the floodgates,
thereby avoiding the flood itself and avoiding losing all that precious water. This could prove to be a new form of water
management that works similarly to an energy microgrid, by balancing water supply and demand
to make the most of this precious resource when it falls naturally as rain. Now, in order for this to work, there are
two major obstacles we’ll need to address: The first is knowing in advance when there’s
going to be heavy rainfall and where, so we can mitigate the risk by pumping water out. We´ll also need to know if there’s enough
capacity to store all the water we need to pump out at the desired destination. This is by no means a simple problem. Still, it’s one that Nvidia, the world’s
leading GPU manufacturer and a force to be reckoned with in Artificial Intelligence Computing,
is ready to tackle. I talked to Karthik Kashinath from Nvidia,
where they’re working on an amazing machine learning and AI project called Earth II, a
Digital Twin of the Earth designed to study the Earth’s climate. This project
is particularly relevant to today’s topic, but I’ll let Karthik himself explain what
it’s all about. INTERVIEW GOES HERE
So, through Earth II and the Omniverse Platform, Nvidia is able to tackle the uncertainty behind
the weather by making extremely fast predictions with superb resolution, good accuracy, and
stretching further into the future than ever before. By coupling these predictions with digital
twins of our hypothetical “hydro-microgrids” to optimize water distribution and flood risk
management, we can practically ensure the system’s success, provided we have the necessary
infrastructure in place to move water around as needed. This brings us to the second major obstacle. The cost of the infrastructure’s construction
and operation. This is the single biggest hurdle, and it’s
not an easy fix. In fact, Australians tried to do something
similar at the beginning of the 20th century, but the project never took off, primarily
because of costs. The project was called The Bradfield Scheme. Its aim was to take flood waters from the
coastal regions of Australia and pump them inland, where it would allegedly transform
the arid terrain into a sort of green Oasis with milder, cooler weather through a sort
of rainforest effect. The project was turned down after several
independent assessments concluded that costs were prohibitive and that the plan wouldn’t
work either way. But what if we already had the gross of the
infrastructure in place, but we just didn’t know it yet? Well, it turns out we do! As we move away from fossil fuels, we could
repurpose oil and gas pipelines when we don’t need them anymore and use them to pump water
instead. This alone could make such a project not only
feasible but comparatively cheap. Now, the first thing that pops into most people’s
heads when thinking about reusing oil pipelines for pumping water is water pollution. Oil is full of carcinogenic aromatic compounds
that are hazardous both to our health and the environment. This means that we’d need to clean them
pretty well in order to be able to reuse them as aqueducts. So, is this even possible? Can we clean oil pipelines well enough to
repurpose them for pumping clean, fresh drinking water? Or is this just another pipedream? (get it? Pipe… dream… oh, never mind!). The short answer is yes! And, in fact, it’s already been done before. According to Pipeline Equities, a company
that engages in pipeline mergers and acquisitions as well as pipeline salvaging, a “30-mile
section of [an oil pipe] line was recovered and shipped to Vietnam to be used as a water
transportation pipeline near what is now Ho Chi Minh City,” where it would likely serve
for an additional 40 years after being repurposed! [7]. Ok, ok, I know what you’re thinking. Cleaning 30 miles of pipe is one thing. That’s peanuts. What about cleaning over 2,000 miles of pipes
free of oil? It turns out that engineers already thought
of that. They use special tools dubbed Pipeline Inspection
Gadgets or PIGs to clean and inspect pipelines all the time, and we could adapt them to wipe
pipes clean of oil. If this still doesn’t convince you, though,
there are also plenty of natural gas pipelines that have never come into contact with crude
oil and would therefore require almost no cleaning whatsoever. The point is, we have options, and plenty
of them without having to build the infrastructure from scratch. Image Source [8] There are around 3 million miles (4.83 million
kilometers) of oil and natural gas pipelines across the nation, and they already connect
America’s most important cities. By reusing pipes that are already there, we
eliminate the need to salvage and remove all those pipelines when they’re decommissioned,
and we eliminate the need to build new aqueducts, avoiding, among other things, further damage
to ecosystems, landscapes, and more. Now, I can almost hear you asking, how much
would it cost to run this thing? This would be very hard to assess since the
cost of pumping water around depends on topography and many other factors. If we need to pump water up a hill, we’ll
need bigger pumps that represent a higher upfront cost and consume more energy, making
its operation more expensive. But we can at least get a rough idea of how
much energy consumption this would imply by looking at the energy costs of water in Southern
California. Here, more than 50% of the water comes either
from Northern California 400 miles away or from Lake Mead. Pumping water these long distances requires
approximately 3,000 kilowatt-hours per acre-foot of water pumped (2.432 kilowatt-hours per
cubic meter). That’s the same amount of energy required
to charge a Tesla Model 3 standard range 60 times, or roughly the energy that an average
Californian household uses in 5 months, and is enough water for that same household for
6 to 12 months. Energy costs aside, the savings in damages
from preventing floods and droughts year after year could be enough to offset the costs of
building and operating the system. Worldwide flood damages in 2021 produced combined
economic losses of $82 billion, $41 billion of which were in Europe [9]. And we already saw how much last year’s
drought cost California’s economy (about $1.1 billion). Ok. There’s only one thing left for us to analyze
regarding our pipeline-repurposing ambition. How much water could we pump through the currently
available pipelines, assuming we were able to convert them completely to aqueducts? We’ll take the notorious Keystone pipeline,
famous for pumping one of the world’s dirtiest fuels, tar sand, from Alberta, Canada, to
Texas’s Gulf coast. Image source [11]
This 2,687 miles (4,324 km) long, 36-inch (91.44 cm) wide stretch of pipe can pump almost
600,000 barrels (roughly 100,000 m3) of tar sands per day, at about 150°F (65.6°C). At this temperature, the tar sand’s main
component, bitumen’s viscosity will be close to 1,100 centipoises, which is over 1000 times
higher than water’s. Source [12]
Therefore, if we replace tar sand with water, we should be able to get flow rates about
1,000 times that of tar sand at the same operating pressure. So, those 600,000 barrels per day of tar turn
into 600 Million barrels of water per day, or 77,336 acre-feet per day (95.4 million
m3/day). That means we’d be able to pump enough water
in a day from Alberta to Texas to cover the annual water demand of close to 80,000 average
Californian homes, or the daily consumption of close to 30 million homes, single handedly
covering all of Southern California’s water demand. Will we have to pump that much water out? I don’t know. That depends on how much rain we get. But what’s important is that we can if we
ever need to. So there you have it! Predicting floods with Nvidia’s Earth II
platform and pumping water from areas prone to floods in preparation for heavy rainfall
to areas in drought, while repurposing natural gas and oil pipelines could be an amazing,
economically-feasible, and smart way to Make better use of an already scarce resource
Avoid the devastation caused by floods, and Alleviate the effects of drought in dry but
fertile lands like the Central Valley of the state of California. But what do you think? Did we miss anything when exploring this new
solution? Shout out in the
comments section below, as you always do! Thanks for watching!
