Is this a good or bad idea?
sucks. Abbott is trying to placate is W. Texas billionaire buds.
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â Mayor Whitmire said that the governor called him to ask if he would be willing to potentially sell excess water from the city to the state in exchange, possibly, for money to work on the cityâs infrastructure needs.â
Does the Houston, Galveston even all gulf coast areas have reservoirs to collect water?
Desal plants close to the coast?
Bad idea; Houston will be hard pressed to meet its own citizen water needs in coming decades.
I think we need to be building more reservoirs to capture surface water. Been decades since Lake Conroe and Lake Houston were created. Glad the leadership back then had the foresight.
OTOH, we waste a lot of water on watering our lawns. That needs an attitude adjustment, but good luck on that.
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Everything west of I 35 was meant to be a desert.
Manâs hubris comes into play when shipping water to areas man wasnât meant to live in.
We have large cities in areas that are running out of water.
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Chris, we havenât created any new surface reservoirs since the 60âs and 70âs I think.
Desalination plants are very expensive to operate and energy intensive. I think they are option of last resort, minus some new technological whiz-bang breakthrough in that area.
The area, so far, has gotten abundant rainfall. Which we try to force Buffalo Bayou to do the heavy work of handling flooding. Maybe something can be done with Addicks and Barker dry reservoirs in the future ?
and golf courses
but that may be too much to accept
TrueâŠbut I understand some golf courses these days use non potable waste water.
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Lake Houston, Lake Conroe, Lake Livingston are all reservoirs for the Houston area.
Not quite all my Mexican golf courses customers have a desal plant for water and golf course.
Israel and Spain have a ton of desal plants.
Building reservoirs in the gulf states for West Texas and South Western States should have been done long ago. The Romans did it all over EuropeâŠthey still work today.
Lakes?
FLOODS.
Did not know that. These plants are probably relatively small and paid for by the golf courses ?
Trying to get an idea of how much Mexico gets from ground water, surface water, and desali plants is a bit challenging. Didnât spend a lot time trying to find the answer, but it appears to be about 2/3 groundwater and 1/3 surface for human consumption. Here is article on Mexico Cityâs water mix.
Are the golf course you speak of all along the coasts with their private desali plants ?
Follow-up: Looks like the largest desali plant in the US does 50 million gallons a day. For comparison, city of Houston uses
472 million gallons of water per day.
As the largest, most technologically advanced and energy-efficient plant of its kind in the nation, the Claude âBudâ Lewis Carlsbad Desalination Plantâs stability stems from an effective collaboration between Poseidon Water and the San Diego County Water Authority.
Itâs stupidâŠand thatâs coming from someone who sells centrifugal pumps for a living. This is someone that doesnât have a clue what the hell they are asking and someone else who doesnât have a clue saying âmaybeâ.
Itâs over 500 miles and 2500-2900 feet elevation differenceâŠUP. Thatâs over 1000-1250 PSI each drop would have to be pressurized to pump up that elevation and thatâs not including the 500 miles of friction loss in each foot of pipe which would add greatly to the energy requirements.
The construction costs would be enormous. The city is already spending BILLLIONS building new plants, upgrading old ones and building giant lines all over town just getting water form Lake Houston to the West HCRWA, North HCRWA and FBRWA and other customers locally. The cost to build lines that far and that far UP elevation wise and the multiple new pump stations that would be required to do the work could be a TRILLION dollars or more.
Then lets talk about the power to do thatâŠholy crap. Just pumping water across Houston the City uses pumps up to 4000HPâŠand these idiots want to go to Midland? LOL
Then you have to factor in the fact that the City has commitments to be the regional water supplier and those customers will be expanding in the future. Yeah. Not going to happen and its just a silly question.
You donât move water UP if you can help itâŠyou find a source higher than you (usually North) and let gravity do the work.
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Our desal plant in Carlsbad tookâŠ40 years to be approved. Right until the opening, the environmentalists were suing the city. Bud was Mayor forever.
All golf courses are private. Pretty much all desal plants are fromâŠSpain.
Fair enough then let me ask you on how the Romans were able to build aqueducts all over Europe and parts of Northern Africa. Mayans, Aztecs, Incas had similar technology.
They let gravity to do the flow work and the capacity requirements were small comparitively.
This would be massive pipes and massive pumps and motors. Theyâd be better off sourcing it from Canada.
But heyâŠIâll sellâem if they want them. But then Iâm moving cause I donât want my tax dollars to be so wasted.
They did let gravity work. Their aqueduct network was designed for small output to large outputs.
We have a water problem in America especially in the West because ofâŠregulations that goes against proper water output. /i have dealt with water agencies for years, By the way in California they are public but forâŠprofit.
Businesses can pay 10/20 times more from one city to the nextâŠ
Diaphrame, centrifugal pumps are used on every golf courses.
Again, Abbott will need a trillion dollar budget to get that water from Houston to Midland. Itâs just stupid. Each gallon of water could cost them 100-200 times more than what Iâm paying WHCRWA for water, that comes from the City of Houston, and is pumped to my local municipal district.
Theyâd be better off drilling more water wells and treating whatever brackish water they could find.
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I used to pay a steep monthly fee to NHCRWA for years at my old home. They are just now laying the pipelines in the 290/1960 area for surface water conversion. And the monthly fee was often the biggest charge on the monthly water bill.