http://www.railwayage.com/index.php/news/water-train-inc-seeks-test-project-partners.html?channel=00
Can the economics be made to work?
With the price per gallon of some of those bottled waters, it’s got to be close.
Just like with oil, the rolling pipelines are faster and more flexible than NIMBY prone pipes. It will be interesting to see if this works out economically. I can see some desparate farmers willing to pay for expensive water so they can make even a smaller profit than would be possible with no water. There is also a major glut of DOT-111s around, which should help the economics a little.
Bigger question to my mind - where are the water fields? Who has surplus water to sell?
All areas of the country are subject to draught from time to time. All I hear is that all the known undergroud aquifers are being overused at present.
Long term contracts or just in time delivery?
Would the price per gallon fluctuate based on …
Balt,
As to sources, billions of gallons of water are “wasted” from CA point of view by the Columbia River which forms the border between Washington and Oregon for several hundred miles. As a transortation problem, the obvious place to take the water is Wishram WA on BNSF and go BNSF all the way.
Buying and selling the water is a whole different kettle of fish which I do not know enough to comment on except that when I was a kid long ago and CA proposed a pipeline from the Columbia the pols in WA and OR were resolutely opposed. I would expect them to oppose ANY water exports to CA
As to price, no way can water be railed at a price Central Valley farmers are used to paying, probably by a factor of 100. For drinking water to smaller Central Valey towns which are dependent on well water, maybe. My sense of things is that it would be cheaper to write off the towns than haul water to them.
If CA wants more water they can take their own from the Sacramento River, but the environmentalist wackos and the Endangered Species Act prevent that. Delta smelt, don’t you know.
A native of Washington State.
Mac McCulloch
The environmentalists won’t let anyone have any from the Columbia, either. With the current drought, some areas of Eastern Washington don’t have a whole lot to spare either. Hope wherever you are the fires are not affecting you in any way, smoke or otherwise.
Really, by the time we get to shipping large amounts of water by rail it would be far cheaper to simply desalinate it on the coast and ship it inland.
Indeed, you won’t get any water from the Great Lakes, either. They’re already lower than they ought to be.
Never mind the economics of hauling the water from the midwest to the west coast.
Even when the Lakes were high in the '80s causing shore erosion, and the Mississippi was down, they would not let any extra water go thru the connecting canal at Chicago. The 8 shoreline states and 2 provences have signed a compact that there would be no water diversion without agreement from all 10 members. Presently there is a little more water diverted into the Lakes than out. There have been some small diversions of municiple water by cities on the edge of the basin, but they generally have to send the treated waste water back into the basin. Only about 1% of Great Lakes water is renewed per year thru precipitation.
“Water runs uphill towards money.” (from the book Cadillac Desert).
“Whiskey is for drinking; water is for fighting.” - Mark Twain.
“Water will be to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th.” (source unknown to me).
- Paul North.
(From Pennsylvania, where we generally have plenty of water - 40"+/- precipitation annually - something like 6 large water amusement parks within 40 miles of each other in the southern Poconos, and 3 large rivers that would dwarf most others out west - the Lehigh, Delaware, and Susquehanna).
[soapbox] Why not De-salination Plants on the Coast [banghead]
Excerpt from Fortune Magazine, May 15, 2000
http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2000/05/15/279789/index.htm
Water, Water Everywhere - Today companies like France’s Suez are rushing to privatize water, already a $400 billion global business. They are betting that H2O will be to the 21st century what oil was to the 20th.
By Shawn Tully
…From Buenos Aires to Atlanta to Jakarta, the liquid everybody needs–and will need a lot more of in the future–is going private, creating one of the world’s great business opportunities. The dollars at stake are huge. Supplying w
That supposed quote by Mark Twain about whiskey and water has been used frequently over the years whenever the subject of Western drought is discussed, but it’s considered to be a false quote by those in-the-know.
http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/06/03/whiskey-water/
http://twainquotes.com/WaterWhiskey.html
As for water by rail, some recent discussion can be found here:
http://www.railwayage.com/index.php/freight/class-i/drought-relief-by-rail.html?channel=50
If anyone thinks they can draw more than a cupful from the Colorado River Basin, they’re hallucinating. Lake Mead continues to drop, even with discharges from Lake Powell (which is also 'way low!)
The next river east big enough to show up on a satellite view is the Rio Grande, and it’s not all that impressive. So, on to the Mississippi…
Remembering my time in South Dakota, Missouri River water led to more than a few hostile broadsides between Upstream interests and Downstream interests. Getting enough to make a water by rail scheme practical would be surrounded by political minefields that would make the oil pipeline debates sound like a Sunday school discussion about which hymn to sing…
These folks might be better off trying to figure out how to move a big hunk of the Ross Ice Shelf from Antarctica to California (while saving all the melt water.)
Chuck (ex-California resident, but I left)
Thanks once again for that follow-up, wanswheel / Mike, and for the correction, too, Bruce.
- Paul North.
[^o)] With all the objections to get water from any source, how and where do the railroads get thier water in case of a ROW fire along a remote area?? There is a surplus of 111s tankers . Do they bypass the NIMBYS?? I remember Will Rogers saying in the 1930s that wiskey was for drinking and water was for fighting. Was that right??
Getting water to fight issues on your own property is not the same problem as ‘vendor’ selling water in bulk measures to another party in another section of the country for profit.
This is little different from fire departments hauling thousands of gallons of water to fight “regular” fires. Many’s the water authority who objected to said thousands of gallons of water being pulled from their system.
One even welded the “steamer” caps shut on their hydrants to limit how much water the fire department could get out of them.
I’m sure that folks who are sensitive about how much water is taken from their various bodies of water don’t complain too loudly when a firefighting aircraft takes a few thousand gallons to help fight a fire that might destroy their home.
Several railroads have fire trains - I don’t recall if it was here or on FB that videos of such trains at work recently appeared.
[:)] Tree you are right about water trains used for fire duty. KCCC a copper mine co. here in Az. had a fire along the R.O.W. of thier own mine R.R. used to haul ore. This is in a remote area to the smelter. They have thier own tankers and well.