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Our current parlor game -- guessing what excuse the Bushites will contrive for going to war with Iraq in time to make the mid-term elections a test of patriotism -- was getting old, so I figured it was again time to ponder our drought and one proposed cure, the Big Straw.
The Big Straw is the popular name for a project which would take water from the Colorado River near the Utah line, put it in a big pipe, and pump it uphill back into the mountains near the Continental Divide, where it could flow through existing reservoirs and tunnels to the thirsty lawns of the Front Range.
It would keep water in our Western Slope streams while supplying the metro area, so it's got something for almost everybody in Colorado. Downstream states might complain, but under a 1922 interstate compact, we have the right to some Colorado River water (400,000 acre-feet by some estimates, or enough for 2.5 million new residents) that we aren't using now.
Most current sources credit the Big Straw to Butch Clark of Gunnison, a former director of the local water conservancy district. He called it the Colorado Aqueduct Return Project, or CARP.
Immodesty compels me to point out that about 25 years ago, when I was editing the newspaper in Kremmling on the Western Slope and all manner of diversion schemes were in circulation (Vidler Tunnel, Windy Gap, etc.), I presented a similar proposal in a column -- build one big dam near Grand Junction and pump it back.
But I doubt I was the first, either. When I encountered Butch in Gunnison on Colorado Day, he agreed that this idea would likely occur to anyone who's spent more than 20 minutes thinking about Colorado water. Thus the true originator of CARP is unknown to history, and besides, I'm more than willing to let Butch deal with all the criticism that CARP has inspired.
One problem with CARP is that river water, by the time it reaches the state line, is hardly pure, so it would need expensive treatment to be potable. For another, think of the environmental litigation resulting from lower flows in the Colorado River through Utah and Arizona.
So it's time to think bigger than CARP. We need a plan that would put more water on the Eastern Slope, preserve streamflows on the Western Slope, and avoid hurting downstream states on the Colorado River. And as you might have guessed, I've got one.
It's not entirely original, of course. It was inspired by some bizarre proposal to pump hydrogen, rather than water, up the Big Straw, since hydrogen is lighter. But it takes a lot of energy to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen, and that would mean building an immense power plant somewhere.
So we'll start with somewhere off the coast of California, and we'll build the mother of all nuclear power plants on an artificial island, something like the platform for an off-shore drilling rig.
Since this could sit dozens of miles off-shore, it would be no threat to the public health -- if it did melt down, it would just sink.
The electrical output from this plant would go to hydrolysis of the seawater all around it. The oxygen and other by-products could be sold to help cover operating costs; we're after the hydrogen.
Hydrogen is much lighter than air, so balloons filled with hydrogen, even under considerable pressure, would float. Hydrogen is explosive, as you might recall from old newsreels of the Hindenburg disaster, but the result is just steam that turns into water. The prevailing winds go from west to east, so you should be getting the idea by now.
The balloons should float at about 16,000 feet -- too high to bother birds and small aircraft, and too low to annoy commercial jetliners.
They could be made of a plastic that was developed a few years ago. It had cornstarch as a major constituent and degraded after exposure to sunshine. Thus the formulation of the plastic could be adjusted so that after the balloons had been aloft for a certain time, they would degrade and emit small sparks that would ignite the hydrogen, and burn the organic balloon material in the process.
At 16,000 feet, it's always cold, so the steam from the hydrogen combustion would turn into water, and most of that water would fall to the ground -- and if the timing and wind had been calculated properly, the water would fall on Colorado. Of course, other states could participate, using the winds and balloon materials that would best assist them.
The main complication I've encountered in my preliminary calculations is that a 20-foot-diameter balloon, inflated to float at 16,000 feet, would produce only 10 gallons of water. Since there are 325,850 gallons in an acre-foot, and we want thousands of acre-feet, you can see that billions of balloons would be needed to guarantee a stable water supply.
But on the other hand, they could provide much-needed shade as they floated over the West, and besides, this would give the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation something big to do -- something even bigger and better than CARP.
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