3/2/2024 0 Comments Cadiz water conveyance project“Our project hypothesis is that we construct a well field here,” he says, pointing at a point on the scale model. It takes centuries from the water falling at the upper end of our watershed and then follow a migratory path to down where we are,” he says. “None of the water we are going to take fell on the earth in the last 100 years. He says the 50,000 acre ft of water a year the company would extract would “otherwise evaporate, which is far more of a waste than people drinking it”. Slater says his plan is environmentally “benign” and will conserve water that at present is lost from the aquifer via evaporation from dry lakes. “The bottom line is that right now we need more responsibility in how we use our water, not less.”ĭavid Lamfrom, the director of the National Parks Conservation Association’s California desert and wildlife program, said he believed that “full examination of the Cadiz Inc proposal will once again prove that it is unsustainable and that it will harm our desert national parks, communities, businesses, and wildlife”. She believes it could be threatened by the Cadiz project. “I remain concerned the Cadiz project could damage the Mojave desert beyond repair and believe the BLM decision to deny the right of way is the right one,” said the veteran Democrat, who in 1994 help create the Mojave national preserve. “I know it will work,” he says, dressed in an purple open-collar Burberry shirt and jeans.Ĭadiz has plenty of enemies - environmentalists, local ranchers, protectionists and Native American tribes - but none more fierce than Senator Dianne Feinstein. He says the logistics of the project are pretty simple, and that the company could start pumping enough water to supply 400,000 people by 2017. He accuses the BLM of misinterpreting 19th century railway law, and says: “If we can’t get them to follow the law, we’ll do what we need to do, pursue administrative and judicial remedies.” Slater, who was a water rights lawyer for 30 years before taking over as Cadiz’s CEO in 2013, is not giving up on the railway pipeline without a fight. It means Cadiz will have to seek federal approval for the pipeline, which will trigger a long and expensive environmental impact review. In the latest setback, the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) ruled that the company cannot lay a 43-mile pipeline alongside an existing railway line to transport water to the Colorado river aqueduct and on to the cities of the Californian coast. The company’s share price spikes every time a drought emergency is declared, but the shares have still lost more than 80% of their value since 2007 because of repeated regulatory setbacks in Cadiz’s quest to tap the eastern Mojave aquifer. “In a condition of scarcity, all water, all water that’s reliable, becomes more valuable,” Slater says. A decade ago the price was less than $100, he says.ĭrought is good news for Slater and Cadiz. Slater says water is worth as much as $2,200 an acre ft in San Diego, where it is shortest supply. The price of water in California has been steadily rising, as has demand from a growing population, while the state struggles with four years of severe drought. “People see this development as a private sector initiative and they have a very visceral, negative reaction to that,” Slater says. His problem, however, is convincing politicians, regulators and the public that pumping water 200 miles from the desert aquifer to LA is a good idea. That works out at $2.4bn over the 50 years of the company’s water extraction deal with San Bernardino County. Slater has already got contracts to sell the water for $960 an acre ft (the amount of water it takes to cover an acre of land in a foot of water). The company biggest investors, some of whom have been waiting for Cadiz’s water to flow to LA for more than a decade, include the New York hedge fund Water Asset Management and Crispin Odey’s Odey Asset Management in London. The holdings were built up by the company’s founder, Keith Brackpool, a British horseracing impresario, who came to the US after admitting having breached financial disclosure laws in the UK in the 1980s. Cadiz owns water rights associated with 45,000 acres of land along route 66, about 75 miles north-east of Palm Springs.
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