Business
Cadiz Inc. Presents The Groundwater Banking Solution for California
To address climate change, California must make meaningful investments in water supply reliability LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Today, Cadiz Inc. (NASDAQ:
About this update from Cadiz, Inc.
[{"type":"text","content":"\nTo address climate change, California must make meaningful investments in water supply reliability\n\n LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--\nToday, Cadiz Inc. (NASDAQ: CDZI) posted on its website a new white paper discussing the opportunity for groundwater storage in California. An excerpt is reprinted below and a full copy of the paper is available at https://www.cadizinc.com/2020/09/29/the-groundwater-banking-solution-for-california/.\n\n“California’s water infrastructure was designed to provide protection from the fluctuations between wet and dry years that characterize its climate. Over the last century, engineers built a sprawling network of reservoirs and canals to store and deliver a consistent, reliable supply of water throughout the state. However, this infrastructure is not always capable of providing an adequate supply of water to the state’s growing population.\n\nStorage of water in California and the West has historically been principally obtained through the construction and operation of dams and surface reservoirs. As the need for additional storage to accommodate changing hydrology has increased, California has largely retreated from the construction of dams as the primary water supply strategy in California due to cost and environmental concerns. The last major dam built in Northern California was New Melones Dam in Calaveras County, in 1979, with a capacity of 2.4 million acre-feet. In 2003, the Metropolitan Water District built Diamond Valley Lake, an off-stream surface storage facility which holds 800,000 acre-feet at a cost of over $2 billion. The combination of the current environmental regulatory framework and limited public funding for large infrastructure projects without state and federal subsidies have made it extremely difficult to construct dams.\n\nGroundwater banking offers a number of benefits, including minimal surface disruption, no interference with beneficial uses of surface water and little to no evaporation. For example, the Colorado River’s largest reservoirs Lake Mead and Lake Powell lose as much as 500 billion gallons of water to evaporation annually – that’s five times more water than the city of Denver uses in one year. In California, there are limited studies on the total amount of water that evaporates from reservoirs and open-air water infrastructure. The CA Department of Water Resource...