The Ocean Bountiful? De-salination, de-politicisation, and binational water governance on the Colorado River

Williams, J.

Abstract

In May 2010 an extraordinary document was published. Although technical in nature and understated in terms of its political implications, this document in many ways represented the culmination of nearly a century of disputes on the Colorado River. Eighty-eight years after the signing of the Colorado River Compact, under which the entire annual fl ow of the river was (over)allocated, and 66 years after the United States and Mexico reached an unstable compromise over their respective entitlements to water, a number of the basin’s largest water users were looking for new ways to fi x intensifying disputes and shortages. Their conclusion: manufacture water to add to the Colorado River Basin. Four water agencies in the United States and four from Mexico collaborated in a feasibility study proposing the construction of a large seawater desalination plant located about 30 km south of the border at Rosarito Beach ( SDCWA, 2010 ). This international infrastructure project would be fi nanced by agencies on the Colorado basin on both sides of the border. Desalted ocean water would then be transferred to the US either by pipeline (as ‘wet water’) or through the transfer of entitlements to river water (or ‘dry water’). This way, water users as far inland as Las Vegas could fi nance coastal desalination in return for more secure access to Colorado water ( Shrestha et al., 2011 ). In other words, by effectively increasing overall supply in the basin, ‘binational’ desalination was proposed as a technical fi x for the intense political disputes that beleaguer water governance between the states on the Colorado River.

Citation

Williams, J. (2018). The Ocean Bountiful? De-salination, de-politicisation, and binational water governance on the Colorado River. In F. Menga, & E. Swyngedouw (Eds.), Water, technology and the nation-state (19-33). Routledge

• Acceptance Date: Jun 19, 2017
• Online Publication Date: May 23, 2018
• Publication Date: May 23, 2018
• Deposit Date: Jun 19, 2017
• Publicly Available Date: Nov 23, 2019
• Publisher: Routledge
• Pages: 19-33
• Series Title: Earthscan studies in water resource management
• Book Title: Water, technology and the nation-state.
• Chapter Number: 2
• Publisher URL: https://www.routledge.com/9781138724655
• Related Public URLs: http://www.academia.edu/33833612/The_Ocean_Bountiful_De-salination_de-politicisation_and_binational_water_governance_on_the_Colorado_River