Dan Klymchuk wants to capture water as it pours into the ocean and then pump it back up over the centre of North America all the way to Texas.
It might sound crazy, but the researcher says what’s crazy is allowing trillions of litres of fresh water to pour into the ocean while other parts of the continent are parched and would pay for it.
“Our business case suggests Manitoba has the potential to conservatively earn $1.33 billion US annually from the sale of just one percent of the fresh water flowing into Hudson Bay,” Klymchuck wrote in a June 2008 report for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
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“Earnings of this magnitude would end the province’s perennial have-not status.”
He said selling water would earn the province royalties, and the Americans would pay the up-front capital cost, so there’s little downside for Manitoba.
Water would be extracted only at the mouth, and Hudson Bay is not short of fresh water. He said there is evidence that the bay does not produce enough fish to support a commercial sea fishery because the water is not salty enough.
Klymchuk acknowledges there hasn’t been a massive upsurge in popular demand for building a continent-wide water pipeline since the report was released.
“At this point, it is safe to say that, as a whole, Canadians are negative toward bulk water sales. However, it is for reasons that are unrelated to any objective facts,” Klymchuk said in an e-mail interview.
“So far, Americans have shown little interest in the idea, focusing rather on conservation and desalination as the answer.”
However, Klymchuk is unperturbed by the opposition and lack of interest because he sees major economic gains from the sale of bulk water. He said Texas and the U.S. southwest are some of the biggest producers of agricultural products, but are short on water. Northern Manitoba, on the other hand, pours trillions of litres of fresh water into the ocean every year.
Ground water reserves are being depleted in Texas, and California uses aqueducts to move water hundreds of kilometres from its northern mountains to feed its irrigated fruit and vegetable industry. Those areas will either have to reduce production in the future or bring in more water.
California is considering desalination (removing salt from ocean water) as a way to meet future needs, but Klymchuk said such projects would be more expensive in the western United States than building and operating a pipeline from the mouth of the Nelson River in Manitoba to a mid-point in Texas.
He said the immense capital cost of the project, estimated at $52 billion Cdn when the Frontier Centre first considered it in 2001, could be covered by diverting a small part of the money that the U.S. spends on agricultural subsidies.
Water users would cover the $700 million per year cost of power for pumping the water, which would also require a 50 percent increase in the generating capacity of Manitoba Hydro.
Klymchuk said many Canadians oppose bulk water sales because they believe they would drain interior areas of water, but this proposal would take fresh water only as it enters the ocean.
As well, he dismissed fears that rivers such as the Red have occasionally dried up in the past and that not enough water would flow into Hudson Bay. He said the bay empties a vast area of North America and droughts in one region would be balanced by water coming from other regions in the watershed.
Klymchuk also said keeping the water in Western Canada and using it for irrigation is not the best way to put it to work because the short, cold growing season makes the resource harder to exploit than in hot, dry areas such as the U.S. southwest.
“Farmers are growing whatever makes the most sense today and would be growing water-intensive crops if it made sense,” he said.
“As it stands, all water-intensive crops cannot take our climate. Needless to say, we have a vast oversupply of water that could be used in the future.”
Klymchuk said water sales could put billions of dollars into the coffers of the Manitoba government to pay for the ever-increasing cost of social programs.
