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July 8, 2015

Ah, which of the many nutjob schemes, you wonder. The idea of turning Eagle Mountain iron ore mine into the "Eagle Mountain Pumped Storage Project" is the one we're talking about today.

I first heard of this project when they had a federal EPA comment session. The project developers had never even been on the property! No one had any objective information as to the permeability of the rock at the mine. There was no way this was ready for public comment, except for the public to say "It ain't ready." Worse, was that at that stage in their planning they were hoping to use the Salton Sea as a source for water! When you are finished laughing, consider that in addition to dealing with the declining quantity of water in the lake, they would have to pump the water from below sea level up to a height of, whatever, 1000 feet, 2000 feet above sea level. How much electricity could they possibly regain by dropping the water down a height that's far less than the height it was raised?

It went back to the drawing boards and the new idea is to pump water out of the aquifer there. So that makes it do-able, but I hardly consider that an improvement. Also, Mr. and Mrs. Charpied oppose it. Try to get around them. After filling from the aquifer, it is estimated the project would continue to draw 1,800 acre-feet of water per year from it.

[UPDATED with more accurate figures]

This article says average residential use in the Coachella Valley Water District averages 368.7 gallons a day. 368.7 gallons/day/capita for a full year comes to 0.41 acre-foot. 1,800 acre-feet, then, would the amount of water used by 4,390 people in the Coachella Valley. To put that in some kind of perspective, consider that our annual population swing from season to off-season is far larger than 4,390 people.

This is up in the news today because the developers have bought the mine from the corporation that owned it for Kaiser, paying $25 million. Maybe their goal is to come up with a plan that is more offensive than the landfill plan, so that even Congress is sufficiently horrified (yeah, I know, that's impossible) that they allocate the money to buy the land back to re-incorporate it into Joshua Tree National Park which, you can bet, would cost more than $25 million.

Filed under Coachella Valley | permalink | July 8, 2015 at 12:36 PM

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