Increasing water storage, both above and below ground, has become a part of the conversation as the state grapples with the critically dry conditions. At the April meeting of the Delta Stewardship Council, the issue took center stage as Council members heard from three different panels. In this first panel, Jason Phillips, Deputy Regional Director for USBR, provided an overview of the remaining CalFEd projects, laying out what it will take for the federal government to reach a decision point on reservoir studies that have been long underway; Ajay Goyal, Chief of the Statewide Infrastructure investigation branch at DWR gave an update on the North of Delta Offstream Storage option (more commonly known as Sites Reservoir) as well as DWR’s System Reoperation Study; and Dr. Jay Lund, Director of UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences provided an overview of the state’s existing water storage, as well as the reviewing some of the benefits and drawbacks to building additional water storage projects.
In the second part, posting tomorrow, Thad Bettner, General Manager of the Glenn-Colusa Irrigation District, will give an update from his perspective on the Sites Reservoir, Ara Azhderian, Water Policy Administrator for the San Luis & Delta Mendota Water Authority, discusses the importance of water storage his agency and its water users, and Mario Santoyo, Assistant General Manager for the Friant Water Authority will explain why the Temperance Flat project is needed. In part three, posting on Thursday, Sue Simms from the California Water Commission and Danielle Blacet with ACWA give the preliminary results from a statewide survey on potential and planned water storage projects.
Jason Phillips, Deputy Regional Director, Mid-Pacific Region,Bureau of Reclamation
Jason Phillips began by giving his background, noting that he previously managed the Klamath Project for 3 years, and previous to that, he was the Program Manager for the San Joaquin River Restoration Program. Then prior to that, he was Reclamation’s Program Manager on the CalFed Bay Delta Program where his first job with Reclamation in 2001 was to initiate the feasibility study on the Upper San Joaquin storage investigation.
He said that today, he would be providing an update on where Reclamation is in getting to some key decision points. “I was reading that I was to address what’s it going to take to get these projects implemented,” he said. “I’d like to talk more about that, but I think the key that we are facing is the decision point on whether we’re going to implement anything, relative to surface storage. The way in which that decision is made is going to significantly drive how these projects and when these projects are implemented, so I am going to focus on my thoughts on decision points and where we are in that process to get there.”
Councilman Hank Nordhoff asks Mr. Phillips to compare surface storage to underground storage, and to give the advantages and disadvantages of each.
“There’s pros and cons to both,” replied Mr. Phillips. “I think one thing that we’ve found in the last ten, fifteen years is that there are less challenges politically as it relates to implementing groundwater storage type projects. They are important to continue to pursue, but whether or not they would take care of the needs of the system would be something that we all probably have different opinions on based on the analysis that’s out there.” He noted that he was around for the very wet years in 1990s and the 2000s when there was a lot of water that could not be captured by groundwater storage. “Whether or not that’s important water to capture for the system is subject to different value judgments, I think.”
He said he wasn’t going to advocate for surface storage today, but he said he does feel its Reclamation’s charge and responsibility to lay out the technical aspects of what constructing surface storage would look like, what the effects would be and what the costs would be. “Then the administration, Congress, and local sponsors are really going to need to decide whether that is an additional component to the system that’s needed,” he said. “As a matter of policy within Reclamation, I would agree 100% that there are a lot of tools to solve the needs of the water community, those being recycling, demand reduction, groundwater storage, and conjunctive use of water, and Reclamation, to the extent that we can with budget limitations, has stepped up to help finance and partner on as many of those as possible.”
“We’re not necessarily judging whether or not we should do one or the other,” he said. “We already know where it makes sense to reduce demand or recycle water or conjunctive use it, we should do that. The question really is in addition to that, is additional surface storage a necessary component or not on the system.”
In terms of the federal decision making process, what it means to get to a decision point on something like new surface storage is to complete a feasibility study, he said. “There are a lot of procedures and guidelines on how the federal agencies are to go about putting together a feasibility report and how we are to do our calculations, cost estimating, and alternatives – all of that is spelled out in quite a bit of detail for us,” he said. “But another component of getting to a decision point is the Environmental Impact Statement, so that we have adequately disclosed the effects that such a decision might have and that the public has an opportunity to tell us how good or bad it would be. Then we have an opportunity to address those effects, so those are the two key components before we can get to a decision point. Once we get to that point, we then seek guidance from the Administration through Interior and also the Office of Management and Budget to take a position on whether or not the decision would be to support or not moving forward with construction of a project.”
But a decision point also involves non-federal decision making, which is a different process, he said. “It can use the same information, but it’s necessary to have non-federal entities – state agencies, local or both – make decisions also on whether or not to move forward with surface storage,” he said. “That may require things such as environmental impact report, and there’s also the possibility that additional analysis might be required, more or different than what was necessary for the federal government to make a decision. It might even be necessary to modify some of the alternatives that were looked at. … There have been some challenges getting to a point where we think any non-federal entity is ready to make a decision, and I can just tell you that it will be critical that there’s a strong position from non-federal entities on this, relative to moving forward with implementation. If there are not, then the federal government is not going into this alone, by any means.”
Photo by Bureau of Reclamation
He then ran down the status of the studies. “In terms of enlarging Shasta Reservoir, we already submitted publicly a draft feasibility study and a draft Environmental Impact Statement, and that process for the EIS has already gone through public comment period,” he said, noting that right now the schedule is to have the final Environmental Impact Statement and feasibility study complete by December of 2014. At that point, they would be ready to make a decision.
Mr. Phillips is asked if expanding Shasta would be built with federal money alone. Chair Randy Fiorini indicates that California legislation prohibits the state from participating in construction costs at this time. Mr. Phillips adds that the project would be repaid by a non-federal entities that are beneficiaries, and that they have been in discussions for more than a decade with the state and with CVP districts about that. “What I’m highlighting right now is how near we are from a federal standpoint from getting to where the non-federal entities will need to make a decision as to whether we’re going to move forward with surface storage in the state or not.” He reiterated that the federal government is not going to advocate for this. “It’s a tool that the multi-agency groups over the past 20 years have said we need to look at, and so I think we’re getting finally to a point where those decisions will be made.”
Regarding the Upper San Joaquin or Temperance Flat, a draft feasibility report has been submitted publicly, and the Environmental Impact Statement is scheduled for August, 2014. Both are scheduled to be final by July of 2015, and then would be ready from a federal standpoint for a decision, he said. The Sites Reservoir or North of Delta Offstream Storage is in a little bit of a holding pattern right now, and it would be best to wait for that Thad Bettner (on the second panel) who is representing the local JPA to talk about that, Mr. Phillips said.
The pressure that Reclamation has been getting is to get the feasibility reports done, and that’s our priority, he said. “We have not been getting pressure to not do them nor have we been getting pressure to do them any differently, it’s been get them done, so we can have the right discussion to finish, either make a decision that we’re going to move forward or we’re not.”
Currently, it appears that Shasta and for Temperance Flat will be determined to be feasible projects, at least in the way the federal government does its calculations, which might be different from how others might pencil it out, said Mr. Phillips. “This does not mean a decision would be made to implement them, it means they would be considered feasible projects,” he said. “It could change between the draft and the final with the input and reviews of others, but there’s a need to have non-federal decisions coming in at the same time. If there is not a non-federal decision for go or no-go, I would highly doubt that the federal government will even make a decision. They will be in a holding pattern until that is figured out.”
Councilmember Phil Isenberg asks if the summary of the federal position is that unless there are other financial participants to pay the costs, they will not be going ahead on their own. Mr. Phillips acknowledges that in order to move forward, Congress would have to authorize Reclamation to do that, and he doubts that would happen without full support from the right non-federal decision making groups and how that cost-share would happen.
“Different people are going to see feasibility differently,” said Mr. Phillips. “I’m sure we’re going to hear one of the panel members who has generously marked up the fact sheet that I sent out, who will have views on feasibility and that’s good, that’s healthy, and that’s expected. Different groups are going to have different ways that they look at whether a project is feasible,” he said, pointing out that their task is to follow the guidelines and principles that are required as a federal agency. “It’s not our job to try and make something appear feasible or not; it’s ‘here are the formulas to use, use them, here’s the process, follow it,’ and then the outcome is what it is. As a local entity, as an economist representing a state agency or whatever, there would be different ways in which feasibility of a project is determined, and that’s healthy.”
“The impression I have now is that the federal government is not going to put money there unless there’s local ‘participation’, and I think our Chairman said that there’s no way that the state can participate if it’s a federally funded dam in the beginning,” said Councilmember Hank Nordhoff.
“Local participation could be a water district signing a long-term contract to repay the cost, federal money could be used up front,” replied Mr. Phillips. “That would be current policy and current law.”
- For more information on the Upper San Joaquin Storage Investigation (more commonly known as Temperance Flat), click here. (Note: look for links to documents on the left hand side of the page.)
- For more information on the Shasta Lake Water Resources Investigation (more commonly referred to as the Shasta Dam raise), click here. (Note: look for links to documents on the left hand side of the page.)
Ajay Goyal, Chief of the Statewide Infrastructure Investigations Branch, Department of Water Resources
Ajay Goyal, Chief of the Statewide Infrastructure Investigations Branch for the Department of Water Resources, next gave an update on the North of Delta Offstream Storage project (more commonly known as Sites Reservoir) and the System Reoperation Study. He began by saying the administrative draft of the Environmental Impact Report, the preliminary engineering design report, and the cost analysis for the North of Delta Offstream Storage project will be released next month and those documents will supplement the information in the progress report released by Reclamation about three months ago.
The objectives of the NODOS project are to improve water supply reliability, and ecosystem, improve water quality, and provide flexible power generation; in addition, it would provide recreational opportunities and emergency storage, he said.
The project, located 14 miles west of the town of Maxwell, will take water from the Sacramento River using two existing canals and a new intake structure in the river and a pipeline would be constructed, said Mr. Goyal. There are three alternatives, a 1.2 MAF reservoir and two 1.8MAF reservoirs; the main difference between the three is whether the pipeline would be one-way or two-way.
“This project would provide water supply for multiple purposes, for water supply reliability, water quality, and for ecosystem,” said Mr. Goyal. “The total yield for these three purposes, on annual average, would be about 400,000 to 500,000 acre-feet; for dry and critical periods, it will be about 500,000 to 600,000 acre-feet.”
“The Sites Reservoir would provide about 300,000 to 400,000 acre-feet of water volume towards ecosystem actions under average years, and in dry and critical years, that volume is going to go up to 400,000 to 500,000 acre-feet every year,” he said, noting that this is in addition to yield he mentioned previously. “These actions include improving cold water pool conditions in Shasta, Oroville, Trinity, and Folsom, and improving flows in Sacramento River. In addition to this, we will reduce some diversions at GCID canal and provide the water from the reservoir during months of migration of sensitive fish.”
“Having a reservoir of this size north of the Delta will increase storage north of the Delta, anywhere from 1 million to 1.4 million acre-feet, which is about 14% increase on average,” he said. “During dry and critical years, this increase will be about 800,000 to 1.1 MAF, and some of the water will be held in existing reservoirs to provide cold water pool improvements, so this is going to help increase the reliability of system of CVP/SWP system.”
Mr. Goyal said the performance of the reservoir was tested with the existing conveyance and with the proposed new Delta conveyance, with and without climate change. “We found that the reservoir would perform equally well under all conditions,” he said. “We will be able to divert on average 500,000 acre-feet from the Sacramento River, so it shows the reservoir is quite resilient, it’s robust, and it will be able to perform for a long time to come.”
“The costs of construction, which includes contingencies, construction and design contingencies, ranges from $3.6 to $4.1 billion, and as per the comparison of benefits to cost, the benefits outweigh costs with a ratio of about 1.3 to 1.4,” he said.
The administrative draft of the EIR, the engineering design and the cost estimate report will be released next month, he said. “The reason we are releasing the administrative draft is because the state at this time does not have funding to response to public comments on a public draft,” he said. “So we are going to share this draft to the public next month in hopes that we will have some partners who are willing to work with us in taking this to a public draft and final.” He said if they do get funding, the public draft could be released in about 6 to 8 months, with the final report following a year later. The design of the project would take two to three years, so the earliest this project could go to construction would be four to five years from now, he said.
- Note: Subsequent to Mr. Goyal’s presentation, the NODOS (Sites Reservoir) documents were released. Click here to view them.
Mr. Goyal then gave a briefing on the System Reoperation Study, which was authorized by legislation in 2008. “It directed the Department to identify potential options of reoperating the state’s flood protection and water supply systems using existing surface storage facilities in connection with groundwater storage,” he said. “The objective of the study is to simultaneously improve water supply reliability, enhance ecosystem and improve flood protection. And legislature did give us some direction to do this by integrating systems or reoperating the systems in connection with groundwater storage or totally modifying conveyance systems.”
They have completed two phases of the study, he said. They have developed a plan of study, identifying 24 reoperation options and concepts, and after that, they met with owners and operators of large surface reservoirs, groundwater districts, and the fish agencies, he said. Out of that, four strategies were developed which are summarized in the phase 2 report, the Strategy Formulation and Refinement Report. They are currently working on a detailed analysis on the four strategies, and after that, there will be a reconnaissance study.
The first strategy is to reoperate Shasta in conjunction with groundwater storage, so they are looking at forecast-based operations and at floodplain inundantion, as well as trying to improve ecosystem conditions by improving stream flows, geomorphic flows, and stream temperature, he said. “Since part of the biological opinion at Shasta is doing a pilot study of fish passage into the reservoir, we are thinking of doing a hydrologic study illustrative that if fish were to have access to cold water pools, and assuming that fish agencies are going to relax temperature conditions, what benefits could it provide,” he said. “We’re going to study this under existing Delta conveyance and new Delta conveyance.”
The second strategy is a similar study for Oroville, looking at conjunction with groundwater storage. The third strategy is looking at integration of CVP/SWP systems, and the fourth is looking at reoperation of Lake McClure and the New Exchequer Dam, which is operated by Merced Irrigation District, he said.
- For more on DWR’s System Reoperation Study and to view previous reports, click here.
Dr. Jay Lund, Director of UC Davis Center for Watershed Sciences
Dr. Jay Lund began by reviewing the main points of his presentation. “Water storage is part of a very large system with a lot of components that vary across a very diverse state,” he said. “We have a lot of different uses in a lot of different places; they vary from year to year. We use a lot of storage in California – we have 1400 regulated dams. A lot of really small ponds, as probably 80-90% of the surface storage is in the top 20 of these reservoirs.”
“Not all storage is equal,” he said, likening water storage to refrigerator. “If you have a refrigerator but nobody stocks it with food, there’s no food in there,” he said. “If you have a reservoir and there’s no water flowing into it, you’re not going to have water in it. I think sometimes it’s missed in the public conversation that really one of the biggest limitations we have on being able to get benefits out of storage is making sure that there’s enough water to fill these surface water or groundwater reservoirs. It’s like your refrigerator, more than anything else.”
We are thinking about using storage differently than we have in the past, said Dr. Lund. “I think certainly this is a challenge for me as a classical reservoir operations theoretician, because we’re thinking of all kinds of environmental uses and conjunctive uses that are pretty exciting, but very different.”
Storage is also very expensive, he pointed out. “Even many of the groundwater storage activities that we look at are going to require considerable expensive rearrangement of the plumbing, so I think we should look at all of these options in this very large integrated system with very cold and calculating attitude, and so that’s the main thing I want to encourage here.”
He then presented a slide with a map of statewide precipitation and another map depicting the state’s extensive infrastructure. “These slides illustrate the tremendous extent and physical integration of this very large and complex system in a very large diverse and variable hydrology that we have within California and similarly with water demands,” he said. “We have about 42 MAF of surface water storage capacity in the state; certainly a lot of that is empty right now. We have over 150 MAF of essentially active useable groundwater storage. We have a vast conveyance network; people around the world marvel at what we have for being able to move water around in California. 9 million acres of irrigated agriculture, 38 million people and not enough fish, and so I think that summarizes a lot of it.”
“Primarily, storage moves water in time,” he said, presenting a slide with diagram of the 1997 flood at Folsom. “We moved that flood peak in time so that it was less damaging when we released it out the bottom; that’s a very important role for storage in California. We’ll forget it easily this year but I did want to mention it.”
Dr. Lund then presented a plot of modeling results of groundwater storage statewide over the past several decades, and noted that we tend to have two different kinds of storage. Seasonal storage is indicated by the ‘little’ wiggles on the graph, he said. “Wet season, dry season, refill a little bit, pump down a little bit,” he said. “The big wiggles are droughts, so we have annual cycles of storage use in surface water reservoirs, also in groundwater, for seasonal storage, and in the case of groundwater, we will have 10 to 15 years of drawdown refill cycle, but not always in every part of California. The third cycle of storage timeframe is really groundwater mining, and we have a lot of that in some parts of California. Fortunately for most of the state, we’re relatively in balance, but in some places in southern part of the Tulare Basin and the west side we’re really seeing that go down quite a lot.”
He then presented sliding showing the total capacity of water storage for the state. “This chart gives you a perspective of the total amount of capacity we have in the system, how much of it is used for seasonal storage in normal years, and how much we would tend to use over the course of a drought, and then compares that with the total amount of proposed storage that we saw in the previous projects,” he said. “The graphical intent of this slide is to show you storage alone is not going to solve California’s water problems. It might be useful, in many different ways it could be useful, but it’s not a silver bullet. There aren’t really any silver bullets in this system.”
“Not all storage is created equal,” he said, presenting his next slide. “These are the results from a little simulation model I made that show how much additional water supply deliveries you get from a little larger reservoir capacity on a hypothetical stream. You’ll notice that the first acre-foot of storage you build, basically you can fill that every year, and you can move it from the wet season to the dry season and make full use of it. You see the numbers on that scale go up to 1.5; in some hydrologies, you might fill it and empty it several times during the year. However, as that reservoir gets larger and larger, you can’t fill that up very often, because there isn’t enough water flowing into that reservoir. … What’s the most firm yield you can ever get out of a reservoir of infinite size? It would be the average flow that flows into it, and I think we have to really bear that in mind as people propose larger and larger reservoirs, you get less and less out of them in terms of additional water supply.”
“We’re thinking of using storage differently,” he said. “Certainly we use it for cold water habitat for fish. A lot of our salmon populations now spawn and rear at elevations where they never spawned and reared in their natural life before we built the dams. Winter run salmon, they never spawned at that elevation, it would have been too warm in every year for thousands of years, so we are reoperating the environment, in a sense, and this has become a major aspect for how we manage water and potential benefits for storage.” There are also pulse flows for habitats and floodplain inundations, as well as regional and statewide conjunctive use, he said, adding that there’s been a lot of market creativity in the last couple of decades that has been very interesting to see.
Dr. Lund directed them to the handout from Reclamation with the fact sheet in the back, noting that he couldn’t resist doing some calculations in the back of the room. “If you look at the Shasta cost numbers, if you take the $1.1B construction cost and you divide it by the capacity, you end up with a construction cost of about $1700 per acre-foot of storage constructed,” he explained. “If you now compare the new storage capacity to the average annual delivery, you get that the average annual delivery is 12% of that new storage capacity, so if you go back to that declining curve that I had, that tells you that we have a fair bit of storage on that reservoir compared to the demands and the flow, so the yield is 12% of the storage that you build. If you take that construction cost and annualize it at 5%, that construction cost of that reservoir is $87 per acre-foot every year, in perpetuity. If you take that construction cost and you assign it entirely to water supply which is not entirely fair because it’s being proposed for more than just water supply, but if it was only for water supply, it’d be $725 an acre-foot, which might explain why, for water supply, you’re not seeing a lot of people come forward, but again it’s not entirely fair, because there are other benefits that would presumably come from this project. And you can go through that kind of calculation for each of these projects, they are pretty simple calculations, and find that as water supply, this is fairly expensive water, but it isn’t the only purpose that we have in mind for these things.”
Dredging sediment out of reservoirs is not necessarily an answer, he pointed out. “If you assumed it costs $10 a cubic yard to dredge sediment out of a reservoir, that works about to be about $12,000 an acre-foot. So it is about ten times the cost to build a reservoir by digging than by piling up dirt on the dam.”
Councilman Larry Ruhstaller asks that if we’ve already taken the good sites for dams, what happens when the dams fill up.
“There’s a wonderful engineering textbook on water resources engineering that has a sentence in there, ‘the ultimate fate of every dam is to be filled with sediment,’” Dr, Lund replied. “We don’t live that long, for most of them. And we have had some small dams that have filled with sediment, and it is a problem from place to place. Fortunately in the Sierras, there are large granitic formations, the rate of sedimentation is relatively low. So it will be hundreds if not thousands of years for that sedimentation to become appreciable.”
He then presented a chart with showing the value of added reservoir capacity under both the historical climate and a warmer drier climate for some of the existing dams in California. “These are just some modeling results we’ve done that show the economic value that the model estimates of additional storage capacity at each of these reservoirs under a range of climate conditions, a range of Delta export conditions, and a range of urban water conservation conditions, 0% and 30%.” He noted that the line below Folsom divides north of Delta versus south of Delta.
“If you end water exports or if you have reduced water exports, what that does is lowers the value of storage north of the Delta because you can’t get that water down to where the high value is in the system,” he said. “It illustrates how storage is connected intimately with conveyance and where the economic water demands are. If you conserve water for those Northern California reservoirs, it doesn’t make too much difference under the historical climate. It might decrease the value of storage a little bit. It’s sort of like having your teenager graduate high school, leave the house, so now you don’t need as big of a refrigerator. If the climate gets drier, the value of the storage in the North is higher, because you want to capture all the water that was spilled before. It now has higher value.”
“South of the Delta, it’s a little bit different story,” he continued. “Pardee on south, if you end exports, the value of storage increases because you don’t want to lose any of it. If you conserve water, generally the value of storage goes down and if you have a dried climate, the value of storage generally go up. There are three exceptions to that, however. If you look at New Melones, New Don Pedro and Grant Lake, you’ll notice that with a warmer, drier climate, the value of storage will actually go down. And why is that? Because it’s so dry, you can never fill it. You can rarely fill it, even at the existing capacity, and so I think that illustrates how we always have to be careful about making sure we have enough water to fill the storage that we’re considering, be it surface water or groundwater, for that matter.”
There are some good reasons to have more storage in California, he said. “You might get more water supply or more flood control out of it,” he said. “We have some increases in water demand, certainly on the environmental side. It gives you more flexibility for integration. As a theoretician of water storage, as a reservoir operator, if you gave me free extra storage, I would always take it, if it was free. But does that mean it’s a good investment? Not always. With a warming climate, it’s very valuable for us to have additional storage because of the seasonal warming; in other cases, it’s not so valuable because our reservoirs are already fairly large and a few weeks of acceleration in the runoff, we can already capture most of that already. In terms of climate warming, we also are going to have some really interesting problems with water temperature and salmon and other cold water fishes.”
There are also reasons not to build more storage, he said. “We have this phenomena that’s the more you build, the less the marginal value is,” he said. “It’s expensive; there might be alternative opportunities for that money, and certainly in many cases, environmental impacts, so I think we have to weigh these things carefully on an individual case-by-case basis. We have a very large and diverse state; I would be surprised if there isn’t any place in California that merits construction in storage, but I’m pretty sure that most proposals for storage probably aren’t going to pencil out or these probably already would have been done.”
For more information …
- For more information on the Upper San Joaquin Storage Investigation (more commonly known as Temperance Flat), click here. (Note: look for links to documents on the left hand side of the page.)
- For more information on the Shasta Lake Water Resources Investigation (more commonly referred to as the Shasta Dam raise), click here. (Note: look for links to documents on the left hand side of the page.)
- For more information on the North of Delta Offstream Storage Project (more commonly referred to as Sites Reservoir), click here.
- For Ajay Goyal’s power point presentation, click here.
- For Jay Lund’s power point presentation, click here.
- For the staff report for this item, click here.
- Click here for the meeting agenda and all meeting materials. This is agenda item 9.
For part 2 …
- Find out what the beneficiaries of these potential storage projects have to say here: An update on potential new water storage projects, part 2: Potential beneficiaries talk about Sites, Temperance Flat and other storage projects
