John Brumby must have enjoyed the temporary respite. Rather than talking about attacks on Indian students, or public transport, he got to open something – a pipeline that takes water from the Goulburn River (a major tributary of the Murray) to supply Melbourne.
The pipe itself has been highly controversial. Traditionally, Melbourne’s water has come from south of the Great Dividing Range, rather than the Murray-Darling Basin to its north. To provide water for the pipe, the government proposed to fund “water saving projects” like lining irrigation channels, further downstream in the Basin. 225 gigalitres of water was to be saved, which was to be shared equally between the pipeline, irrigators, and environmental flows.
Unfortunately, the water savings projects aren’t completed, while the pipeline is, and Melbourne remains under tight water restrictions. So the government is scrambling round to find water allocations to fill the pipe:
As the water was turned on, the government was still unable to fully explain where this year’s 75 billion litres would come from.
This year water will not be exclusively supplied by savings in upgrades in ”Foodbowl” irrigation.
The pipeline will take a third of water saved in the Foodbowl project in future years, but this year water will come from several contentious sources.
From an economic and environmental point of view, piping water to Melbourne should be a no-brainer, and obtaining the water a doddle. 75 gigaliters is a tiny fraction of the amount that will be extracted by irrigators this year. Urban water users pay hundreds of times more for their water than irrigators do. So pay the irrigators triple the going rate, buy double the allocation required and send the surplus down the river as environmental flows. It makes far more sense than the current lunacy of stressing the Murray-Darling, and starving Melbourne of water, to grow grapes that nobody even wants to buy.
and I believe they made the pipe able to go both ways, to future proof it for whatever reason.
I’m in no sense knowlegable about water infrastructure (not that stops anyone round here), but I couldn’t get my head around Ken Davidson’s plan to pump water from tassie. on the face of it it seems quite absurd, but what would i know?
http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/economic-rationalists-have-hijacked-water-policy-at-our-peril-20091004-ght2.html
That 75 gigalitres will extracted from Eildon Dam whether or not there is water available, irrigators generally must wait until June or October to know whether they will get all or part of their allocations. Announcements like “secure water licenses have 4% of their allocation” are regularly heard in Autumn and some rice irrigators pay $36,000 in water rates for licenses that haven’t had water allocations for a decade. There are fears that Melbourne will take Eildons reserve supply held back to flush algae blooms and prevent the water storage turning saline.
Not only grapes are grown under irrigation but so is 60% dairy product, oranges, apples etc
What about pumping water from Carrum Dows to Hazelwood to cool the coal fired electricity power stations. Currently they use frsh water from LaTrobe storages.
Wilful, I don’t doubt it’s technically feasible, but Davidson’s cost estimates are likely to be back-of-the-envelope affairs. As far as I can tell, an undersea freshwater pipeline of that magnitude is completely unprecedented, and that makes back-of-the-envelope cost estimates very woolly indeed.
“knowlegable” WTF, wilful? Not dyslexic, merely lazy.
billie, the govt looked very closely at using class a recycled water for the generators, instead of desalination, but apparently the numbers just didn’t stack up, and the generators said absolutely no way, no thanks, we’ve got secure property rights to the water we’ve got, we’re not risking anything new.
We shouldn’t be attempting to grow rice in the Murray-Darling. I only buy imported rice.
Notionally the pipeline deal is very fair, there is absolutely no way Melburnians should or would otherwise subsidise irrigated agriculture north of the divide more than they already do, however it’s my view that most of the water accounting is completely bogus, and much of the water ‘lost’ and subsequently ‘saved’ is either double-counted or never counted. A lot of lost water is effectively environmental water (albeit not in iconic areas), while getting more accurate metering systems than detherige wheels is hardly some massive efficiency.
Billie
That won’t happen because Peter Ryan, leader of the Agrarian Socialist Party, has said that any drinking water saved by using recyled water to cool power stations should stay in Gippsland.
Victoria – a United State
On the Tassie pipeline, I understand that the Tassie Government will not guarantee the water supply indefinitely, which makes the pipeline infeasible. Our Kennith keeps banging on about it anyway.
There are no rice irrigators in Victoria, therefore rice irrigators are not affected by the water taken from the Murray system (all water for rice irrigation comes from NSW).
From memory, I recall someone saying that the Israelis had found that if you have to pump more than 200km it’s cheaper to desalinate. Tasmania must be about 500km away from Melbourne.
Then there is the lift factor. I recall someone saying that the lift from Wivenhoe to Cresswell to supply Toowoomba is the highest in the world. The project overview puts the lift at 235m, but Wivenhoe is 45m above sea level and Toowoomba is 691. I’ve no idea what the lift factor would be from the source in Tasmania to Melbourne. Maybe it’s downhill, but there’s down and up and there would be a lot of friction in the pipe.
I would be interested to know just how much lift is required to get water from where it is pumped from the Goulburn River [near Yea I believe] over the Great Dividing Range to Sugarloaf Reservoir.
Using Google Maps it looks like the Goulburn River near Yea and Sugarloaf Reservoir are at approx the same elevation. But it also looks like the water, in either direction, would have to be lifted approx 200M and maybe more. That will consume a fair amount of energy. Was a tunnel out of the question to eliminate most of that lift? It would only be needed for a fraction of the total distance to avoid the peaks.
Regarding Davidson’s proposal, I think he was implying it could rely largely on gravity feed thanks to the Tasmanian topography. I don’t know about the ‘friction factor’ mentioned by Brian@8 maybe it is a problem, maybe not. I am not sure it can be dismissed out of hand.
Closer to Melbourne, there have during Melbourne’s current water shortage been floods, or near floods, twice that I recall in Gippsland involving the Mitchell River. I believe the old MMBW had plans to dam the Mitchell River and have a gravity feed tunnel through to the Thompson Dam. This would seem more feasible than Davidson’s Tasmanian solution.
Then of course there are the recycling and storm-water capture proposals.
I have difficulty seeing the energy intensive desalination and Goulburn River pipeline as being the best options.
A dam on the Mitchell is an environmental nonstarter.
Gosh, if only there was some mechanism for letting buyers and sellers of water to sort all this out without the complicated middleman system. Where they could freely come to agreements on prices and volume. In such a system the water would go to whoever wanted it most, as expressed by payment.
A bit like the ancient greek agoras. Let us call this hypothetical system ‘the free agora’.
The ‘water pipeline visionaries’ crop up from time to time to much eye rolling from the water supply engineers in the various Govt Departments that have to pay lip service to taking them seriously. An example of this is where bringing water from the north of Australia where it is just ‘going to waste’ out to sea, is a hardy perennial that deserves a megalitre of glyphosate. (Why it is ‘going to waste’ when it is probably part of an ecosystem that needs a bit of fresh water from time to time eludes me for the minute).
Physically it is possible to pump water these distances, but at about $1/kilolitre sale price of water compared to $1000-1500/kilolitre for gas immediately clues us in as to why long gas pipelines are feasible and water pipelines that length are risible, unless there is a huge gold mine (in the case of Kalgoorlie and Coolgardie literally) at the end.
Undersea pipelines are even more expensive. So unless one is willing to pay about one thousand times as much for one’s water – forget it. Daft. Oh, and did I mention the energy requirements? Wind power? If you want to cover the whole of Tasmania including the national parks and get rid of that pesky old growth forest to put up enough windmills…well, maybe.
Kenneth Davidson has costed a no-pump gravity feed water pipe from Tassie to Vic at $3 billion.
The desal plant costs at least that or more.
wbb: would you invest in an engineering project on the basis of Kenneth Davidson’s costings of it?
I’d prefer to have more than one opinion, Robert. But if the $3 billion figure is any indication then it is interesting to compare it with the cost of the desal solution.
What exactly was Davidson’s argument with the GHD estimate of $12 Bn?
Other than he didn’t believe it, and that a much smaller pipe over different depths and longer distance cost less?
Pipe costs escalate massively with diameter. Not only do wall thicknesses go up in proportion to the diameter (to maintain safe wall stress levels) but the weight goes up with the cube of the diameter roughly. ie double the diameter and it’s eight times the weight per meter. Then handling and trenching underwater go up disproportionately.
Still, if he has a detailed explanation why GHD are wrong, it would be an interesting debate.
Maybe Europeans just do these things cheaper than we do.
The Langeled undersea gas pipeline
1200km of 1066mm pipe
$4 billion
$3 million per km
Sugarloaf water pipeline
70km of 1750mm pipe
$750 million
$11 million per km
124 Gigalitres per year capacity
Tasmania-Victoria undersea pipeline
350km
?
?
wbb, a number of points.
The 70 km pipeline at 1750 dia.
If you want to have a longer pipeline, then you need higher pressure or bigger diameter or both. Head loss is proportional to the length (roughly for our purposes), so for the same head loss for a 500 kM pipeline it would proportion out at 13000 diameter. (If we used the same criteria as were used for Sugarloaf). Not gonna happen.
Unit costs go up wildly with diameter – usually cubed or higher. Unit costs go down with length.
So the langeled pipeline is far smaller in diameter than the required Tas – Vic pipeline (which means that the Tas – Vic pipeline unit cost would be higher by well over the cube of the diameter, plus a smaller increase in unit cost due to the shorter length).
Not sure if anyone has actually ever built an undersea pipeline with the right diameter and pressure rating that would be required. Gas pipelines tend to be smaller in diameter.
So, like I said, it would be nice to see the GHD workings.