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Company wants to tap Mojave's public lands for Southland water
Cadiz Inc. could realize $1 billion to $2 billion in revenue over the plan's 50-year life. Opponents say public resources are being used for private profit.
By Bettina Boxall, Los Angeles Times
May 15, 2012, 7:25 p.m.
CADIZ, Calif. – Three decades ago a group of businessmen pored over NASA satellite imagery as part of a worldwide hunt for large groundwater reserves they could tap to grow desert crops. They found the signs they were looking for here in the sun-blasted mountain ranges and creosote-freckled valleys of the Mojave Desert, 200 miles east of Los Angeles.
The group, which founded Cadiz Inc., bought old railroad land, drilled wells and planted neat grids of citrus trees and grapevines, irrigating them with water that bubbled out of the desert depths at the rate of 2,000 gallons a minute.
But by the mid-1990s, Cadiz had a new business plan: Sell water, not lemons.
The company is pushing ahead with a proposal to pump enough groundwater every year to supply 100,000 homes and sell it to urban Southern California at prices that could, over the project's 50-year life, reap $1 billion to $2 billion in revenue.
More: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-water-cadiz-20120516,0,391990.story
By Bettina Boxall, Los Angeles Times
May 15, 2012, 7:25 p.m.
CADIZ, Calif. – Three decades ago a group of businessmen pored over NASA satellite imagery as part of a worldwide hunt for large groundwater reserves they could tap to grow desert crops. They found the signs they were looking for here in the sun-blasted mountain ranges and creosote-freckled valleys of the Mojave Desert, 200 miles east of Los Angeles.
The group, which founded Cadiz Inc., bought old railroad land, drilled wells and planted neat grids of citrus trees and grapevines, irrigating them with water that bubbled out of the desert depths at the rate of 2,000 gallons a minute.
But by the mid-1990s, Cadiz had a new business plan: Sell water, not lemons.
The company is pushing ahead with a proposal to pump enough groundwater every year to supply 100,000 homes and sell it to urban Southern California at prices that could, over the project's 50-year life, reap $1 billion to $2 billion in revenue.
More: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-water-cadiz-20120516,0,391990.story
This project will drain the Mojave desert producing extreme dry conditions that will result in dust bowls.
Diane Feinstein's letter: http://www.feinstein.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/press-releases?ID=910cd240-f5af-e0bd-c7b0-956dad4200e0
3 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
A: Draining desert groundwater to sell to people for even more profit.
Still, not many people will care seeing how - as we've been told so many times on E/E - there's no need
to worry what happens to a desert is there? It's not as if it has an ecosystem or anything ...
