The bit about water one day being more valuable than land seems to be half truth and half someone who has never lived on the otger side of the US where we have too much water.
Farmers in south central VA work to keep their land dry because it rains here everyday and we average about 4" a month.
If the article is correct that water will become more valuable than oil, then of course you're gonna ship that water to California. The economics will mandate it.
Now whether the article is correct about that prediction is another question. It's an understatement to say I'm skeptical. Desalination plants produce expensive water, but not that expensive...
I'm skeptical that this "water more valuable than oil" prediction will come to pass.
Currently, a thousand gallons of freshwater from a desalination plant costs between $2.50 to $5 to the end consumer in the US. By contrast, a thousand gallons of West Texas Intermediate crude oil costs around $2500. And oil is becoming more scarce as we burn through it.
I would agree. Oil only exists in certain locations and is extremely difficult to get, so it necessarily has to be extracted by corporations and shipped around the world.
Water, on the other hand, covers a lot of the surface of the planet, and even if you're not standing by a lake or river almost anyone can dig straight down and with an hour or so of work you're likely to find water. The places where this is not true are fairly rare, and the easier solution is to move the people to where water is instead of moving water to where people are. Filtering water to be drinkable is just so much easier than getting crude oil out of the ground.
And worst case scenario, even if you have to move water from one place to another because the best farmland doesn't have water, basically anyone with a tanker truck and a hose can supply water pretty cheap. There's just not enough barriers to entry in the water business.
The only way I see water becoming more valuable than oil is if oil demand falls so far that it's practically worthless.
Perhaps a different way of looking at it, is to consider the cost relative to how much we use. For instance, I use one or two gallons of water every time I flush the toilet, and I could certainly look up my water bill to see how much I use overall. But I rarely go through a gallon of gasoline per day in my car.
The main cost of water is probably energy, so the two are probably tied together. Water is less dense in energy terms, thus harder to transport if it can't be obtained locally.
This makes me think that depleting local water sources will have more of an effect on geographic distribution of populations, than oil.
Central valley would still be more sensible than the rest of the USA even with more expensive water. There is a reason so much is grown there despite lack of water. So much less to worry about with good soil, temperatures, less pests, less disease. In fact the last two are partly because of the lack of water.
Urban water usage is a rounding error compared to industrial and agricultural water usage. It will always make more economic sense to move water to cities than to move cities to water. The same is not true for agriculture and industry, and the two topics don't belong in the same discussion.
The temperature itself already makes LA a pretty sensible location. It also takes resources dealing with weather and extremes of temperature it lacks. Doing the math an aquaduct pipeline from a wet region could ironically be the cheaper option compared to heavier use of heating and air conditioning.
> If the article is correct that water will become more valuable than oil...
Yep, your skepticism is warranted. This is unlikely in the US for common infrastructures, in the large scale, over a long (next generation) period, for standard municipal water (still an under-recognized engineering achievement IMHO). Potable and crop/livestock waters (the kinds that civilizations rely upon) are to a first approximation a derivative of energy. Whether to purify it, or move it, water relies heavily upon energy to enter the market.
To postulate that a barrel of American-municipal-standard potable water will cost more than a barrel of oil is to hypothesize a situation where it takes more than a barrel of oil to create a barrel of that kind of water. Now note I put in the qualifier "for common infrastructures". That's key.
If you have a large enough logistical tail behind creating that barrel of potable water, then it absolutely will cost more than a barrel of oil. For example, that will easily be the case when comparing a barrel of WTI pulled from a stripper well against a barrel of potable water created on a US Navy ballistic missile submarine, including all decomm costs amortized in on both the well and the submarine.
On a slightly less fantastical plane, that qualifier can likely be breached (pun intended) if sea levels do actually rise faster than we can revamp our coastal infrastructures. Major metro water processing plants and the supply chains feeding them are complex beasts, and they are multi-year projects even when money is no object and working shifts 24x7. If, as I predict based upon human nature, politicians kick the can on the sea level rise problem until dikes catastrophically fail in major metro areas, then yes, municipal potable water's disaster relief equivalent may indeed cost more than an equivalent quantity of oil for at least a few years if only because it all has to be trucked in as bottles or tankers during a disaster relief operation.
Leaving on a couple articles about water becoming more expensive than petroleum or gasoline (note it is generally about retailed bottled water):
Farmers in south central VA work to keep their land dry because it rains here everyday and we average about 4" a month.