re: Louisiana Is Running Dangerously Short Of Groundwater

So if a city wanted to drill a well on your land and buy water from you what is the best way to sell it? Do you sell it by the gallon or cubic yard, and what would the price be. Thanks

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Man the sarcasm and genuine lack of concern in this thread is worrying. I've sat in on a few groundwater committee meetings thinking I was going to go in and raise hell and it ended up being some of the sharpest minds from LSU geology, Water Chemistry and Ecology professors. I was blown away and the information they have (and publicy present!) is fricking terrifying.

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I mean this honestly: Thanks for being open-minded. I wish more people could open their eyes to it like you did. Instead, they want to keep their head in the soon-to-be dry sand.

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I know of chemical plants along the Mississippi River that pump thousands of Gal / min of ground water for cooling. 72 deg F ground water provides better cooling in summer than 90 deg F River water.

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The ones I'm familiar with pull the water from the river, not from ground water, for use as cooling water and boiler feed water. For cooling it does not come directly from the ground or river for use in the heat exchangers, it's used as makeup water to the cooling tower, mostly to compensate for evaporation and drift losses. In any case the water from the cooling tower is going to be 90 F or a bit warmer in the summer. There is no temperature advantage to using ground water since it goes through the cooling tower first and is a small fraction of what is being circulated.

Move to Flint Michigan

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I know of chemical plants along the Mississippi River that pump thousands of Gal / min of ground water for cooling. 72 deg F ground water provides better cooling in summer than 90 deg F River water.

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That’s not why they use ground water. In fact, at plants with a mixture of ground water and river water, they typically prioritize the ground water for boilers - not cooling towers.

They use ground water because it’s way cleaner than river water, and thus much less expensive to treat. This is especially true for boiler feedwater where dissolved solids can cause scaling inside of a boiler or, worse, get carried into the steam system.

Since the 1960s, we have culturally changed to the point we are no longer replenishing the Southern aquifers.

Folks no longer “make water”, now they piss it all away.

Louisiana’s water table is about 7 inches. Not sure how this is possible. I smell a regulation/tax opportunity they are about to push.

They use groundwater so they don’t have to pretreat river water

we need to start pissing outside more

From the mouths of babes...

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One thing I’m surprised about is that the flood stage levels of the MS River that seem to be getting worse are not being leveraged as a water resource. Can’t use the keystone pipeline for oil? Fine, connect it to a pumping station in Port Allen and send all that water out West for profit.

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My question is, with the Mississippi River going though seasonal flooding, why hasn’t a goodly portion of that been diverted to a newly constructed reservoir and then injected into the depleted aquifers? This isn’t my area of expertise, but don’t injector wells reach some pretty impressive depths?

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ETA - Injection Wells range from 3500 feet to 10,000 feet in depth.

The Mighty Mississippi could be a money maker on multiple levels.