Liquidity: Privatization and the Rise of Big Water - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 221

Plains) Aquifer holds a quadrillion gallons of H 2 O, or enough to cover the entire con-
tinental United States to a depth of nearly two feet. If the water beneath Colorado's San
Luis Valley presented Maurice Strong and Gary Boyce with “blue gold,” then Pickens
had found blue platinum.
The Ogallala Aquifer stretches beneath parts of eight states: South Dakota, Wyom-
ing, Nebraska, Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and northern Texas. It is also
the most heavily used aquifer in the country, providing 30 percent of all groundwater
used for irrigation in the United States, and drinking water for 2 million people. The
Great Plains overlays it and supplies 40 percent of the nation's grain-fed beef and one-
fifth of the total annual US agricultural output, representing crops worth some $20 bil-
lion a year.
The Ogallala's water is estimated to be from ten thousand to several million years old
and is known as fossil water. The aquifer was formed when the Rocky Mountains were
volcanic and rivers that no longer exist washed pieces of the mountains east. The chan-
nels eventually filled with silt and sediment, but the water remained and slowly percol-
ated underground, where it pooled in gravel beds that lie only a few feet thick in the
southwestern part of the aquifer to more than a thousand feet deep in the north. Al-
though rain and river flows continue to recharge parts of the Ogallala, it can take many
years for the water to make its way underground and move through the system. Heavy
pumping has drained the Ogallala's water ten times faster than nature has recharged
it. Even if all pumping were to stop tomorrow, hydrologists estimate it would take the
Ogallala six thousand years to refill by natural processes.
Before European settlers arrived, roughly 1 billion acres of grasslands covered the
Great Plains . With a short growing season, and only twelve to eighteen inches of precip-
itation a year in parts, hardy plants such as blue grama and green needlegrass sustained
bison, pronghorn antelope, swift fox, lesser prairie chicken, and burrowing owl. There
was little surface water on the Plains, and it was a difficult place for humans to live. Nat-
ive tribes used the plains as seasonal hunting grounds but withdrew to river valleys to
build their communities. Cattle drives across the plains in the 1860s faced drought and
problems from overgrazing. Homesteaders, beset by low rainfall and high soil erosion,
were driven away in a mass migration during the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. But as farm-
ers learned to use windmills to pump water from the aquifer in the 1950s, more than
half the native grasslands were replaced by crops on the Plains, and permanent settle-
ments took root. The process has accelerated in recent years, and some 25 million acres
of cropland have been planted since 1982 .
The accelerated planting was the result of diesel-powered water pumps, which re-
placed windmills after the Second World War and pushed water extractions from a few
gallons a minute to many hundreds of gallons per minute. The brown plains turned