Black Rock is too expensive,

Part 1: construction costs. 

Cost estimates for Black Rock’s pump-pipeline-dam-reservoir-canal construction have topped $4 billion.  The likelihood of Congress authorizing this level of funding for a federal water project is vanishingly small, no matter what public benefit may derive.

By comparison, the most recent irrigation project authorized and funded by Congress is the Animas-La Plata Project (ALP) in southeastern Colorado.  Currently under construction, ALP is one of the most expensive single water projects ever built, with costs approaching $1 billion.  The project is heavily criticized in Congress and elsewhere for its overall expense and cost overruns.  Black Rock would make ALP seem a modest endeavor.

Black Rock is too expensive,

Part 2: annual maintenance costs. 

Operations & maintenance costs for Black Rock are now projected at $79 million per year, far beyond what farmers can afford to pay for water.  By way of comparison, O&M expenses for the existing Yakima Project run about $7 million per year.  Black Rock would increase the annual cost of irrigation by an order of magnitude, if not more.

The Black Rock proposal is premised on the assumption that the reservoir will provide substitute water for five irrigation districts, including two large districts in the lower Yakima Valley, Roza and Sunnyside Valley Irrigation Districts.  However, neither irrigation district has expressed interest in an exchange of Black Rock water for their existing Yakima river diversions.  The fact that Black Rock would cause a tenfold increase in O&M costs each year likely figures into the lack of support for the project. 

One method to reduce O&M cost to irrigators involves allocating the cost of a water project to public purposes.  This is why Black Rock promoters seek to assign fishery benefits to the project – then fish can pay for construction and operational expenses.  Since fish don’t have bank accounts, the public pays on their behalf. 

The Columbia Basin Project (CBP), east of Yakima, provides a good example of this type of water project accounting.  The CBP is the most heavily subsidized federal irrigation project in the United States.  Public purposes of hydropower and flood control associated with the project, including Grand Coulee Dam, form the basis for allocating most expenses to taxpayers and Bonneville Power Authority ratepayers.

Click here to enlarge table.

Click here for more on the Columbia Basin Project.

The Bureau’s Black Rock cost-benefit analysis assigns $900,000 per year for actual fishery benefits and $28 million for “non-use” fishery benefits.  Non-use values are values that economists assign based on public desire to maintain an environmental amenity (for example, many people value and want to protect the caribou herds in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in northern Alaska, even though they will never visit, hunt or otherwise use those caribou).  Thus, the Bureau has assigned one of the two largest benefits of the Black Rock project to environmental “perceptions.”   (The other large benefit is assigned to recreation, which is discussed on the Recreation page.)

Black Rock is too expensive,

Part 3: energy costs

Keeping Black Rock reservoir at operational levels would require pumping water from the Columbia River around the clock, all year long.  Black Rock would take water from the Columbia when electrical demand is both light and heavy.  The diversion pumps would remove water at the rate of 3,500 cubic feet per second (cfs). 

There are five major hydroelectric dams downstream of the Priest Rapids pool.  Removal of water from the Columbia would reduce hydropower production at those dams. 

See Preliminary Appraisal Assessment of Columbia River Water Availability for a Potential Black Rock Project, U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (March 2004).  (Click here to download “Preliminary Appraisal Assessment of Columbia River Water Availability for a Potential Black Rock Project”)

In its cost-benefit analysis, the Bureau of Reclamation estimates that the value of the electrical power that would not be generated because of the Black Rock diversion is $4 million.  The Bureau then estimates that the Black Rock project could generate $8.8 million in electricity when water is diverted from the reservoir to irrigation canals.  The Bureau does not explain why power stations on two irrigation canals would generate twice the value of electricity of 5 dams on the Columbia River.

Perhaps most important, it would cost $62 million each year to pump water from the Columbia River, 1400 feet up to the Black Rock reservoir.  These pumping costs are a major component of the annual operations & maintenance expenses that would make the Black Rock project too expensive for irrigators to support.

Next:  Unstable Geology