Keith Matheny

Detroit Free Press

Amid rising water supply crises, could the parched American Southwest ever get its hands on the world's most abundant and valuable liquid fresh water supply — our Great Lakes?

Setting aside the astronomical expense and infrastructure requirements, as a policy matter, a large-scale diversion of Great Lakes water is a virtual impossibility. But that's only because of states and Canadian provinces around the lakes coming together to solidify protections within the last decade.

The latest need for a big water supply is a longstanding, but still escalating, crisis in drought-stricken California. Gov. Jerry Brown earlier this month mandated a 25% water-use reduction for residents and nonagricultural businesses.

"Today, we are standing on dry grass where there should be 5 feet of snow," Brown said as he made the announcement April 1 in California's Sierra Nevada mountains, a key source of water statewide. "This historic drought demands unprecedented action."

California isn't asking for Great Lakes water. No Southwest state is. But if the drought worsens, and population growth continues to soar there, desperate times could someday call for desperate measures.

Don't think the idea of a raid on Great Lakes water is that far-fetched. Plans were in the works to allow a Canadian company to sell Lake Superior water to Asia via tanker ships as recently as 1998. A coal company in 1981 wanted to pipe Superior water to Wyoming to move its semi-liquefied product back to the Midwest. And in 1982, Congress mandated that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers study the feasibility of using Great Lakes water to replenish supplies needed for the heavily agricultural Plains states. (It wasn't feasible.)

Who owns the water?

Who could make the call on such a water deal, anyway? Ownership of Great Lakes water is a matter of some debate. Traverse City environmental attorney Jim Olson is among the leading voices contending the water is a public trust, a natural resource requiring preservation in perpetuity for public use and enjoyment.

"This is a very important story right now, and will become more so in the next few months and years," he said, citing "the increasing pressure from world water shortages, and of course those in the U.S."

The biggest protection from large-scale Great Lakes diversions is public resolve, said Noah Hall, an environmental and water law professor at Wayne State University.

"From the lady on the street to the governor's office, it's really uniform," he said. "Throwing money at them really doesn't tempt people in terms of diverting water from the Great Lakes. The issue cuts Democrat and Republican, and it doesn't matter which Great Lakes state."

The lakes' main source of legal protection comes from the Great Lakes Compact, an agreement between eight Great Lakes states that was further approved by Congress and signed by President George W. Bush in 2008. The compact also includes Canada's two provinces on the lakes, Ontario and Quebec, and its terms cannot be changed without the approval of all compact member state and provincial governments.

On new and increased Great Lakes water diversions, the compact "just says plain as day: 'No diversions.' Period. Boom," Hall said.

Less formal Great Lakes water agreements existed before the compact. But it was a 1998 plan by a Canadian entrepreneur that spurred Great Lakes states into making lake diversions more strictly prohibited.

John Febbraro's Nova Group proposed exporting about 156 million gallons of Lake Superior water per year to Asia via tanker ships. The Ontario Ministry of the Environment approved the proposal before news of it spread and outraged Great Lakes residents and lawmakers on both sides of the border.

"It was a silly idea, but it raised enough concerns," said Ralph Pentland, chairman of the Canadian Water Issues Council at the University of Toronto.

Pentland co-chaired the International Joint Commission, a U.S. and Canadian agency that works to protect boundary waters and resolve disputes over them, at the time the Great Lakes Compact was devised.

"Shipping water from Lake Superior would be entirely impractical; it could never happen. But it made people think they should start preparing for these kinds of eventualities, even if it doesn't make economic sense now."

Business concerns

The compact differentiates products that contain water — beer brewed in Milwaukee; pop or water bottled in Michigan; a head of lettuce grown on a Midwestern farm — from water itself, Hall said.

"It's really quite common sense," he said. "We want to sell the products that require water, that we can make here, to the world."

The compact includes a controversial exemption allowing for water removal from the basin in containers of 5.8 gallons or less, often called the "bottled water exemption." However, a 2000 report by the International Joint Commission noted that the Great Lakes basin imports 14 times the amount of bottled water that is withdrawn and shipped elsewhere.

The bottled water issue came to a head in 2002, when Nestle Waters North America began operating its Ice Mountain bottled water plant in Mecosta County, west of Mt. Pleasant. The Michigan Department of Environmental Quality had approved Nestle's plan to pump up to 400 gallons of groundwater per minute.

A grassroots group, Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation, sued Nestle and won in circuit court. But the Michigan Court of Appeals stayed the lower court ruling in 2003. The Citizens group and Nestle reached a settlement roughly halving the plant's allowed groundwater extraction at 218 gallons of water per minute.

In terms of impact on the Great Lakes, the Nestle extraction is almost infinitesimal. But it, and other major groundwater uses — such as high-volume oil and gas hydraulic fracturing that can use millions of gallons per well — can have significant local impacts, said Peggy Case, a volunteer with the Citizens group at the time of its Nestle lawsuit who is now the group's president.

"The local impact in Mecosta was pretty clear," she said.

"We all live locally. If your stream is turned into a mud hole, and that water is no longer moving through that ecosystem, it affects plants and animals and humans all along the way."

Can deal be undone?

If Congress and the president signed the compact into law, what would stop a future Congress and president from reversing it? In that extremely unlikely scenario, Canada would have a say before water headed to the Southwest, said Frank Bevacqua, spokesman for the International Joint Commission.

In addition to the compact's requirements that all parties agree to a large-scale diversion, a boundary waters treaty between the U.S. and Canada enacted in 1909 also requires the agreement of both countries before an action is taken that impacts the shared waters, he said. Though Lake Michigan is wholly within the United States, it's connected to Lake Huron, which Canada also borders. So a large diversion from Lake Michigan would also likely fall under the treaty.

"It would certainly be a topic of discussion between the governments of the United States and Canada," Bevacqua said.

Michigan law has its own restrictions on water use. Large-scale withdrawals, considered greater than 100,000 gallons or more per day, must be registered with the DEQ or, for farmers, the Michigan Department of Agriculture. If the withdrawal is determined to cause an "adverse resource impact," it will be prohibited or require correction.

U.S. agriculture accounts for 80%-90% of the nation's consumptive water use — water that doesn't make its way back into the basin, but instead is lost through evaporation or incorporation into products.

But how specific farms in Michigan use, or misuse, water is a state-kept secret. Michigan's Freedom of Information Act specifically exempts from disclosure the amount of water a farm uses, where specifically it's withdrawn, and descriptions of farm water system capacity.

Change them, not us

Water usage in the Great Lakes and elsewhere in North America has dropped during the last 10-15 years, through increased efficiency in uses such as agricultural irrigation, but also because of the outsourcing of water-intensive U.S. industry to places like China and India, Pentland said.

Maintaining and examining protections on Great Lakes water is important, no matter how impractical a water diversion may seem now, he said.

"You don't know what the future holds," Pentland said. "We don't know how bad climate change is going to be. There's other things we haven't heard of or thought of yet. We should do everything we can to preserve."

It's California that needs to change, water experts said.

"Their economy is about to run into a brick wall, which is a lack of freshwater," Hall said. "There are parts of the West that can't grow because their housing, businesses, any kind of urban land-use development can't meet its water needs."

Gov. Brown's mandated water use reductions exempted agriculture, which is responsible for 80% of the California's water use, said Howard Learner, executive director of the Environmental Law and Policy Center in Chicago.

"The big elephant in the middle of the room is agriculture," Learner said. "California milk competes with Wisconsin on milk. Fruits and vegetables from California compete with fruits and vegetables from Michigan. The bottom line is, we're not going to be shipping Great Lakes water out to California for agricultural goods that compete with those produced here."

Case said she's opposed to the idea of water being bought and sold and traded.

"Water and air are the commons," she said. "We need them to live. You can't own them; you can't privatize them."

Contact Keith Matheny: (313) 222-5021 or kmatheny@freepress.com

Water, water everywhere

Total water withdrawal from the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence River Basin was 42.4 billion gallons per day in 2013, a decrease of 5% from the previous year. The water irrigates farmers' fields, generates power, drives industry and supplies municipal drinking water and sewerage systems.

But the vast majority of that water isn't lost. Power generation, for example — a major Great Lakes water diverter — returns all but about 1.5% of the water it uses to the Great Lakes basin. Overall, only 5.5% of withdrawn Great Lakes water, 2.3 billion gallons per day, was consumed or otherwise lost in 2013.

That sounds like a huge amount, and it is. But placed in the context of the amount of water in the Great Lakes — 6.5 quadrillion gallons, or 6.5 million billion gallons — the diverted amount becomes relatively minuscule.

Water in, water out

The largest, longest-standing and most controversial diversion from the Great Lakes is at Chicago, where the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, finished in 1900, reverses the Chicago River and connects Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River. About 88% of all Great Lakes water diversion occurs there.

The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 1967 consent decree, limited the Lake Michigan water diversion through the Chicago canal to 3,200 cubic feet of water per second.

But there's more water diverted into the Great Lakes than is diverted out; particularly at the Longlac and Ogoki diversions in Ontario. They take water bound for Hudson Bay and divert it to northern Lake Superior at 5,580 cubic feet per second. The diversions were initially created to bolster hydroelectric power generation to help wartime manufacturing in the U.S. during World War II, but then were maintained by mutual agreement between the U.S. and Canada after the war.

Michigan's biggest water users

Here are the largest users of all types of water in Michigan, from direct siphoning of the Great Lakes to withdrawals from rivers and streams to groundwater wells. While power plants withdraw much more water than any other user, they return almost all of it. The largest consumptive use of water, which isn't returned, comes from agricultural irrigation. Farm-specific data is exempted from disclosure under state law. But the list below includes the largest agricultural water uses by county.

Largest withdrawers

1. Donald C. Cook nuclear power plant (Berrien County) — 2 billion gallons per day

2. DTE Energy-Monroe power plant (Monroe County) — 1.5 billion gallons

3. DTE Energy-St. Clair power plant (St. Clair County) — 909.9 million gallons

4. Consumers Energy-J.H. Campbell power plant (Ottawa County) — 690 million gallons

5. Consumers Energy-Karn-Weadock Complex (Bay County) — 546.6 million gallons

Highest agricultural irrigation water withdrawals by county

1. St. Joseph: 50.1 million average gallons of water per day

2. Cass: 33.4 million gallons

3. Montcalm: 27.8 million gallons

4. Van Buren: 21.5 million gallons

5. Branch: 18.9 million gallons

Highest municipal users

1. Detroit (Wayne County): 537.6 million average gallons per day

2. Saginaw-Midland (Arenac County): 38.2 million gallons

3. Grand Rapids (Kent County): 35.6 million gallons

4. Wyoming (Kent County): 34.2 million gallons

5. Lansing (Ingham County): 19.9 million gallons

Highest industrial users

1. United States Steel (Wayne County): 154.5 million average gallons per day (0% consumed)

2. AK Steel Dearborn Works (Wayne County): 153.2 million gallons (19.5% consumed)

3. Praxiar Inc. (Wayne County): 65.3 million gallons (0% consumed)

4. Escanaba Paper Co. (Delta County): 37.5 million gallons (12% consumed)

5. Lafarge Presque Isle Quarry (Presque Isle County): 28.9 million gallons (19.3% consumed)

Source: Michigan Department of Environmental Quality (2013 statistics)

Great Lakes facts and figures