Since I brought up the subject elsewhere, I thought I would graduate what was about to be a comment to a full-status blog post. I would love to hear more informed feedback.

Many have brought up the idea of building desalination plants along the Georgia coast and pumping the water to Atlanta. Among the many problems with that, gravity alone would make a project like that more costly than the effort would be worth. Such an enormous amount of water getting pumped that far uphill (Atlanta is just over 1000 feet above sea level) would not be a sane approach to solving a drought.

So the obvious question was asked: what about the farms in south Georgia? Certainly south Georgia isn’t that far uphill, and watering the crops would make more sense anyway.

I’m not entirely sure of the feasibility of that, but here’s what I figure.

At the very least, calculating the feasibility would mean using a formula involving the amount of water pumped at any given time (determined by the amount of water needed), multiplied by how far uphill it has to go. A gallon of water weighs about 8.3 pounds — that becomes another multiplier in the formula.

From what the topo maps say, it’s not long before the water has to go up 100 feet. The area around Waycross, in SE GA, for example, sits about 130 feet above sea level. Just for the sake of picking a random number, if you want to give Waycross 50,000 gallons of desalinized water per day, you would have to build pumps strong enough to move about 207 tons of water 130 feet uphill every day.

If I’m right about this, and if Georgia were crazy enough to implement the desalination idea, I would recommend investing in both desalination builders and — to a greater extent — pump suppliers. Moving additional millions of gallons per day the extra 900 feet up and 225 miles over would make for quite a weighty engineering challenge.