Are there enough applied scientists in this group to advance the following idea into a feasible project?

It's been proposed before with variations, but the main idea is to use natural forces and some clever engineering to provide abundant quantities of fresh water to inland Australia... hopefully producing a small inland sea in the Lake Eyre area that would, over sufficient time, produce a local climate change over the region and make it attractive for human development.

Apparently Lake Eyre is below sea level, so if a  pipeline could be run from somewhere in Spencer's Gulf through to Lake Eyre, costs of pumping water through it should be minimal. We need fresh water at Lake Eyre, not more salt, so at a suitable place along the length of pipeline a big desalination plant will be needed. Hopefully the salt it produces can be sold to offset the costs of this plant and it's continual operation.

Careful thought needs to be given to the matter of how big to make the project initially. It's possible to imagine an enormous scale producing the maximum benefits (for humans),  but that is likely to destroy the habitat of numerous species adapted to the desert that exist in the region at present.  Better I think, would be to start at the opposite end of the scale, with a demonstration  or pilot project no bigger than the minimum that can be expected to produce observable benefits.   A project of that size will no doubt show up problems that need overcoming before considering expansion of the scheme.  Furthermore, if the demonstration size project  is successful it will commence generating income from which future expansion can be financed.

Anyone interested in discussing this scheme further?i

fawkes - This is an idea I have looked at also.

my preference would be some of the monsoonal rainfall waters.
So it'ld be seasonal rainwater.
Whatever we can use by use of dredging to make one continuous riverbed as far as we can go.

pumping water is a LOT of energy.

The centre is lower than where the rain falls, help gravity.

Well we obviously should be bringing it from the gulf of carpentaria, not spencer gulf, because it is uphill that way.

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I'm not into reinventing the wheel.

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Note true. If the pipe goes over approximately 7m above the level of the water it is sucking from, gravity can't do it. Even if it could, you would end up with a trillion dollar pipeline that delivers a trickle.

i'ld opt for diverting or boring through.

it's so isolated, any pumping would give problems

Thanks for noticing Grendel.
It is a bit of a fanciful notion though, and not something I think we need to consider as likely to happen in any of our lifetimes.

I think that Gough's scheme for twin pipelines from the North West Cape, for water and gas to be piped to the whole eastern seaboard of australia was a more worthy scheme, and proposing that got him kicked out of office.

So making Desalination plants to provide water for cities is one thing, and something I am not a fan of either, but desal plants to make an inland lake, is pretty unjustifiable in my opinion.

I think cost is the barrier, not technology.

freediver wrote on Mar 31^st, 2010 at 9:11pm:


I agree. Some artificial irrigation canals were build thousands of years ago like in ancient Mesopotamia and they did not have much technology then.