But thanks to a collaboration that began in response to the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), which was signed into California law in 2014, technologies that can accurately monitor and track groundwater use will soon be piloted in one of the largest and most at-risk aquifers in North America — California's Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.
Collaboration Breakdown
This collaboration — which includes The Freshwater Trust (TFT), a nonprofit that works to protect and restore freshwater ecosystems; IBM Research; and SweetSense Inc., a provider of low-cost satellite-connected Internet of Things (IoT) sensors — began a two-year pilot at the start of 2019 that’s based on a research project in Kenya.
The ultimate goal of the California pilot, says TFT Freshwater Fund Director Alex H. Johnson, is to be part of the solution in how to sustainably manage groundwater supplies.
In a working paper titled Sharing Groundwater, Professors Mike Young and Bryce McAteer note that the SGMA identifies “a need for local groundwater-dependent communities to find a new way to share access to groundwater and keep use within sustainable limits. If access has to be shared, then it makes conceptual sense to issue shares.”
That’s the framework on which this solution is based, and it looks something like this: Water consumers — including farmers, financers and regulators — use a Web-based dashboard to monitor and track groundwater usage, and demonstrate that sustainable pumping levels can be achieved by trading groundwater use shares.
“Essentially what you need to understand (is) that you have to cut the cake,” Young said during a 2017 presentation hosted by the Water Association of Kern County. “And if you’re going to cut the cake, you need a sharing system. The state of [the] art in developing ownership of these sorts of systems is to issue shares.”
In this solution, individual users who require groundwater amounts beyond their share cap may "purchase" groundwater shares from users who don’t require all of their supply, at a market-regulated rate.
“There are pretty dramatic groundwater issues in California and throughout the West, and groundwater aquifers are not very well-studied. There is a lot more groundwater pumping than there is groundwater recharge, but it's not obvious how much more groundwater there exists in all the different aquifers. And that's a scary thing," he said.
State-Level Involvement
When the SGMA was signed in 2014, it mandated creation of Groundwater Sustainability Agencies (GSAs) — local groups that must ensure that regional groundwater supplies are sustainably managed, and develop and implement a plan to make their local groundwater usage sustainable by 2040.
The California Department of Water Resources (DWR) serves as the oversight agency, a role Johnson likened to the federal government dictating parameters but allowing states to make many little decisions about how to manage.
“DWR is not dictating how things need to look on the ground,” he said. “The GSAs have the obligation to come up with a plan, and then they're going to send that into the DWR.”
Joyia Emard, information officer with the DWR’s Public Affairs office, echoed that sentiment.
“The DWR's role is regulatory and assistance,” she said. “We created the regulations and then we were responsible for prioritizing the basins, [and] we are going to evaluate the plans when they're turned in.”
The assistance role Emard mentioned includes helping the local agencies by providing support in three different areas: planning, technical and financial.
The planning aspect includes help with communication, engagement, facilitation and support services. Technical support consists of helping to gather data, providing data, monitoring wells and providing guidance documents. And the financial component includes providing the GSAs with funding that allows them to take necessary steps in meeting their obligations.
“Those are the two roles we have,” she said. “But there are 517 basins in the state, and each of them is unique. [The GSAs] have to decide locally how they're going to implement this, what tools they need and how they're going to go about it.”
If there’s enough scientific evidence about the plan and its feasibility in reaching that sustainable level over the next decade, the DWR will tell them to proceed, Johnson said, adding that the agency will check in with the GSAs every five years to make sure they're on a trajectory toward sustainability.
Developing a Prototype
The pilot project is jointly funded by the Water Foundation and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and though Johnson said he couldn’t share the pilot’s cost, he said the team has “enough to cover essentially developing a prototype.”
In its first few months, the project team discussed rollout details and engaged with landowners in Solano County. The team already has five landowner participants but is looking to work with at least 10 to 15 landowners. Once at least 10 participants are signed up, technology installation begins; Johnson anticipates that by early March, Portland, Ore.-based SweetSense will install the first batch of sensors — low-cost sensors that work where there’s little to no cellphone service, are easy to install and noninvasive, and have a relatively small footprint.
“It's essentially a current clamp,” Johnson said, “so you can just clamp it around any line that has electricity or can pass electricity, and then you essentially type in the metadata for what that electricity means. The sensors are just clocking how much electricity they've seen go through that wire, so as long as we have the right information about the pumping amount, the sensor just translates, ‘OK, it's been on for six hours, that means this many gallons got pumped."
The sensor is powered by a one-foot by one-foot solar panel that must be within a 20- or 30-foot range, and all pumping data is relayed to a micro-satellite network by Palo Alto-based Swarm Technologies.
While Swarm isn’t officially part of the project team, Johnson said its satellites made sense for the pilot because they’re smaller, and they just take in and push out small packets of data a couple of times a day — and they're dramatically cheaper than existing competitors.
“That's really interesting to us because when you look out years and years for a marketplace to work, we're going to need sensors on almost every pump and an aquifer,” Johnson said. “And we're going to need to be developing a cost-competitive way for those data to be collected.”
In fact, he added, IBM and SweetSense already have been collaborating in Africa and using Swarm satellites. “So this is essentially transferring a collaboration that's ongoing in the developing world and bringing it back to the developed world,” he added, “which is another interesting attribute of this pilot.”
Another item the team is working through is how to pass data from the groundwater sensor in California through the satellite relay to a blockchain-enabled platform — called the Water Management Service Platform (WMaaSP) — that’s being developed by IBM Research and made available on the IBM cloud.
The interest in blockchain for water management stems from the historic lack of trust between users, a lack of transparency about when something's getting used, and the inability to transact or trade water shares to where they’re most beneficial, Johnson said. So the basics of blockchain, he said, should allow for distributed water share trading, efficiently tracking where those shares are going, and when they're used in time and space.
And beyond the transactional benefits, Johnson said, “you can encode the blockchain so that landowners’ specific information is private, but in aggregates, the pumping amounts regionally can be transparent to the government or to private groups interested in making sure that everybody's pumping sustainably.”
Meanwhile, IBM research is developing the WMaaSP dashboard that will meet the needs of groundwater pumpers in California who are looking to comply with the SGMA — and those working at a GSA will have a different view on their dashboard because they must demonstrate in aggregate how everyone they manage is pumping sustainably for the region.
“We're going to need to see how much transparency is needed, how much privacy is needed for this to work for both farmers and for the GSA,” he said. “And then we're going to need to see what other types of users would be interested.”
And once a prototype is developed and the team has something to demonstrate, “then we essentially need to figure out what the next steps are for this,” Johnson said. “Is it going to be a commercial product or a public product?”
