One of the ways I like to do this evaluation is calculate how much the water would cost if desalinated. @$0.50/m^3 (modern price for reverse osmosis desalinated water at scale, based on pricing from Singapore desalination costs on a 25 year committed contract of a design-build-run factory) - 4B gallons = 15 million cubic meters.
So we're talking $7.5 million dollars, which, in the big scheme of things, doesn't sound like a lot of money when you are thinking about endangered fish, and, more importantly, a healthy ecosystem for the other fish that are in that environment. In fact, it sounds kind of minuscule to me.
Note -to those that would argue you can't take desalinated water from the ocean, and deliver it to the appropriate places for the fish @ $0.50/m^3, you are right. But what you can do, is deliver that water to residential homes and industries on the coastal area, and offset it by diverting the water that feeds into those coastal reservoirs at the source, so everything balances out.
So we're talking $7.5 million dollars, which, in the big scheme of things, doesn't sound like a lot of money when you are thinking about endangered fish, and, more importantly, a healthy ecosystem for the other fish that are in that environment. In fact, it sounds kind of minuscule to me.
Note -to those that would argue you can't take desalinated water from the ocean, and deliver it to the appropriate places for the fish @ $0.50/m^3, you are right. But what you can do, is deliver that water to residential homes and industries on the coastal area, and offset it by diverting the water that feeds into those coastal reservoirs at the source, so everything balances out.