"The project would repurpose an existing gas and oil pipeline to pump water to municipalities across Southern California."
"Just before the Trump administration headed out the door, a federal agency this past December cleared the way for a private company to begin pumping groundwater from under the Mojave Trails National Monument in Southern California.
The Cadiz water project would extract roughly 16.3 billion gallons of groundwater every year for 50 years from aquifers north of Joshua Tree National Park. The project would overtax the surrounding environment, according to environmentalists who filed a lawsuit to halt the project Tuesday. The latest iteration of this project involves repurposing an existing oil and gas pipeline.
The Center for Biological Diversity, Defenders of Wildlife and the Sierra Club accuse the U.S. Bureau of Land Management of leapfrogging over the necessary environmental analysis when it approved a right-of-way that will allow a 43-mile pipeline to pass over federal land. This is not the first time the pipeline has been the center of a legal fight.
Cadiz Inc. proposed the project in 2012. Over the years, the company has realigned sections of the proposed pipeline route, but in 2015 a legal evaluation from the BLM under then-President Barack Obama said a railroad right-of-way could not be used for purposes apart from the operation of a railroad. This effectively stopped the project in its tracks."
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