Private Firms Scour Booming Nevada Desert For Water Profits

Lemmon Valley, United States, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 19th Jul, 2023 ) :Beneath a bone-dry Nevada lakebed, close to the dusty desert where the Burning Man festival is held each year, an ambitious water project is reshaping this pocket of the US West.

A giant, natural underground aquifer containing enough water to supply 25,000 homes annually is fed by rainfall and snowmelt from the surrounding volcanic mountains.

For the past few years, a little-known company called Vidler Water Resources has been quietly pumping much of this water out through a buried pipeline, under the mountains -- and straight into the rapidly sprawling northern suburbs of Reno, some 30 miles (50 kilometers) away.

"We, everybody, had to start buying from Vidler," said developer Robert Lissner. "Anybody who is building.

" Diverting often-scarce water to cities is, in itself, nothing new in the West. But this pipeline is unusual because it was fully constructed and paid for by a private company.

Such projects could help solve water-shortage issues as development expands rapidly in the desert, but they raise serious concerns for the area's aquifers - and with high building costs, the path forward will depend on whether the strategy ultimately proves profitable.

Vidler spent around $100 million to purchase the ranch atop the aquifer, and build the infrastructure -- an outlay that local government officials say they could not contemplate.

"If Vidler hadn't constructed this project, it wouldn't have gotten done," said John Enloe, of the water utility covering Reno.

"They took quite a risk," agreed Lissner.