WorldWide Drilling Resource® 23 OCTOBER 2026 www.starironworks.com 257 Caroline Street Punxsutawney, PA 15767 800-927-0560 • 814-427-2555 Fax: 814-427-5164 Serving the Water Well Industry Banking on Groundwater Adapted from Information by the Mojave Groundwater Bank A hundred years ago, California and the Western U.S. built an extensive network of reservoirs and aqueducts, with predictable mountain snowmelts able to move water from where it fell to where it was needed. With snowmelt and precipitation no longer reliable, storing water during wet years has become essential as dry years grow hotter. Underground water storage is more important than ever in this new reality. The Mojave Groundwater Bank is a groundbreaking public-private partnership bringing water agencies together with Native American tribes and the Fenner Gap Mutual Water Company to deliver clean, reliable, and affordable water to every community. The project is dedicated to sustainably capturing, storing, and supplying water resources to people in underserved areas, improving long-term water reliability while protecting the environment. The plan is to deliver an annual reliable supply of water of approximately 50,000 acre-feet per year while also storing imported surplus water to access in dry years. Together, supply and storage will strengthen long-term water security for the entire region. The Mojave Groundwater Bank sits at the base of a 2000-squaremile watershed in the Mojave Desert overlying a significant freshwater aquifer estimated to hold 30 to 50 million acre-feet of high-quality groundwater. The Fenner watershed is a closed hydrologic basin, where rain and snowmelt from the surrounding mountains enter the aquifer and slowly travel underground beneath Cadiz toward saline dry lake playas and evaporates. Fresh water that could be used to sustain families, farms, and ecosystems is lost to evaporation when it reaches the dry lakes of Bristol and Cadiz. The project’s goal is to capture and preserve water for communities that often go without, creating an immediately available supply within the Colorado River Basin. By combining modern water banking with active recharge and monitoring, the project both safeguards community supplies and protects local ecosystem for generations to come. Conversion of the Northern Pipeline are expected this year, with water deliveries projected to start next year, making this one of the rare shovel-ready solutions capable of addressing California’s water crisis.
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