The federal forecast for Lake Mead got worse again last month. The newest study has the reservoir dropping to 1,015.77 feet by July 2027 and 1,011.74 feet by May 2028 — nearly 29 feet under the record low set in 2022, and lower than anything since the lake first filled in the 1930s. The projection fell about 5 feet in a single month. A group of the basin’s own experts now says the system is one dry winter from collapse.
“We can’t conserve enough to save this system,” Sarah Porter of Arizona State University’s Kyl Center for Water Policy told the Review-Journal. She is right, and it is worth considering how much that sentence gives away.
For 25 years, the seven Colorado River states have answered the shrinking river the same way: They gather, they invoke shared sacrifice, they produce a document thick with appendices and thin with water, and then they go home while Lake Mead keeps dropping. Tearing out lawns and recycling indoor water bought Southern Nevada real time. It did not buy enough.
The next move will not come from asking the states to be more noble. It will come from changing what they are paid to do, and one piece of that is already on the table.
On June 3, seven parties — the Southern Nevada Water Authority among them — signed a memorandum at the Carlsbad desalination plant near San Diego to study moving desalinated and recycled water around the basin. No new pipeline. No water actually shipped to Nevada. In the years San Diego makes more than it needs, California’s share of the Colorado would shift to Arizona or Nevada on paper, with San Diego drawing on the plant instead.
Federal officials involved were blunt about how it works: The water moves on paper. That is the part worth noting. Our problem has never been only that there is too little water. It is that paper water still gets treated like wet water.
For Southern Nevada this is not a hypothetical. Lake Mead is our balance sheet, hung on a canyon wall where anyone can read it, and every white ring of mineral stain is a line item. Below 1,035 feet, Hoover Dam’s power output falls sharply, and the new numbers run well under that. We hold the smallest allocation on the river — 300,000 acre-feet annually — and we may have to give up another 50,000 to 100,000 of it in 2027 and again in 2028. We cannot raise the lake by ourselves. But we can help broker the deal that does.
Call it a Colorado River Forbearance Compact. California builds new local supply: Carlsbad’s surplus now, deep-ocean desalination later, plus recycling and aquifer recharge. The other states help cover the premium. In return, California takes measurably less from the Colorado, and the water it leaves behind is credited to Lake Mead. If the number at the diversion gate does not fall, nobody gets paid.
The desalination technology is finally worth optimism. The startup OceanWell anchors desalination pods deep enough that the ocean’s own pressure does much of the work, cutting energy use by about 40 percent, with a gentler intake and a lighter brine discharge. That last part matters: Environmentalists who spent years killing desalination projects have softened to a wait-and-see. Federal officials are now talking openly about six to a dozen such plants along the California coast, and OceanWell has already signed on to a project off Nice, France.
The exchange at the heart of the compact isn’t speculative either — California agencies trade water on paper among themselves all the time. The pipes and the accounting already exist. Nobody has yet run them across a state line.
This is a market, not a subsidy. It pays for one thing: a verified drop in how much California pulls from the river, measured per acre-foot at the diversion point. No modeled savings, no press release water, no credit for a plant that produces while the river sees nothing. We are not paying for desalination. We are paying for withdrawals that don’t happen.
Why would California agree? Because it is not being asked to give up water. It is being offered a way to sell risk. It can cling to a senior paper right and defend it through years of federal pressure and litigation, hoping that seniority holds when the system finally cracks — or it can turn part of that contested right into cash and drought-proof local supply, on terms it helped write.
Ocean water is expensive: Carlsbad runs about $3,500 an acre-foot and OceanWell projects $2,000 to $3,000, against roughly $365 for river water. That premium looks impossible only if one agency carries it alone, which is exactly what the compact prevents. A price of $2,500 per acre-foot breaks a single coastal agency forced to carry the premium alone. But it is a bargain when Arizona, the Upper Basin states and Nevada share it to keep a reservoir they all depend on from dying. The cost was never really the obstacle. The missing piece was a way to split it.
The same math reaches the Upper Basin. Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico have spent years refusing cuts they would get nothing for. A forbearance market gives them, at last, something to buy rather than only something to lose.
None of this refills the Colorado. One offshore water farm is about a fifth of Nevada’s allocation — useful, not decisive. But six to a dozen of them is not a rounding error. It is the first genuinely new water the West has been handed in a generation. For 100 years, the only verb in that room has been “cut.” This one adds “build,” and it replaces “trust us” with a number anyone can check.
The appetite is already here. Rep. Dina Titus has said Nevada must use every tool it has, desalinated San Diego water included. And the alternative to acting is bleak: The states have failed for years to agree on cutbacks, so Washington is preparing to impose them, which points straight toward the Supreme Court and years of litigation. A deal the states write themselves beats one a federal judge writes for them.
The Southern Nevada Water Authority, the Colorado River Commission of Nevada, Gov. Joe Lombardo and Nevada’s congressional delegation should push to turn the June 3 memorandum into something binding: verified reductions, payment tied to measurement rather than construction, saved water credited to Lake Mead, any technology allowed to compete and penalties with teeth.
Nevada is the smallest user on this river. Brokering the deal that saves it may be the largest role we will ever get to play.
John Shook is a Las Vegas attorney and co-founder of Shook &Stone.
