I did a calculation to get a sense of the enormity of these numbers and to consider what it would take to replace this water release with desalination. The release is 500,000 acre-feet, or about 163G gallons (326/000 gal/af). According to Wikipedia, the Keystone Phase III pipeline can deliver 700,000 barrels/day, or 29.4M gallons/day (oil barrels are 42 gallons). Setting aside the 7% flow rate differences between water and oil, an equivalent pipeline would take over 5,500 days, or over 15 years to deliver that much water.

Or to put it another way, the 7.5M acre-feet per year deliverable in the Colorado River Compact would take over 225 pipelines to achieve the same flow rate.

So, for desalination to have any significant impact, we would have to build a huge number of desalination plants and pipelines and provide massive power for the plants and the energy to pump all that water uphill.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keystone_Pipeline

https://usbr.gov/lc/region/pao/faq.html

https://www.regoproducts.com/PDFs/liquid_flow_conversions.pd...