Columbia River Treaty leaves U.S. with more electricity, trickier flood mgt.

A stopgap update to the 60-year-old Columbia River Treaty between the U.S. and Canada upends flood control and hydropower across the river basin.

The U.S. Department of State announced the temporary agreement late last month. It shifts flood risk management mostly to the U.S., which could make it trickier to manage floods on the Lower Columbia. But it also lets the U.S. keep an estimated $100 million in hydropower previously sent north.

The new regime will have downstream impacts on hydropower generation, flood-control costs and ecosystems in ways that river managers say are not entirely clear yet.

The treaty determines the flow of trillions of gallons of water, tens of billions of dollars and more than a billion watts of electricity each year, profoundly shaping life and economics on both sides of the border. The U.S. and Canada signed the treaty in 1964 to prevent a repeat of the catastrophic 1948 floods. In the decades since, the agreement had continued mostly unchanged until some parts of it expired in September.

Original treaty

Until this September, the treaty ensured Canada would hold back 8.95 million acre feet of spring snowmelt behind three of that nation’s large Columbia River dams. An acre foot is 325,851 gallons of water — enough to cover an acre of land with a foot of water — meaning the storage Canada promised the U.S. totaled just shy of 3 trillion gallons of water, or about 5% of the Columbia’s annual output at its mouth. In exchange for helping prevent floods along the Lower Columbia River in communities like Vancouver and Portland by holding water back, Canada received half of the electricity U.S. hydropower operations went on to produce with it, an amount determined years in advance.

Canada initially exchanged the first 30 years of those benefits to the U.S. to fund the construction of its three dams. But, more recently, it has taken the power instead. That power has roughly totaled between $315 million and $461 million each year, according to numbers in a U.S. Congressional Research Service report adjusted for inflation using the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ inflation calculator.

What just changed?

On Sept. 16, the “assured annual flood control” part of the treaty expired, and flood risk management on the Columbia switched to what’s known as an “on-call,” “called-upon” or “real-time” regime. In practice, that meant that Canada would no longer be required to preemptively store trillions of gallons of spring runoff, a practice that had protected Washington and Oregon communities from floods each year for more than half a century.

While the remaining treaty provisions ensured the U.S. could still call to ask Canada to hold back water — at a cost — that still left the U.S. in a sort of limbo, said Tom Conning, spokesman for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Northwest Division. The Corps runs most of the federal Columbia River hydroelectric dams and is responsible for flood control on the river. “(We were) in this kind of weird interim period where we didn’t have anything guiding our operations,” Conning said.

Then, late last month, the State Department announced the new interim measures, which will pay Canada $37.6 million for 3.6 million acre feet of storage in Canada for this coming spring, with real-time flood risk management filling any gaps.Despite only securing about 40% of the preplanned storage the previous regime did, the agreement prevented the “worst-case scenario” of no coordination with Canada on flood management or hydropower, Corps’ chief of Columbia Basin water management, Steve Barton, said in a talk about the changes hosted by the Corps and U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. The interim measures are set to last three years, Conning said.

The idea behind them is to guide river management until a modernized treaty can be ratified and come into force, said Roland Springer, deputy regional director at the Bureau of Reclamation, the other key U.S. institution that manages the Columbia. Funding for 2026 and 2027 will need to be approved by U.S. Congress.

Flooding

With Canada’s responsibility for flood risk management greatly reduced, the U.S. will have fewer tools at its disposal to control the timing of the Columbia’s immense spring runoff. That’s a difficult task under any circumstances with 60% of the river’s total output coming in May, June and July alone, according to the Congressional Research Service. And as much as half of that total spring runoff originates from the small portion of the Columbia River drainage basin located in Canada.

Put simply: The U.S. now has less than half the support it used to have in managing the trillions of gallons of water that cascade toward the border each spring. “This increased uncertainty of those operations may lead to adjustments for some U.S. (dam) projects authorized for flood risk management,” said the Corps’ Northwestern Division commander, Brig. Gen. William C. Hannan Jr., in the joint talk. That means the U.S. dams that can store water, most Columbia River dams are “run-of-the-river,” meaning they offer no significant storage will be picking up serious slack. They will have to lower their reservoirs more than normal ahead of spring runoff.

Specifically, that will happen during moderately wet water years because in dry years there is no need to prepare for an influx, and in extremely wet years the reservoirs are already lowered to about the same levels, Barton explained in the talk. The Corps and Bureau of Reclamation expect moderately wet years 30% of the time, when levels at Grand Coulee Dam and John Day Dam will need to be lowered much more than before.

That will mean more water in the Columbia, and for longer. And that will cause flood risk in Vancouver to start weeks earlier in the spring and last weeks later in the early summer, according to the joint presentation. “We expect to see flows above flood stage for about a week longer,” Barton said in the talk. While he noted the potential for flooding can never be eliminated, that risk will still be much lower and less persistent than if there were no upstream reservoirs. Barton said the flood risk was the same with or without Canadian storage.

Shipping, etc.

That extra water in the river between April and July in moderately wet years will impact other crucial river users, too, Barton said. Navigators on the lower and middle parts of the Columbia will face faster currents, potentially driving fuel costs up for shippers who import the roughly $31 billion of cargo brought into the Columbia River’s deepwater ports each year. (Barton noted that would only be for a few days those years.)

On the other end of the spectrum, the need to draw down reservoirs more than before will expose local Native nations’ historic cultural sites that were flooded by the dams’ construction. “When these archeological sites are exposed in the drawdown zone, they are more vulnerable to shoreline erosion, mass wasting and looting,” Eric Rothwell of the Bureau of Reclamation said during the talk. “The agencies will continue to work with the tribes to protect these resources.”

Low levels at Grand Coulee’s reservoir could also force temporary closures of the Colville Confederated Tribes’ Inchelium-Gifford Ferry, which connects tribal members to school and emergency services. Those low levels during moderately wet years will also mean weekslong irrigation disruptions for farms that draw water from above the John Day Dam. However, the bureau doesn’t expect the anticipated drawdowns to impact the Columbia Basin Project, which grows $2.7 billion in crops each year.

Hydropower

Maybe the biggest change the treaty makes is letting the U.S. keep 37% of the hydropower that used to go to Canada. That’s about 150 more average annual megawatts of power for the U.S., said Doug Johnson, spokesman for the Bonneville Power Administration, which sells power produced by the federal Columbia River hydropower system. (To put it in perspective, the extra electricity amounts to about 2% of what the system generates on average.) “It’s hard to quantify the dollars, but it’s absolutely impossible to ignore the benefits from a financial perspective,” Johnson said. And while it’s tough to quantify, a 37% reduction of the estimated $315 million to $461 million in power Canada’s entitled to each year stands to save BPA between about $117 million and $171 million a year. That 37% will grow to 50% by 2033, according to the agreement, shrinking the final entitlement to one-quarter of the power Canadian storage goes on to generate in the U.S.

Driving forces

For much of the past century, many of the Pacific Northwest’s most profitable industries have been attracted to the region by the cheap, abundant power that the Columbia River hydropower system provides. In the 1940s, for example, the U.S. war effort consumed the vast majority of its power to build ships at sites along the river like Vancouver’s former Kaiser Shipyards. More recently, data centers have gobbled up an increasingly large share of regional electricity, powering everything from our cloud storage accounts to wars conducted thousands of miles away.

Overall demand, which is also fueled by increases in industry, electric vehicles and overall population — is expected to grow by nearly a third in the next decade, at times outpacing supply by some projections. Pressure from that growth has been compounded by Washington and Oregon’s respective deadlines for phasing out fossil fuels to slow regional contributions to our ever-accelerating climate crisis. All that has led the cost of power to rise, fueling an effort by utilities, both public and private, to claw back the hundreds of millions of dollars of hydropower that make up Canada’s entitlement.

While there has been speculation that reaching what U.S. power managers consider a more favorable share of electricity was a driving force behind the new stopgap treaty regime, it’s ultimately unclear what factors drove the agreement. Both the U.S. Department of State and Canadian counterpart, Global Affairs Canada, did not respond to repeated interview requests. Instead, the agencies each provided statements praising the two countries’ effort to deliver a new treaty.

Neither agency said what specifically would happen in the coming years to the roughly 5.6 million acre feet of spring runoff that was previously held in Canadian reservoirs under the past agreement.

Meanwhile, environmental advocates have grown increasingly uneasy with the treaty process, said Joseph Bogaard of Save Our Wild Salmon. The coalition of conservation organizations appreciates the treaty update’s traction on flood control and hydropower generation. “Our leaders and members, however, are much more concerned about the new emerging long-term treaty that, like the original one ratified in the middle of last centuryappears to ignore salmon recovery and river health, and fails to properly recognize Tribal sovereigns and bring to bear their deep expertise,” he said in an email. For a new treaty to come into force, any agreements between the two lead negotiators will need to be ratified by the U.S. Senate and Canadian Prime Minister.