The myth of American lust for Canadian fresh water supplies has been strong since the early 1990s, when opponents of free trade claimed the agreement would lead to draining Canada dry. The premise was that the American Southwest was desperate for fresh water and thus would work through hook or crook to snatch Canada’s abundant supplies and transport them to irrigate parched states.

The fantasy has resurfaced of late, as a story has claimed that independence advocates in Alberta allegedly offered Alberta’s water to American government representatives in a meeting. Perhaps they did, or perhaps they didn’t make the offer. It doesn’t matter because moving significant volumes of water to the United States is totally unviable.

It’s not a matter of principles. It’s a matter of simple physics and economics.

Water as a commodity is very difficult to move in volume. It’s heavy and of low relative value. Alberta’s larger standing water supplies are in the north. It would have to be moved thousands of kilometres to reach arid American regions.

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The latest estimate for a bitumen pipeline to move 1 million barrels per day to the West Coast is ringing in at $40 billion, and that is less than 1,000 kilometers. If a pipeline were created to move water at that scale, the cost would be higher since water is heavier than oil and it would need more energy to push it through the pipe. Even if such a massive pipeline for water were built, it would move the equivalent of a small creek.

The value per barrel isn’t even comparable. Untreated water for industrial use in Alberta averages at about $.05 per barrel, whereas oil ranges from $30 to over $100. A pipeline moving a million barrels per day of water would be transporting a value of about $50,000 daily.

Blasting a canal is even more impossible. A structure would have to be built to transport water over mountain passes and across multiple large river valleys that keep trying to take the water to the Pacific Ocean. The Panama Canal is only 50 miles long and reaches a peak height of 85 feet above sea level, and it’s considered one of the modern wonders of the world.

If water were that easy to move, southern Saskatchewan and Alberta wouldn’t have the vast, arid regions they do because irrigation would have been brought in generations ago.

There is no model where taking water from Alberta (or any other part of Canada, for that matter) would be economically or logistically reasonable Desalinization plants on the West Coast could create fresh water supplies more reasonably than trying to move water from the north, and they are terribly expensive.

Among concerns raised over Alberta’s potential bid for independence, the threat to Alberta’s water supply is a non-starter.