Cadiz Inc. hopes what lies beneath more than 30,000 Mojave Desert acres in San Bernardino County can one day sustain people. But after four decades, the company’s ambitious groundwater-pumping plan has yielded only fruits, vegetables and a mountain of legal bills.
The latest salvo in the long-running fight over the Mojave Groundwater Bank — formerly called the Cadiz Valley Water Conservation, Recovery, and Storage Project or Cadiz Water Project — came last month with a new lawsuit from project critics.
They’re hoping to overturn the federal Bureau of Land Management’s July 9 decision that clears the way for 162 miles of a former natural gas pipeline to ferry desert groundwater to the Inland Empire and points beyond.
“BLM’s attempt to revive this inadequately studied project is another example of how the Trump administration is selling out the American people and our public lands to private industry hellbent on profiting from natural resources,” the plaintiffs’ attorney Elizabeth Forsyth said in a statement.
“It’s like Groundhog’s Day: they still haven’t corrected the legal errors previously identified by the court, and we’re filing another lawsuit to address the same concerns.”
Responding to the lawsuit, Cathryn Rivera, chief operating officer for the Los Angeles-based Cadiz, said the BLM reviewed the project for five years.
“We are confident the record supports the bureau’s decision,” she said via email.
Critics, including environmentalists and local Native American tribes, maintain the project would destroy a vital aquifer while endangering cultural traditions, plants and wildlife in the process.
“Cadiz is a threat to all creatures great and small and the core values of protecting our parks and environment from irreplaceable ruin, all in the name of profit,” civil rights leader Dolores Huerta said in a news release following the BLM ruling.
“It is exactly this type of greed and injustice that I have dedicated my life to oppose.”
Cadiz executives insist groundwater currently lost to evaporation would be extracted through a sustainable, thoroughly vetted process that’s been subject to dozens of studies and multiple court approvals.
The project dates to the early 1980s, when satellite imagery uncovered the isolated aquifer in the Cadiz and Fenner valleys near the Arizona border.
Cadiz bought land above the aquifer and devised a plan to extract its groundwater. For 35 years, the company has used the aquifer to water lemons, grapes, squash and other crops on roughly 3,500 acres of its property.
“The fact is tens of thousands of acre-feet of groundwater that flows through our aquifer is lost to evaporation each year at desert dry lakes just below our ranch,” Cadiz spokesperson Courtney Deneger said via email. “Conserving water before it evaporates is the most environmentally friendly source of new water supply on the planet.”
The project would use two routes called the Northern and Southern pipelines to deliver groundwater, which would be managed through a San Bernardino County-approved plan to prevent over-extraction, according to Cadiz.
The Northern Pipeline, which Cadiz acquired from the El Paso Natural Gas Company, would run northeast through Barstow to the Antelope Valley.
Seventy percent of the Northern Pipeline’s capacity is ticketed for Inland area water providers, according to the Secure Water Alliance, a labor and business group. The project also could keep more water in the Colorado River through exchange arrangements, according to Cadiz.
“As soon as the pipeline is repurposed for water, many Inland Empire residents will have a new, reliable and more affordable long-term water source,” Rich Lambros, the alliance’s executive director, said via email.
Cadiz also said the Northern Pipeline, which could deliver enough water to meet the needs of 200,000 people a year, would spur $386 million in economic activity during construction. Once operational, the pipeline would support 56 jobs, $21 million in regional economic activity and up to $3.4 million a year in state and local tax revenue, the company added.
The BLM ruling — the Northern Pipeline crosses federally protected lands like Mojave Trails National Monument — found the underground, 30-inch steel pipeline would not significantly affect the environment.
Nonsense, argue critics who warn the project would pump groundwater faster than it could be replenished and dry up springs used by wildlife — bighorn sheep and desert tortoises, for example — and native plants.
The drawdown of the water table will deplete and expose desert playa lakebeds, resulting in air pollution from windswept sediments laden with toxic heavy metals, according to last month’s lawsuit filed in Los Angeles federal court.
Some tribes view the project as an assault on their sovereignty and cultural heritage, saying the aquifer supports sacred springs and landscapes that are part of their cultural heritage.
“Our people have been here since time immemorial, and we will not allow the Cadiz Corporation to destroy the living landscapes that preserve and teach our traditional ways,” Daniel Silvas, chairman of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe, said in a news release.
At least one tribe supports the project. Lytton Rancheria of Northern California became a majority investor in 2025, making the project “the first major water infrastructure project that is majority owned by a Native American Tribe,” said Deneger, the Cadiz spokesperson.
Other project critics include Rep. Raul Ruiz, D-Palm Desert, whose district includes project land.
“This decision ignores a fundamental truth: a private company should not be allowed to mine groundwater from one of the driest regions in North America without a full accounting of the consequences,” Ruiz said in a post on X.
The project’s fortunes have ebbed and flowed depending on who’s in the White House.
The first Trump administration issued a pipeline permit, a decision reversed by the Biden administration in 2021.
The latest legal challenge aside, the project still faces hurdles.
A state law enacted in 2019 requires the project to get California State Lands Commission approval and undergo an independent scientific review; in 2024, the commission rejected a lease for a pipeline segment crossing state lands.
Andrew Ayres, a water economics professor at the University of Nevada, said the project is “a hedge against future uncertainties” in water supply.
“A lot of these projects kind of get floated and hang around for a while because major public water suppliers like to have a diverse portfolio of things that they could reach into if they had to,” Ayres said.
“Many of these run into roadblocks further down the line that mean that either they’re not worth it or they’re just not feasible. If we’re able to solve bigger problems on the State Water Project and the Colorado River, I’m not sure that Cadiz will end up manifesting in the future.”
A new framework released by the U.S. Department of the Interior late last month calls for cutbacks in Colorado River water deliveries to California and other states.
“The future of the Colorado River Basin depends on developing new water supplies, not simply managing scarcity,” Deneger said.
“The Mojave Groundwater Bank is one of the few major water infrastructure projects that offers new water that can directly benefit the diminishing Colorado River.”
City News Service contributed to this report.