Economic Assessment of Opportunities for Managed Aquifer Recharge Techniques in Spain Using an Advanced Geographic Information System (GIS)

Abstract

This paper investigates the economic aspects of Managed Aquifer Recharge (MAR) techniques considered in the DINA-MAR (Depth Investigation of New Areas for Managed Aquifer Recharge in Spain) project. This project firstly identified the areas with potential for MAR for the whole of the Iberian Peninsula and Balearic Islands of Spain using characteristics derived from 23 GIS layers of physiographic features, spanning geology, topography, land use, water sources and including existing MAR sites. The work involved evaluations for 24 different types (techniques) of MAR projects, over this whole area accounting for the physiographic features that favor each technique. The scores for each feature for each type of technique were set based on practical considerations and scores were accumulated for each location. A weighting was assigned to each feature by "training" the integrated score for each technique across all the features with the existing MAR sites overlay, so that opportunities for each technique could be more reliably predicted. It was found that there were opportunities for MAR for 16% of the area evaluated and that the additional storage capacity of aquifers in these areas was more than 2.5 times the total storage capacity of all existing surface water dams in Spain. The second part of this work, which is considered internationally unique, was to use this GIS methodology to evaluate the economics of the various MAR techniques across the region. This involved determining an economic index related to key physiographic features and OPEN ACCESSWater 2014, 6 2022 applying this as an additional GIS overlay. Again this was trained by use of economic information for each of the existing MAR sites for which economic data and supply or storage volume were available. Two simpler methods were also used for comparison. Finally, the mean costs of MAR facilities and construction projects were determined based on the origin of the water. Maps of potential sites for Managed Aquifer Recharge (or "MAR zones") in the Iberian Peninsula and Balearic Islands of Spain and the results of the previous economic studies developed at the beginning of the project were used as the foundation for the economic analysis. Based on these data, a new specific mapping of the total expected costs for all "MAR zones" (€/m 3 ) was proposed based on the techniques that were considered most appropriate for each Spanish study case. Capital costs ranged from Euro 0.08-0.58 per m 3 /year. Overall, this study investigates the opportunity and economic feasibility of implementing new MAR projects and provides support to decision makers in Spain. The novel mapping provides valuable guidance for the future development of Managed Aquifer Recharge projects for water managers and practitioners.

Potential Benefits of Managed Aquifer Recharge MAR on the Island of Gotland, Sweden

“…The economic analysis was based on cost estimates associated with infiltration basins, raw water intake and new piping, resulting in a unit cost of approximately 5 SEK/m 3 . This can be compared to cost estimates for MAR in Spain ranging between €0.08-0.58 per m 3 [20] (approximately 0.8-6 SEK/m 3 ).…”

Cost-Benefit Analysis of the Managed Aquifer Recharge System for Irrigation under Climate Change Conditions in Southern Spain

“…In the field of water resources, Bouwer [38] gives an overview of CBA throughout Europe and North America. Regarding the MAR system, previous studies have illustrated the use of CBA to evaluate the feasibility of this type of system [9,11]. However, few have included non-use value in the attainment of socio-environmental benefits, such as in Todd [39] and Maliva [12].…”

“…The web application called "HidroGeoportal DINA-MAR" manages an important volume of information that helps in water decision-making policies or investments. This project also has a map of "iso-costs" to estimate the average investment and maintenance cost in a MAR Zone, depending on the origin of the water sources, either of fluvial in origin or sewage waters [9]. Since the Boquerón aquifer is located in an MAR Zone and the recharge comes from the Hellín canal, the map of iso-costs was used to estimate the investment cost and the maintenance cost: €0.2/m 3 and €0.01/m 3 , respectively.…”

Application of a GIS Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis for the Identification of Intrinsic Suitable Sites in Costa Rica for the Application of Managed Aquifer Recharge (MAR) through Spreading Methods

“…Several different approaches to classify the suitability of the slope are available in the literature [12,[16][17][18][19][21][22][23][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34]41]. The linear function for the standardization of the slope is used in [12,41], all the others use the step-wise function (slope classes).…”

“…GIS-MCDA for the identification of MAR suitable sites has been applied to entire countries such as Australia [15] and Spain [16], as well as in many regions of the world, for example in India [17][18][19][20][21][22][23], Iran [24][25][26][27], Jordan [28,29], Portugal [12,30], Tunisia [31,32], and the United States [33,34]. The general process for MAR site suitability analysis proposed in [12] is: problem definition, screening of feasible areas, suitability mapping-including the classification of thematic layers or criteria, standardization, weighting of the criteria and layers overlaying-and sensitivity analysis.…”