Editor’s note: This segment was rebroadcast on May 19, 2025. Find that audio here.
This year, Chicago breaks ground on a pipeline that will bring water from the Great Lakes to some suburbs whose groundwater is running dry.
Joliet, Illinois, about 30 miles from Lake Michigan, draws its water from an aquifer deep underground. The area’s geology effectively seals off that underground reservoir, preventing rain from replenishing it. Since people started pumping from it in the 19th century, the aquifer has been drained much faster than it can recharge.
“This has been something that the Illinois State Water Survey has been predicting since the [1970s],” said Allison Swisher, Joliet’s director of public utilities. “But it kept being, ‘Well it’s 100 years away, it’s 100 years away.’”
In 2015, the state revised its outlook. The deadline was actually 2030. Joliet scoured nearby rivers and other water sources, considering 14 different options, and decided to buy water from Chicago, which draws from Lake Michigan.
That set off a race to overhaul the area’s water infrastructure at a cost of more than $2 billion, most of that paying for a roughly 62-mile network of new pipes and pump stations that will carry drinking water from Chicago’s purification plants to Joliet and five neighboring communities. Construction begins in June, according to Chicago’s Department of Water Management, and is expected to be complete in 2030, right when Joliet’s wells may start to run dry.
Some see a model for regional cooperation in a warmer world where water is more scarce, but the project has also renewed anxiety about the future of the Great Lakes.
‘A noble endeavor’
It’s easy to take water for granted, especially around the Great Lakes, which hold 20% of all the freshwater on Earth.
“It is kind of mind-boggling for people in this area,” said Swisher. “As long as you turn on your faucet and water comes out, people don’t think about it.”
That peace of mind is possible because of a complex system of engineering that treats and delivers water on demand. In Joliet, that has included removing naturally occurring radium, which will no longer be needed after the switch to Lake Michigan water.
When the project is complete, Chicago will send up to 55.3 million gallons of treated drinking water to Joliet and its neighbors every day, at a cost of roughly $30 million annually.
Those bills will be paid by the Grand Prairie Water Commission, formed by Joliet and its five smaller neighbors: Crest Hill, Channahon, Minooka, Romeoville and Shorewood.
David Kohn of Chicago’s Department of Water Management said the sale of water is more than just business.
“We’re providing water to a quarter of a million people whose water supply is running out, and it’s a very noble endeavor in that regard. Chicago is working with its neighbors to try and provide water to those who need it,” Kohn said. “It’s a pretty simple proposition. The engineering isn’t simple, the project isn’t simple, but the idea behind it is very sound.”
The Grand Prairie Water Commission will be Chicago’s second-biggest buyer of water, but Kohn said the city’s system can easily accommodate the extra demand.
On a daily basis, Chicago purifies and distributes about 700 million gallons of water to customers in the city and more than 100 suburbs. That’s enough water to fill an Olympic swimming pool about every 82 seconds on average.
More than 6.5 million people in Illinois get their drinking water from Lake Michigan, but the use of that water is strictly regulated.
“You can’t just simply make a connection to the lake and take whatever you want,” said Kohn.
Like other suburbs with similar water deals, the members of the Grand Prairie Water Commission had to apply for a permit from the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, submit to audits by the state and meet stringent requirements for water efficiency. Joliet is in the middle of a 9-year campaign to replace all of its water mains installed before 1970 with less leaky pipes. It expects to finish that work by 2030.
‘Water demons’
There’s a good reason for regulating withdrawals of water from the Great Lakes, said Peter Annin, director of the Center for Freshwater Innovation at Northland College.
“The idea is under the climate-driven global and national water crisis that someone, sometime will come groping for Great Lakes water,” Annin said. “It is a magical water destination, and the people in the Great Lakes region are paranoid about unsustainable water use elsewhere creating demands for them to divert water outside of the Great Lakes watershed to the detriment of the ecosystem that they love.”
The Great Lakes Compact limits water access to communities that lie within the lakes’ watershed. Chicago can sell its water to Joliet and other cities outside that area because it was granted what Annin calls a “screaming exception” to those rules for something it did more than a century ago.
In 1900, engineers reversed the flow of the Chicago River to keep sewage from polluting the city’s water supply. It worked, and the city flourished, but it also outraged neighboring states who sued Illinois. They eventually got the U.S. Supreme Court to limit how much of Lake Michigan Chicago can essentially flush down its toilets — which drain to the Mississippi River, not the Great Lakes — to about 2.1 billion gallons per day.
“Then comes Joliet with one of the biggest asks and by far the most far-flung ask, and it’s brought back all these water demons in the Great Lakes region from 100 years ago,” Annin said. “It’s no offense to Joliet necessarily, other than the fact that it’s a bailout of unsustainable water practices that should have been recognized and dealt with decades before.”
Many communities around the country have depleted their groundwater to slake growing populations and thirsty industries. In Joliet, industrial users include an ExxonMobil refinery–which taps the aquifer with its own wells, not through the city’s system–and Amazon warehouses.
Industrial users are responsible for about 10% of Joliet’s public water consumption, Swisher said, or about 1.45 million gallons per day. Exxon declined to comment about its private water use, but its Joliet refinery produces about 11 million gallons of fuel a day, suggesting a daily water intake around 4 million gallons according to figures in a 2018 study of refinery water use generally.
While Joliet’s per capita water use has declined over time, it could have done more to conserve water, said Rachel Havrelock, director of The Freshwater Lab at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
“Instead of reevaluating our practices, the idea is just to source water from the Great Lakes and move it there,” she said. “With the rise of artificial intelligence and the intensive water needs of data centers, we’re looking at higher projections for water use exactly when Joliet and the surrounding communities are being told they need to get off the aquifer by 2030.”
Developers of data centers are considering sites in Minooka, one of the communities soon to receive Lake Michigan water through the Grand Prairie Water Commission. Data centers use lots of water to cool the banks of computers constantly whirring to support the world’s digital infrastructure. In Minooka, that demand could be as high as 3 million gallons a day.
Allison Swisher of Joliet, the largest member of the Grand Prairie Water Commission, said her city has no plans to provide large quantities of Lake Michigan water to industrial users, including data centers.
“Right now, the system that the Grand Prairie Water Commission is building is not sized to provide water to refineries,” Swisher said. “It’s not sized to provide water to data centers.”
For UIC’s Rachel Havrelock, even the possibility that treated drinking water from Lake Michigan could one day be used to cool machines outside the Great Lakes basin is “a crazy, unsustainable scenario.”
“Chicago water is now going to be sent farther inland than it’s ever been sent, in order to meet the humanitarian crisis because industries around Joliet over-extracted the water. OK, but those people have to drink, and we will do it for them,” Havrelock said. “But industries don’t need drinking water.”
Instead, Havrelock and her colleagues have proposed building a second pipeline carrying treated wastewater for industrial uses that would save drinking water for drinking.
As water users outside Chicago continue to reengineer the Lake Michigan watershed, they should try to correct the mistakes of the past, said Peter Annin of Northland College.
“They’re getting a privilege that other communities outside the Great Lakes watershed can’t get. And ironically, that privilege goes back to Chicago’s own unsustainable water practices more than 100 years ago,” Annin said, “that they’re continuing to cash in on today.”
‘Water is not going to be shipped to Kansas’
Havrelock’s proposal for a parallel pipeline carrying treated wastewater for industrial users is off the table for now. Even so, Joliet and its neighbors have been forced to rethink how they use water.
Crews are ripping up roads all over Joliet, removing about 192 miles of leaky pipes by 2030, in a rush to meet the state’s requirement that users of Lake water lose no more than 10% in the process of pumping it out to customers. Currently, almost a third of Joliet’s water is lost before it ever makes it to the tap.
Swisher, Joliet’s director of public utilities, said that work will cost about $600 million and would not happen if it weren’t for the switch to Lake Michigan water.
“Right now, to produce our own water is relatively inexpensive, so there wasn’t really a cost driver to replace leaky pipes,” Swisher said. “I think you find that in a lot of older communities, it costs a lot of money to replace these pipes, and unless you’re being told to do it for some specific reason, there’s not a lot of return on investment.”
Like the $1.45 billion for the pipeline, the cost of those upgrades will fall largely on future customers of the Grand Prairie Water Commission. Part of the reason the commission was formed in the first place was to share the costs of piping in Lake Michigan water. Still, Joliet said the average monthly water bill will more than double. Some residents have protested the plan to hike water rates.
The high cost of piping Lake Michigan water approximately 30 miles is a reminder that economics is another deterrent to diverting Great Lakes water, on top of the legal barriers.
“In my mind, this doesn’t open up Pandora’s Box of suddenly water’s gonna be shipped to Kansas just because Joliet was allowed to get the water,” Swisher said.
From the Chicago lakefront, the lake stretches to the horizon in three directions. It seems infinite, but it’s not. Chicago’s diversion, grandfathered in more than a century ago, has already lowered lake levels by more than two inches.
With the addition of Joliet, it’s now up to more people than ever to share this precious resource.
One of those people is Maria Anna Rafac, a professor at Joliet Junior College. She said she’s been using Joliet’s situation to start discussions with her students about sustainable water use.
The lesson, she said, is “don’t wait until you’re in crisis. Get ahead of the game.”
Rafac said she’s excited to start drinking Chicago’s famously tasty tap water, and that she’s not taking it for granted.
“We’ve lost that the decisions we make today come into play in the future. Look at the future of Lake Michigan water. We’d better stay on top of it,” Rafac said. “We’re far away, but now we’re connected.”
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
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