CSIRO calls for towns who want to trial underground water bank

The CSIRO's research indicates underground water banks could be part of the solution to the nation's water woes and used for everything for irrigation to town drinking water.

While it's not a new idea - various versions of it have been used in Australia since the 1960s - there has been a recent concerted effort to make the practice more widespread, as water becomes increasingly scares across the country.

CSIRO groundwater systems group leader Declan Page said the science behind an underground water bank was relatively straight forward.

"Basically you take water in times of plenty or times of excess and bank it in a subterranean basin or aquifer, where it can be recovered again when needed," Dr Page said.

"When there is a lot of water around, it can be bought on the market quite cheaply.

"So you could buy the water for cheap when the flows are high and bank it for times of drought."

There are also opportunities to catch storm water run-off and waste water, and use it to recharge aquifers, which Perth has been doing successfully for the past three years.

Storing water underground is significantly cheaper than building the infrastructure associated with a traditional dam, plus there are no algae blooms, mosquitoes or any evaporation.

"The evaporation is a big one - if you look at some parts of the Murray-Darling Basin, like Menindee Lakes for example, it loses 40 per cent of its capacity to evaporation each year," Dr Page said.

"That's a significant saving. If that can be stored, it'll make a big difference."

The CSIRO is looking for governments, councils and towns - particularly those who have been ravaged by the recent drought - to put themselves forward to trial the system.

While underground water banks will only work for places with a nearby aquifer, Dr Page said there were "significant opportunities" throughout NSW, Victoria and Queensland.

"We're a research agency and while we'd like to see this up and running in, and we'll help get it there, in the long term we won't be the ones to operate it," Dr Page said.

"We need to give the operators confidence and show people that 'wow, we really can do this'. If we can get people excited about this stuff, we can roll it out on a broad scale.

"If you go around Australia, pretty much in every state and territory there are multiple places this could be done."

There are a number of methods to get the water into the aquifer, which vary depending on how deep it is.

The cheapest way is to use a big holding pond above a shallow sandy aquifer and let it naturally soak in.

For the deeper limestone aquifers, the water has to injected under pressure through a well or pump.

Retrieval is as simple as pumping it back out through a bore.

"A lot of places rely on groundwater anyway, and by pumping those aquifers, it creates storages that have room to be recharged," Dr Page said.

"We're actually hoping to go to places where there is significant demand, because we can help bring those aquifers that are over exploited back to a more sustainable level."