California's chronic water worries have been aggravated by rapidly accumulating signals that the climate is changing, with warmer winters, smaller snow pack in the Sierra, earlier snowmelt, and more extreme weather events. Coastal cities expecting water shortages are searching for ways to build "portfolios" that ensure a stable, reliable, and locally sustainable water supply. Water districts and state agencies are promoting conservation measures as part of the mix, but the more intense push right now is for desalination.
More than 20 proposals for producing drinking water from seawater are in various stages of active consideration along the southern and central coast and on San Francisco Bay. They are driven by dire expectations, supported by public subsidies, and encouraged by the federal and state administrations and private water purveyors. Private corporations or public/private partnerships are proposing five of the projects, including two that would be the largest on this continent, in Carlsbad, San Diego County and in Huntington Beach, Orange County.
Desalination is the most expensive way to get potable water in California. Technological refinements have lowered its cost, but energy accounts for a third to half of the cost of production, and energy prices are moving only in one direction. Peter Gleick, cofounder and president of the independent, nonpartisan Pacific Institute, which in 2006 published an analysis of benefits and costs, Desalination with a Grain of Salt: A California Perspective, says subsidies hide the true costs.
California voters gave desalination a boost in 2002 with Proposition 50, the water bond act, which provided $50 million in grants to help water districts develop and build desalination plants. Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which covers six counties, has offered 25-year subsidies of $250 an acre-foot for water produced by desalination. (An acre-foot is about 326,000 gallons, or one acre one foot deep, and provides for the annual needs of four average families). At the federal level, three bills to fund development or production of desalted water, available to both public and private water services providers, were introduced in the last Congress. The U.S. Desalination Coalition, founded in 2003 by five large southern California water agencies, is working to "encourage federal support and funding." Its members now include water agencies in Florida, Texas, and Hawaii.
Who Benefits?
Everyone involved in discussions about desalination--from voters to public officials to environmental organizations and water companies--seems to accept that it will play some role in California's future. At conferences, workshops, and hearings they are debating, however, whether that future has arrived.
When and where will desalted water be needed? Who gets the water? Who should build and operate plants, at what cost and for whose benefit? How big should they be? Would they encourage excessive development? What effect would the discharge of left-over brine, with its chemical residues, have on marine ecosystems? What type of seawater intake will be permissible and how will it impact the coast? If private companies are involved, will water, a vital resource in the public trust, be turned into a commodity?
If all the plants now proposed are built, they could supply an estimated seven per cent of the state's urban water use. Their effects on the coast, however, could be major. A report by the Coastal Commission, Seawater Desalination and the California Coastal Act (2004), states: "The concerns about desalination are due primarily to its potential to cause adverse effects and growth that are beyond the capacity of California's coastal resources." In some coastal areas, the single largest constraint to growth has been a limited water supply.
Proponents of desalination plants maintain they are needed for a growing population, as hedges against drought and other disasters, to reduce dependence on a limited imported water supply, and as a reliable new local water source. They tout the end product as pure water that is of better quality than what now flows out of faucets in many locales.
Go-slow advocates point out that forecasts of water requirements have proved to be greatly overblown, that immense amounts of water are now wasted, that water use has been reduced greatly, and can be reduced much more, by measures that improve efficiency, encourage conservation, and provide for reuse. Such measures can yield more water at far less cost than desalination, they say, while reducing water pollution and saving energy and money. Building desalination plants now could undermine further progress.
Debatable Need Predictions
"The largest, least expensive, and most environmentally sound source of water to meet California's future needs is the water currently being wasted in every sector of the economy," states the Pacific Institute's Waste Not Want Not: The Potential for Urban Conservation in California (2003). About a third of the state's urban water use alone can be saved with existing technology, the report estimates. Agriculture also offers big water conservation opportunities.
What's more, the dire expectations of water shortages may be way off. "Note that California is using less water today than ten years ago," Gleick told a conference on desalination held at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach on October 5. Although the state's economy has grown and its population has risen to more than 34 million from 21.5 million in 1975, statewide water use has decreased, he said. Los Angeles has 700,000 more residents now than it did 20 years ago, but water demand has not risen
There are two ways to desalt seawater: by distillation or by reverse osmosis. All the plants proposed in California would use reverse osmosis, a process in which pressure is applied to seawater to force it through membranes that allow only water molecules to pass through. The remaining brine, along with minerals and residual chemicals used in the process, is discharged in a waste stream. Two gallons of saltwater will produce one gallon of drinking water. Because desalted water comes out tasteless, minerals must be added to make it palatable.
Some of the proposed plants would be built next to power plants with once-through cooling systems: they take in seawater to cool condensers, then discharge it through an outfall. The desalination plant would be connected to this outfall to collect some of the cooling water for desalting. The brine would be mixed with the power plant's discharge.
Nikolay Voutchkov, senior vice president of technical services for Poseidon Resources Corporation, wrote in the July/August 2005 issue of Asian Water that "co-location of desalination plants with large power generation stations may yield significant cost-savings and further reduce the cost of desalinated water." Tom Luster, environmental analyst for the Coastal Commission, meanwhile, says that such tie-ins could delay the transition coastal power plants must make from once-through cooling, which harms marine life. Many of these plants were built in the 1950s and '60s, when neither energy nor the environment were big public issues. In sucking in water from the ocean, they kill fish and other marine life that is trapped against the intake screen (impingement) or pulled through the system (entrainment). The California Ocean Protection Council has called for once-through cooling to be phased out, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has ordered a severe reduction in impingement and entrainment, and three coastal power plants have already switched to a cooling system that uses air instead of water. A co-located desalination plant could lock in a harmful and obsolete technology, Luster said.
What's Best for the 21st Century?
In the past, when water districts wanted more water, they got it from northern rivers or the Sierra by building dams and pipelines, with federal and state governments paying a big share of the cost. Desalination follows that tradition: it would expand water supplies by developing a new water source that requires hard structures. Those on the go-slow side of the debate hold that the 21st century demands an approach that makes the most of the water already available.
A simple measure such as replacing old toilets that use six gallons per flush with the kind that use 1.6 gallons per flush would save 420,000 acre-feet of high-quality water that now goes down the drain, the Pacific Institute has calculated, and householders would save on water bills. (Even more efficient toilets, which use 1.3 gallon a flush, are now standard in Europe and Japan and available here.) Even more could be saved by simple changes in irrigation; most household water use is outdoors.
Conner Everts co-chairs the Desal Response Group, a network brought together in 2004 by southern California utilities interested in ocean water desalination. "We have been meeting ever since because we have more questions than the utilities have answers," he said. This group is trying to make sure that as California moves toward desalination, citizens and decision-makers understand the key issues, and that these issues are addressed. The network includes water policy experts, local government representatives, staff of permitting agencies, utility districts, and citizen advocates concerned with food, water, the fishing industry, and ecosystems. "I've met people from organizations I never heard of before and we have shared our expertise in our areas of concern," said Joe Geever, the Surfrider Foundation's manager for the South Coast.
Privatization of water is a big concern. "If your water system is operated by a company with headquarters in Germany and that company is trying to divest itself of its water holdings in America, whom do you call when you need something?" Everts asks.
Private Projects Forge Ahead
The coastal desalination plants now being considered vary in size, character, and purpose. In October, the Coastal Commission unanimously approved a pilot project to be built by the City of Santa Cruz Water Department at the University of Santa Cruz Long Marine Laboratory to help the City decide whether to build a 2.5 million-gallons-a-day (MGD) facility to provide water during droughts, earthquakes, and other crises. The city might also opt to run it year-round and sell water to nearby communities.
In December, California American Water (Cal-Am), currently owned by RWE, a corporation based in Germany, won a divided Commission's approval for a pilot facility on the site of the Moss Landing power plant, which has once-through cooling. Cal-Am, the principal water supplier for the Monterey Peninsula, intends to build a plant that would generate 11 to 12 MGD, the amount the State Water Resources Control Board has required it to stop drawing from the Carmel River watershed. Cal-Am has been taking more than its permitted amount from the river, impeding efforts to restore the river's steelhead population.
The Marin County Water District is considering a plant next to a wastewater treatment plant on the San Quentin peninsula. It would take water from offshore and discharge brine with wastewater. San Francisco, Santa Clara County, and the East Bay Municipal Utility District are considering a large regional plant.
The projects that have made the most headway are also the biggest, proposed by Poseidon, whose headquarters are in Stamford, Connecticut, as public/private partnerships, co-located with power plants in Huntington Beach and Carlsbad. Each would be twice as big as the desalination plant in Tampa, Florida, which is supposed to generate 25 MGD. Also launched by Poseidon, it has been plagued by technical and management problems. Two companies involved in the project went bankrupt before it was completed. The regional water management agency, Tampa Water, now owns it and hopes to take it into full operation in 2008, six years later than originally planned. Tampa Water is investing another $29 million to work out the problems with the help of Cal-Am and a firm from Spain. The original $100-million price tag has jumped to $150 million, watertechnology.net, a water industry website, states.
The Cities of Huntington Beach and Carlsbad have approved Poseidon's environmental impact reports. The next steps are leases from the State Lands Commission and a permit from the Coastal Commission.
"Desal proponents in the biggest hurry are the private companies," said Surfrider's Geever. "Public agencies seem to be taking a more cautious approach." The City of Long Beach, for example, has a ten-year "drought-proof" strategic plan and is bent on finding an "affordable" approach. The Municipal Water District of Orange County has finalized a successful pilot demonstration of sub-seafloor intakes that avoid marine life mortality.
Coastal Commission's Criteria
Water management is fragmented in California and no strategic plan exists in which the whole picture of needs, requirements, and options is examined. The Coastal Commission hopes to remedy that, at least partly. "Now that water issues are moving to the coast, the Coastal Act allows us to take a more comprehensive look at different issues," Luster said. The Commission has established criteria for proposals and guidelines to help permit applicants move smoothly through the process. The criteria are: The facility should be set back from the coastline; a subsurface water-intake system should be used where possible; brine should be discharged through an existing outfall when possible; the plant should be publicly owned; the applicant should show that the water will affect an already developed area with an approved growth plan; and the service area should have an effective conservation program.
Because it met five of these six criteria, a relatively small project in Sand City north of Monterey, proposed by the Pajaro-Mesa Utility District with Poseidon, was approved within six months. The project has a subsurface intake, is to be sited a half mile inland, and there is a plan to move it farther inland if coastal erosion occurs.
In the case of the Cal-Am pilot project to be co-located at the Moss Landing power plant, the Commission's permit approval went against its staff recommendation that it be denied. Staff found that the proposal did not conform to the Local Coastal Plan and did not adequately protect sensitive natural resources. It was proposed by a private company, although Monterey County has an ordinance requiring public ownership for desalination plants. At the Commission hearing, Cal-Am president Ken Turner said no decision had been made on what kind of intake the plant would have. The pilot project will simply provide needed information, he said. Permit opponents saw the pilot plant as the first step toward a co-located plant that, even if small at first, could be expanded once the distribution system is in place.
Drawing water from the sea bottom is considered to be less environmentally harmful than taking it from the surface. However, subsurface intakes are mostly suitable for small projects and are inappropriate in some locations, said Poseidon's Voutchkov. In Huntington Beach, he said, the seafloor is too polluted, while surface waters are consistently clean, except after storms. Unanswered questions about the impact of pollution, red tides, and other ocean water quality variables on desalinated water is the subject of a study being prepared by the West Basin Municipal Water District in Los Angeles.
No Single Path
Tapping the seas for drinking water is hardly a new idea. Saudi Arabia has done it for decades. In a desert nation rich in energy sources, the cost/benefit ratios are different from those in California. Most of the significant seawater desalting capacity is in the Persian Gulf, on islands with little local water, (including Catalina Island), and in some other locations "where water options are limited and the public is willing to pay high prices," states the Pacific Institute's report on desalination. However, "while seawater desalination plants are already vital for economic development in many arid and water-short areas of the world, many plants are overly expensive, inaccurately promoted, poorly designed, inappropriately sited, and ultimately useless."
The debate about desalination has engaged public agencies, private interests, fishermen, farmers, utilities, planners, and many others. Zeke Grader, president of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations, said he's ready to give "conditional approval" to desalination, but only if the things that trouble him can be resolved. It would be hypocritical for his organization to advocate the removal of hydroelectric dams on the Klamath River while supporting new high-energy water projects, he said. He hopes to see desalination become an energy-saving technology, one that reduces the need to pump northern river water south.
Meanwhile, the Surfrider Foundation is working with the West Basin Municipal Water District and other utilities on an Ocean Friendly Garden program for residential and large landscapes. By reducing runoff, the program should reduce water use, stream and ocean degradation, and the associated costs of controlling intractable nonpoint source pollution. San Diego County, which originally was a partner in the Poseidon project for Carlsbad, has stepped back after its water conservation efforts proved so successful that projections for water requirements were scaled down. Reuse and groundwater recharge are progressing in Orange County.
"Our vision should be absolutely no discharge into the ocean," said Geever. "We should be reclaiming every drop of water and finding a productive use for it." Small, public desalination plants can have a place in that vision. How the story evolves, however, will depend in no small part on the attention it gets from California citizens.
