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Water, water everywhere

With desalination of an ocean’s supply, there’s plenty more than a drop to drink

BY DANIEL BLACKBURN

At first glance, San Luis Obispo County looks lush and green throughout most of the year, suggesting an endless supply of fresh water for people, farms and ranches, and industrial uses.

Look again. Most development in the county is located over or near existing underground or stored water sources. Many other, more arid, parts of the county remain undeveloped, dry, parched.

Forget inadequate housing, unavailable medical care and ever-worsening traffic as the county’s big social problems. Forget state housing mandates.

Water–or the lack of it–is what controls growth in these parts.

So why, in an area blessed with miles of coastline and an ocean of water on the horizon, is desalting not used more extensively? Wouldn’t a few desalting plants along the coast help solve this county’s persistently looming water shortage?

Yes. No. Maybe.

Desalination is not new. For the past four decades the technology has been fine-tuned, mostly by scientific dreamers, entrepreneurs, a distant country here, an isolated municipality there.

Too expensive. Too technologically undeveloped. Impractical. The reasons given by water officials all over this state for desalting’s low priority in the water supply business are pretty standard. And until fairly recently, the reasons carried some weight.

But as existing water supplies from groundwater sources and overland transfers constrict, the plausibility of desalting on a large scale grows. Costs are dropping as technology improves.

"Water suppliers in the United States have historically snubbed desalination as an inefficient, expensive treatment option, but times have changed," according to a recent issue of Mainstream, a publication of the American Water Works Association.

According to the water group, "Severe droughts, dwindling supplies, growing cities, and cheaper methods of desalting water have sparked interest among American suppliers."

There is ample reason to look more seriously at this alternative water supply: Ninety-seven percent of earth’s water is seawater, and two-thirds of the 3 percent that remains as fresh water is in icebergs and snow.

Additionally, 70 percent of the world’s population lives on coastlines, making these locales ideal for desalt utilization.

But desalting contributes just one-quarter of 1 percent of this planet’s fresh water needs. And in California, desalting provides less than one-tenth of 1 percent of urban supplies.

Desalting as a concept last experienced a spurt of popularity during California’s last protracted drought, which started in 1987 and finally ended in 1992 with what was to become known as the "March miracle," a steady downpour that refilled reservoirs and drowned, once more, the impetus for desalting. Out of sight, out of mind.

During that period, several notable local desalting plants were constructed. Residents of both Santa Barbara and Morro Bay, for example, bit the fiscal bullet and ponied up the cash to construct state-of-the-art facilities for changing saline water into fresh, potable water.

Both plants were built in 1991, the driest single year in the state’s recorded history, when water officials wallowed knee-deep in panic. Morro Bay’s facility operated for two years, then shut down, the high cost of production driving that decision. It was used in 1995 to help solve a high iron content in local water, and hasn’t been used before this year since 1997.

Today, the Santa Barbara plant is being dismantled and sold piece-by-piece to Kuwait. Officials in Santa Barbara have decided that the plant was too expensive, and that imported water would take care of its needs.

Morro Bay’s plant, in mothballs for the past five years, was just fired up again Oct. 28, to provide supplemental water for blending with the city’s relatively expensive State Water Project (SWP) supplies. Last Friday, the Morro Bay plant was shut down again, but just for the wet season, according to plant manager Bill Boucher, whose facility can produce 400 gallons a minute.

Boucher said the Morro Bay plant desalts water costing only 20 percent more than its SWP water. The two waters are then blended before delivery to the city’s 10,800 residents.

That 20 percent figure is substantially lower than in years past, when desalted water was said by many "experts" to cost more than twice the price of SWP water and groundwater supplies.

Generally speaking, that high differential in costs was the publicly stated factor which has, over the years, led most water agencies to shun desalting as a long-term water supply source.

Equally responsible, probably, for desalting’s slow evolution as a dependable source of fresh water is the controversial issue of population growth. Residents of many communities, particularly in this county, oppose desalting for the same reasons that many oppose new overland supplies–water encourages population growth. Without community support, it is exceedingly difficult to construct any high-ticket public works project.

David Kennedy, director of the state’s Department of Water Resources (DWR) for 16 years under governors George Deukmejian and Pete Wilson, said population growth "is very much an issue" in coastal areas when desalting plans are on the table.

"Desalting has an economic feasibility in areas where existing water costs are high," said Kennedy. "So eventually people in these areas are going to have to deal with it [desalting]. But it is admittedly difficult to get a consensus from lots of communities."

Kennedy, whose department built and now operates the 444-mile-long SWP and maintains contracts with user districts across the state, said he is encouraged by the diminishing cost of desalting water.

"It’s a niche thing, but it’s an important niche," said Kennedy.

Two decades ago, he noted, desalting cost about $1,500 per acre-foot of water, compared to about $700 per acre-foot for delivering imported water to SLO coastal committees. (An acre-foot is enough to supply the water needs of a family of five for a year.)

Today, the cost of state water for coastal regions has dropped to about $600 an acre-foot, and desalting costs have shrunk to less than $800. The Yuma [Ariz.] Desalting Plant, built in 1977 but never used because of environmental concerns for neighboring wetlands, is capable of desalting water for as little as $318 an acre-foot. But with cities and farmers in that area taking water from the shrinking Colorado River at $3.50 and $70 an acre-foot, respectively, there is little motivation for using the plant.

Costs of desalting water do not include integration of desalted water into existing supplies, however, and that is a variable differing greatly from region to region.

Kennedy said that municipal demands for water make construction of large plants necessary.

"Unfortunately, that results in something being built that looks a lot like a big oil rig. and that doesn’t seem to fly [in coastal areas]. But it is all starting to make sense, I think."

Paul Simon, a former U.S. senator and author of "Tapped Out: The Coming World Crisis in Water," bemoans the fact that this nation’s desalination research program and other federal desalination projects total only $2 million annually. That compares with the desalt technology spending of $400 million a year in today’s dollars by the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations.

Simon questions the priorities of policy-makers in the area of desalting.

"If we spent 5 percent as much each year on desalination research as we spend on weapons research," Simon wrote in his book, "we could enrich the lives of all humanity far beyond anything anyone has conceived."

Simon, a leading advocate of desalting, said he thinks short-term steps to protect water supplies should include conservation and anti-pollution measures; the long-term answers will be desalinization and population control.

"We in the United States tend to think about as far ahead as November" when it comes to water planning, said Simon.

Oddly, this nation lags behind in implementation of the technology, not in development of the technology itself. U.S. firms have been instrumental in providing desalting capability for 120 other nations that use the science. At present, there are 11,000 desalting plants operating worldwide, with 60 percent of those in the Middle East. Those desalting plants produce 4 billion gallons daily, 15 times more than was being produced 20 years ago. Saudi Arabia leads the world in the effort, using mostly U.S.-bred technology.

Most desalting technology centers around two methods, distillation and reverse osmosis.

Distillation mimics nature’s heat absorption of water vapors from the ocean. More than 60 percent of all desalting efforts today use this method. But it is cumbersome and costly, and not a practical solution for most urban areas.

Reverse osmosis is the technique used mostly in the United States. This is a system of using various membranes to separate salt from water.

Reverse osmosis is used in the Morro Bay plant.

According to a San Diego Union-Tribune story published last year, the cost of desalting seawater is down about 60 percent since 1990.

That has nudged interest in desalting again.

The San Diego County Water Authority is considering a Carlsbad plant capable of providing about 10 percent of San Diego’s water needs. The area currently imports most of its water supply through overland water transfer facilities.

In Tampa, Fla., water officials are building what will be the nation’s desalting plant. Florida has two such facilities under construction, as does California.

The Menifee Desalter, a project of the Eastern Municipal Water District in Southern California, will cost $23.5 million and will produce two million gallons daily at full operation.

The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California is considering proposals for five projects to be completed by 2007, and meeting the daily needs of 400,000 people.

That’s a big change for the huge distributor.

Ronald Gastelum, MWD’s chief executive officer, said recently, "Although the Pacific Ocean lies at our doorstep, desalting water for drinking water has, in the past, been far too expensive, compared to other sources of supply."

Oxnard city officials have initiated their Groundwater Recovery Enhancement and Treatment Program, a $50 million overhaul of the city’s groundwater system. This will include construction of a regional groundwater desalination plant, with desalted water extending the city’s potable supplies.

Morro Bay’s Boucher said the cost of water from Naciemiento Lake "was getting very expensive, so what we are seeing is an increase in existing water costs and a decrease in desalting costs. And with groundwater overdrafts and quality an issue, desalting is more attractive than ever."

Today, the biggest hurdle facing the desalting future are environmental concerns. Heavily brined water discharged into the ocean can have wide-ranging detrimental effects on existing ocean life, and this problem must be solved before widespread use of desalting occurs.

High consumption of electrical energy is another issue that needs to be addressed, said Boucher, but he said the discharge problem will not impact Morro Bay’s operation.

"By the time our discharge gets to the ocean, it is so diluted it causes no problems," he said.

So he believes his community is positioned well for future drought situations.

"Morro Bay officials made a far-sighted decision to go both ways, with state water and desalting, and that gives our community a high level of assurance that we can provide water well into the future," he said. Æ

News editor Daniel Blackburn can be reached at [email protected]




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