LEANING RIGHT-Ninety two (92) million people are unemployed under the current administration and will be unemployed for generations to come as long as they continue receiving largess from the government. Fifty million are on food stamps and other aid. At the same time Southern California is in the midst of yet another drought. Why not address both problems by investing in efficient conversion of seawater to fresh water and in the process, creating some jobs?
It seems strange that water should be such a scarce resource when our planet is drenched in 326 million trillion gallons of the stuff. But it turns out that less than one-half of 1 percent of it is drinkable.
Out of the rest, 98 percent is oceanic salt water and 1.5 percent remains locked up in icecaps and glaciers. The stark irony of Samuel Coleridge's immortal line "Water, water, everywhere / Nor any drop to drink" is manifest each year in coastal disasters around the world, like Hurricane Katrina, the 2004 Indonesian tsunami and the 2010 Haiti earthquake, as people within sight of entire oceans are threatened with dehydration.
Between droughts, natural disasters and the large-scale redistribution of moisture threatened by climate change, the need for new sources of potable water grows with each passing day. Each year, the global population swells by another 85 million people, but worldwide demand for freshwater increases at twice the rate of population growth, doubling every 20 years or so Throughout the world, our most vital resource is under stress from pollution, dam construction, wetland and riparian ecosystem destruction, and depletion of groundwater aquifers, with poor and marginalized populations getting the worst of it.
So why can't we convert seawater into drinking water? Actually, we can and we do. In fact, people have been making seawater drinkable at least as far back as the ancient Greeks. But when taken to the scale of cities, states and nations, purifying seawater has historically proven prohibitively expensive, especially when compared to tapping regional and local sources of freshwater. However, as advancing technology continues to drive costs down and freshwater continues to grow scarcer and more expensive, more cities are looking to seawater conversion as a way to meet this vital demand.
We have done amazing things when needs dictate and when opportunities present themselves.
These have included:
- The development of the atomic bomb that spelled the end of WWII.
- Responding to President John Kennedy’s aspiration of placing a man on the moon.
- Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs developing Apple.
- Stupendous achievements in the field of science by today’s engineers.
- Tremendous advances in medicine that has added 15 years to our life expectancy.
One of our next targets should be the efficient conversion of sea water to fresh potable water. Let us look at some of the local efforts being worked to this goal.
Huntington Beach -Seawater could become drinking water at a Huntington Beach plant within a few years. State water regulators at a meeting in Loma Linda on Friday approved a permit for the new facility.
The Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board voted to push forward plans for a plant that will convert about 50 million gallons of ocean water into drinking water every day.
That’s enough to supply at least a quarter of a million people in Orange County with fresh water.
Roughly 70 percent of the earth's surface is covered in water, yet only 0.3 percent is both fresh and available for human consumption.
A Connecticut-based firm proposed the desalination system and developers would build it on a 12-acre site near a coastal power plant. They say the facility will be the largest of its kind in the western hemisphere.
Its price tag is about $350 million, but the plant’s operators say taxpayers won’t have to pay for it.
Most area businesses, water agencies and lawmakers support the plan, maintaining that it’s an affordable way to provide a safe and reliable water supply.
Besieged by drought and desperate for new sources of water, California towns are ramping up plans to convert salty ocean water into drinking water to quench their long-term thirst. The plants that carry out the high-tech "desalination" process can cost hundreds of millions of dollars, but there may be few other choices for the parched state.
Carlsbad-Where the Pacific Ocean spills into the Agua Hedionda Lagoon in Carlsbad, construction is 25 percent complete on a $1 billion project to wring 50 million gallons of freshwater a day from the sea and pour it into a water system that serves 3.1 million people.
Desalination was a dreamy fiction during the California Water Wars of the early 20th century that inspired the classic 1974 movie "Chinatown." In the 1980s, however, the process of forcing seawater through reverse osmosis membranes to filter out salt and other impurities became a reliable, even essential, tool in regions of the world desperate for water.
I think it will turn out that it is very affordable compared to not having the water here in Southern California, particularly with the drought that we are facing.
The process, however, is energy intensive and thus expensive, making it practical only in places where energy is cheap, such as the oil-rich Middle East. But recent technological advances in membrane materials and energy recovery systems have about halved the energy requirements for desalination, giving the once cost-prohibitive technology a fresh appeal in a state gripped with fear that it may be in the early stages of a decades-long mega-drought.
San Diego's $1 billion bet-In the early 1990s, fears that a drought-induced limit to imported water could leave San Diego County with just a trickle from its scarce local supply prompted the regional water agency to include desalination as part of its long-term strategy.
Today, the county's Carlsbad Desalinization Project is the largest seawater conversion project in the Western Hemisphere. When it comes online in 2016, the $1 billion facility will produce enough water to meet the daily needs of 300,000 area residents, which is about 7 percent of the county's water requirements.
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But that dash of independence comes at a cost. The water authority is locked into a 30-year deal with the plant's developer, Poseidon Water, to purchase desalted water for about $2,000 an acre foot in 2012 dollars. That's nearly twice as expensive as the current rate for imported water and will add $5 to $7 per month to ratepayers' bills, which is about a 10 percent hike.
The county is making the bet "that even though there is a significant difference right now, those costs will converge in the future that convergence could happen as soon as the early 2020."
Mothballed in Santa Barbara-A reconsideration of desalination is underway in Santa Barbara, about 185 miles north of Carlsbad, where planners are in the early discussions about investing around $20 million to upgrade and restart a $34 million desalination plant that was constructed there in the early 1990s as a hedge against an ongoing drought in just two years, it was never brought online. The rains returned and filled area reservoirs just as the desalter was completed. The facility was mothballed. In fact, part of it was disassembled and sold to Saudi Arabia.
Bringing it back on line will require a massive overhaul. What's more, Santa Barbara is a pretty topographically challenged community; there are quite a few different elevations. Most of the coastal city's water comes via gravity from higher elevation reservoirs. Desalination "comes in at the bottom. You have to lift this water and move this water further up into the system, which is expensive."
Once infrastructure is factored in, the desalinated water would cost Santa Barbara about $3,000 per acre foot. The facility currently has permits to operate at 3,125 acre-feet per year, which would basically replace what we are currently getting out of the State Water Project.
Sand City Independence-Limited water resources on the Monterey Peninsula hindered master development plans for the small town of Sand City, Calif., which was restricted from any new construction until the city increased its water supply. Regional efforts to find solutions ran into financial and political constraints for more than 20 years. Frustrated, the city struck out on its own to develop a desalination plant.
The city partnered with California American Water for the $14 million project, which started producing 300 acre feet of freshwater a year in 2010. The plant draws brackish water from wells, which is less salty than seawater, meaning its energy requirements are less. The salt content of the leftover brine is about equal the ocean's, so it can be discharged without damaging the marine environment.
The city currently uses about a third of the annual output; the rest is shared among other cities on the water-short peninsula. This allows the water company to reduce its reliance on the stressed Carmel River, which is under state protections.
South Bay-The future of desalination in the South Bay lies in the back of Redondo Beach’s SEA Lab science center, where a few rooms filled with a network of thick copper-alloy pipes filter a half-million gallons of sea water daily.
By the end of this year, the facility will be closed as efforts move forward to build a permanent $300 million desalination facility at the NRG power plant in El Segundo.
West Basin Municipal Water District officials opened the test desalination facility in 2010, after trying out the technology to freshen saltwater at a smaller site in El Segundo for about seven years. Since opening the Redondo Beach site, they have been studying the science of safely removing salt, ocean life and debris from saltwater to make it drinkable or otherwise useful to people.
Officials at West Basin, a water wholesaler primarily serving South Bay cities, say that in addition to relying on recycled and imported water, finding ways to make ocean water safe to drink, water lawns and process petroleum at oil refineries is key to the district’s future.
“The one good benefit for ocean-water desalination is that it’s drinkable water that’s local and not affected by weather,” said Ron Wildermuth, a spokesman for West Basin Municipal Water District.
“Every Southern California water agency is localizing and diversifying their water supply.”
Critics of desalination argue that its high energy needs are too costly and that it is too destructive to ocean ecosystems, pointing to desalination facilities that have been shut down or inactive for years in Santa Barbara and on Catalina Island because they were too expensive.
But West Basin officials believe modern technology is helping to make desalination less costly. At the Redondo Beach test site, for example, operators have learned how to save energy costs by halting sea water intake during ocean conditions such as algal blooms, which render ocean water unsuitable for the desalination process.
These are just some of the local efforts underway on projects that will provide immense benefit to Southern California and to the world.
(Kay Martin is an author and a CityWatch contributor. His new book, Along for the Ride, is now available. He can be reached at [email protected] )
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 76
Pub: Sep 19, 2014
