Great idea for California!
BLOWBACK
From sea to tap
Conservation alone won't cut it -- California needs desalination.
By Peter MacLaggan
April 16, 2008
Mindy McIntyre of the Planning and Conservation League opines in an installment of a Dust-Up, "The SUV of water," that seawater desalination is impractical. It's 2008; innovation, technology and an evolving regulatory and environmental landscape render McIntyre's Model T-era assertion incredible and outdated.
Today, there are more than 21,000 desalination plants in 120 countries around the world producing 3 billion gallons of drinking water a day. Rest assured the world does not know something that we don't -- California has a dozen plants in various stages of permitting, including a 50-million-gallon-a-day plant in Carlsbad that will be the largest and most technologically advanced in the Western Hemisphere. Local, state and federal policymakers and water resource managers are aggressively pursuing seawater desalination in an effort to diversify water portfolios and protect against drought-inflicted blows to the economy and public health. Still, not everyone is honestly confronting the reality that new potable water supplies are not unlimited, choosing instead to believe that we can simply conserve our way out of the next water supply crisis.
California's water supply system is based largely on pumping water from environmentally sensitive watersheds in Northern California and the Colorado River over hundreds of miles to Southern California through an elaborate and costly network of dams, canals and reservoirs. But proven desalination technology now allows us to produce higher-quality water along the coast, where the majority of the state's population resides, at a comparable cost and without damaging the environmentally sensitive upstream habitats.
It is true that seawater desalination historically has been prohibitively expensive, but today this is no longer the case due in large part to technological advances and the escalating cost and scarcity of traditional water sources. Yes, energy is one of the cost variables associated with the production of desalinated water; however, the same is true for the transportation of imported water and the treatment of reclaimed water. In truth, the escalating energy costs that McIntyre worries about -- and associates only with seawater desalination -- will affect all means of new drinking water production.
