The California Aqueduct. (Photo: CA State Water Project)
CA Desalination Plant Inches Towards Approval – ‘Environmentalists’ Apoplectic
This is the sort of water project that should be animating California’s politicians
By Edward Ring, March 3, 2021 2:20 am
In a rare and commendable display of political courage and common sense, California Governor Gavin Newsom has been working to finally grant permits to construct a second major seawater desalination plant on the Southern California Coast.
But don’t count on this new water source just yet. Despite clearing major hurdles, the “environmentalists” and their allies in the media are not going to quit.
In a predictably slanted hatchet job, poorly disguised as an investigative report, the Los Angeles Times is doing everything it can to derail the project. According to their February 26 article, “environmentalists” have serious concerns about the proposed plant, set to be constructed in Huntington Beach and using a similar design to one already successfully operating about 60 miles south in Carlsbad. But why are the only environmentalists used as sources for supposedly objective journalists the ones that disparage desalination?
Here are some of the problems that “environmentalists,” who purport to speak for everyone who cares about the environment, have with the proposed desalination plant in Huntington Beach. Quoting from the LA Times article:
“Though the Huntington Beach facility meets the state goal of diversifying California’s water supply, it would undermine other environmental policies. The plant would require large amounts of electricity; it would sit next to a rising sea; and it would continue the use of huge ocean intakes harmful to microscopic marine life.”
These objections are easily answered. Every drop of water that is produced by the plant is water that does not have to be transported from reservoirs in Northern California, at an energy cost that rivals that of desalination. Even the most aggressive projections of sea level rise would not affect operations of the Huntington Beach plant, and even if some adaptations eventually were necessary they would be part of a larger project to protect the Los Angeles coast. As for the “intakes harmful to microscopic marine life,” the design of these intakes prevents any significant wildlife impact. The intake filters are huge, which disperses the negative pressure over a very large surface area, and the pressure is periodically reversed, freeing the filter surfaces of microorganisms.
Concerns about desalination along with the responses could occupy volumes, and have. But the notion that there is any sort of consensus among environmentalists that seawater desalination is a bad choice is false. Every option to supply the resources required to sustain urban civilization is fraught with tradeoffs. With Californians possibly facing yet another drought, desalination offers a way to take pressure off countless stressed ecosystems upstream.
Economic arguments offer a more credible case against desalination, but can fail to acknowledge the variability of the market price for water. In drought years, municipal water purchasers and farmers with perennial crops have paid well over the price for desalinated fresh water, which for San Diego’s Carlsbad plant comes in at around $2,000 per acre foot. To be sure, this price is well in excess of the wholesale price for water in wet years, which can drop well under $500 per acre foot. But for an urban area such as Los Angeles, situated on an arid desert located 500 miles or more from its sources of water, adding the expensive but certain option of desalinated water to a portfolio of water procurements is a prudent bet.
Water supply resiliency is not merely dependent on weather. Even if a Sierra snowpack reliably forms winter after winter for the next several decades, residents of the Los Angeles Basin still depend on three aging canals, precarious ribbons that each stretch for hundreds of miles. Earthquakes, terrorism, or other disasters could shut them down indefinitely. In an average year, 2.6 million acre feet of water is imported by the water districts serving the residents and businesses in California’s Southland counties. The 701 mile long California Aqueduct, mainly conveying water from the Sacramento River, contributes 1.4 million acre feet. The 242 mile long Colorado River Aqueduct adds another 1.0 million acre feet. Finally, the Owens River on the east side of the Sierras contributes 250,000 acre feet via the 419 mile long Los Angeles Aqueduct.
In a recent book “Winning the Water Wars,” published in 2020 by the Pacific Research Institute, author Steven Greenhut concludes the solution to California’s water challenges is to pursue an all-of-the-above strategy that embraces abundance, or as he puts it “feeding more water into the plumbing.” He writes: “In addition to building more surface and groundwater storage facilities, California can deal with its water problems by building ocean desalination plants and increasing its commitment to wastewater reuse and other innovations.” If Greenhut, who talked with countless experts while researching his book, and who is a confirmed libertarian, can support the economics of public and private investment in desalination, anyone can.
A series of California Policy Center reports in 2018 expand on the concept of water abundance. Part two of the report, “How to Make California’s Southland Water Independent for $30 Billion,” surveys existing investments in desalination and wastewater reuse and comes up with the following capital budget: $7.5 billion to build the treatment plants to annually recover and perpetually reuse the 1.0 million acre feet of wastewater that currently is still treated and released into the Pacific Ocean. Another $15 billion to build desalination plants with a combined capacity of another 1.0 million acre feet per year. And $7.5 billion to upgrade and optimize the capacity to capture runoff, mitigate the capacious aquifers beneath the City of Los Angeles, and use them all for water storage.
This is the sort of water project that should be animating California’s politicians. There are 5.1 million households in the three counties that would benefit from this scheme – Los Angeles, Orange, and Riverside. A $30 billion capital improvement bond would cost each household $384 per year. If revenue bonds were to pass half the cost to ratepayers – a reasonable burden that would bring even desalinated water down to an affordable consumer price – the general obligation bonds would only add new taxes of $192 to each household. Debt like this is referred to as “good debt,” unlike the $100 billion or so in debt that would be necessary to complete a nearly useless, obsolete before it’s even done, make-work project like the bullet train.
Along with thinking big on the policy of water abundance, Gavin Newsom should take steps to keep the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant open. That would solve the energy challenge associated with desalination overnight. Diablo Canyon, situated on a mere 12 acres, produces 1.8 gigawatts of continuous, clean electric power. Based on the Carlsbad desalination plant’s performance, the energy input required to produce 1.0 million acre feet of desalinated seawater per year is only 560 megawatts, less than one-third of Diablo Canyon’s output.
The biggest impediment to Californians achieving water abundance, along with energy abundance and abundant, affordable housing, are “environmentalist” pressure groups that purport to speak for everyone who cares about the environment. These groups have tied infrastructure development and housing development in California up in knots for decades. None are worse than the Sierra Club which, of course, bitterly opposes the proposed Huntington Beach desalination plant.
A prime example of the harm the Sierra Club has done is the intense opposition they threw against Prop. 3, the state water bond that faced voters in November 2018.
This bond, losing by less than one percent, would have done amazing things for California. It was a hard won compromise between environmental groups, farmers, and urban water agencies. It would have allocated $9 billion in new funds, roughly half and half between water infrastructure projects including new runoff capture and storage, and environmental mitigation. Absolutely wondrous mitigation opportunities were lost when that bond failed, including reviving the Salton Sea and turning the Los Angeles River back into a river. Currently the Los Angeles “river” is a cliche, a gigantic concrete channel, slick as a runway, known to all American movie buffs as an obligatory leg on every car chase that takes place in downtown Los Angeles. Imagine this river if it were restored, with parks, trees, bike paths, trails and wildlife habitat, winding through the heart of a great city.
It wouldn’t have taken much for this bond to pass, but the Sierra Club objected to funds from the bond being allocated to repair the Friant-Kern canal. Their arguments were based mostly on a belief that the cost of those repairs should have been borne by the farming interests in the South San Joaquin Valley that use water from the canal, but even so, this was a minor defect.
The Sierra Club is well known for ruining what are otherwise viable compromises. For years, forestry experts have understood that the combination of fire suppression, reduced logging, and restrictions on controlled burns were leaving California’s forests dangerously overgrown. Dying trees and cataclysmic fires are the result of this neglect, and hence the conflagrations we’ve seen in recent years would have happened with or without climate change. But for decades, the Sierra Club has relentlessly opposed a return to sensible forest management. Don’t believe it? Ask Senator Feinstein.
“Sen. Feinstein blames Sierra Club for blocking wildfire bill,” reads the provocative headline on a 2002 story in California’s Napa Valley Register. Feinstein had brokered a congressional consensus on legislation to thin “overstocked” forests close to homes and communities, but could not overcome the environmental lobby’s disagreement over expediting the permit process to thin forests everywhere else.
Quoting from the Napa Valley Register, “Sen. Dianne Feinstein blames environmental ally the Sierra Club for Congress’ failure to pass legislation last month to thin national forests to reduce wildfire threats in the West.” And from the Senator herself, as quoted in the article: “”The Sierra Club roasted me.”
The bargains required to rescue California depend on extreme groups like the Sierra Club either backing off or being exposed and discredited. Over five million acre feet more water per year can be achieved through a combination of desalination, total wastewater reuse, and increased storage including building the Sites Reservoir and raising the height of the Shasta Dam. Why would sincere environmentalists oppose having another five million acre feet of water that could be left in the rivers? Why would they object to the entire Southland becoming water independent? Why wouldn’t they be thrilled by the options this water abundance would enable, such as restoring wetlands and riparian habitats up and down the state? Is this about the environment, or about money and power?
Meanwhile, the “environmentalists” that have turned California into a state of expensive scarcity get plenty of help from the media. The previously noted article in California’s newspaper of record, the Los Angeles Times, came out on February 26, only days after the Huntington Beach desalination plant got crucial approvals. And what was the thrust of this article? Reminding readers that one of the guests at Newsom’s infamous “French Laundry” dinner was a lobbyist for Poseidon, the company trying to build the desalination plant in Huntington Beach. Guilt by association. The article goes on to quote anonymous “critics” who complain that “Newsom and his political appointees are exerting heavy influence to benefit a private company that would produce some of the state’s most expensive supplies.”
The article then infers that state review of the desalination plant’s application is inappropriate, writing “Emails obtained by The Times and the environmental group California Coastkeeper Alliance through the state Public Records Act indicate that top California Environmental Protection Agency officials have been involved in a water board’s review of the complex proposal.” But why is this inappropriate? The application has been stalled for twenty years. And the state oversees everything that happens on coastal land.
Piling it on, the author writes “In addition, Newsom took the unusual step of replacing a Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board member who was highly critical of the project.” Good! Newsom is doing something right.
Reading this article, if you can wade through all the hackery, offers a grim assessment of how many hoops still remain before there will be one more desalination plant on the California Coast. There ought to be twenty of them operating by now. If and when the rains fail for more than a few years in a row, Californians need to remember how and why they ended up so thirsty.
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February 3, 2021 -
To anyone interested in the subject of water in California, regardless of your political leanings, do yourself a favor and find a copy of the book “New Water Water For a Thirsty World” by Micheal Saltzman. Written in SoCal in 1960, upon its release it was bought up and destroyed en masse by political allies of Pat Brown who was at the time for all the large scale water projects listed in this article. Pat Brown and his cronies (particularly unions) could not stand for any sensible opposition to the extremely expensive and inefficient projects.
You’re right, Wade. Instead of building infrastructure at a scale proportionate to our population, let’s just ration the shit out of everything including water, and use public money to expand the woke sector of government bureaucracies instead.
Right on
Let’s just be honest with ourselves. As a California resident, you have no representation. Unions and Lobbyists run the show. End of story.
I would love to know a way out of this. Sadly, the way out is very grim. Unless, my fellow neighbors, family and friends wake up and start voting differently.
Here’s your answer:
The Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph A. Tainter
This is considered *the* absolute, hands-down hardcore classic on the subject of societal collapse. (You might also consider Rethinking Collapse by Dmitry Orlov, as well as the also classic Cadillac Desert by Marc Reisner.*) No one can really have a serious discussion of societal and civilizational collapse without having, at least and at a minimum, having read through at least part of it.
Thumbnail summation: increasing societal complexity complicates and inhibits doing the necessary things that will avert or mitigate a crisis. Putting things differently, problems engender solutions that cause further problems etc. until such point that paralysis makes timely action impossible. A productive classes move away in frustration, leaving a small ruling class overseeing a vast underclass. And then a Black Swan event – drought, plague, famine, tectonic event, whatever, but usually interrelated – pushes the whole thing over the edge.
Sound familiar anybody?
A used hardbound of Tainter’s Collapse will run you ~$300, new trade paper ~$50. (Yes, it’s that well regarded.) Fortunately, there’s the internet, and you read Tainter’s book for free here:
archive org/details/TheCollapseOfComplexSocieties/mode/2up
(Put the dot before the org and you’re golden.)
Hope this helps!
Just a thought.
VicB3
P.S. The Third Stage of the California Water Project ought to have been completed decades ago, in which case pretty much be plenty of water and desalinization plants would be an exotic curiosity and nothing more.
*He also wrote A Dangerous Place: California’s Unsettling Fate, the go-to for the effects of an earthquake. And on the same subject amongst others, there’s Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster by Mike Davis.
Thanks VicB
I always welcome a good read.
I have to admit: I’m a hydrology nut. What’s missing from this article is: who is the intended purchaser? Is it MWDOC? Poseidon has to have a customer in mind, and I doubt it’s Metropolitan because MWD didn’t mention it when I grilled them over their new purification plant in Carson and they didn’t even put desal projected wholesale rates, and I’d be really interested if there was a feud between MWDOC and MWD. Unfortunately, SoCal water has been messed up ever since 1979 because Prop 13 messed with the MWD buy-in clause, so now everyone’s a member agency.
I’d be really interested if Poseidon’s projected customer is actually San Diego County and they’re building it in HB because they have access to the Huntington Beach Energy Project and planning to wheel it over MWD’s San Diego aqueducts and then buy less from MWD as part of their (justified) spite. I’m actually proud I figured this all out.
The Environmental Impact Report identified the end users: City of Huntington Beach, El Toro Water District, Irvine Ranch Water District, Laguna Beach County Water District, Mesa Consolidated Water District, City of Newport Beach, City of San Clemente, City of San Juan Capistrano, Santa Margarita Water District, and South Coast Water District. All OC users. If the real plan is to send the water to San Diego, they would need to revise and recirculate the EIR.
The Sierra Club and their like-minded cohorts such as the Center for Biological Diversity are misanthropes at heart. They are almost entirely affluent, well-educated, liberal, coastal elites who got their piece of the American Dream and love hating on anyone else who attempts to do the same thing. Go look at who they sue.
Environmentalists are anti-human, not pro environment. All their proposed “solutions” are designed to make life hard for people.
Of course why should we be surprised that the author did not cover certain aspects of this desalination project? How about the fact that they are building adjacent to a Superfund site, that they must disturb? How about the fact that desalinated water is contaminated with boron, which is a by-product of the desalination process? How about the fact that OCWD has said they will just store that water in their aquifers, thereby contaminating their aquifer? It should be noted that OCWD has a huge North plume of contamination, that should have been mitigated years ago and put back into use.
What about the effects on marine life in two ways – dead zones at the point of brine disposal and destruction of larvae and plankton from the open intake pipes?
And we still haven’t discussed cost to rate payers who ultimately foot the bill. The author mentioned housing, yet Poseidon applied to CDLAC, a little known agency to ask for $1.1B out of their housing allocation budget to build a plant that will supposedly cost $1.2B.
I have worked with Direct Potable Reuse and Indirect potable reuse and with ROs…And yeah even with Govt. Dubai and Brd.Publ.Works LACity for indirect potable reuse. Big problem with sea level RO/DPR is storage…RO need 24/7/365 to be efficient …shutting down/start up causes lots of problems and greatly increase O&M and shortens equipment life. LACi is funding NOW IPR for the Tillman Plant at >500ft elevation which means it can store in groundwater (same as Org.Co Water Factory 21 and then pump out and pressurize the downhill service area… Serving the shoreline and upto 100ft elevation ain’t good water delivery systems process. Find a good storage groundwater area at say >+200ft elevation. As proposed it is a waste of electricity, water, shoreline and $$$$ – OBTW I am a life-member of Sierra Club and did my first EIR in 1972, now retired.
Hey Sierra Club “environmentalists” – GO POUND SAND!!!
Your “forest management” practices have contributed to the massive wildfires that foul the atmosphere!!!
Mr Ring:
I am a Goldwater Conservative and am against the building a $1.4 Billion boondoggle called Poseidon in Huntington Beach. First, you are not from around here in Surf City. This Poseidon Desal plant will operate with an Open End Contract for 35 years. For us peasant rate payers our water bills will increase 5X.Please do your DD and you will see that San Diego has the highest water rates in Calif courtesy of Poseidon Resources. Now let us look at Performance of the Carlsbad Plant. Poseidon had to pay $10 Million in fines over 4 years as they could not meet the contract of providing water. In addition, please explain to us peasant rate payers why the Poseidon Carlsbad Desal plant was closed down for 5 days in 2020. The only people that will benefit will be the politicians as they will garner political monetary contribution payments stream for the next 35 years. Note the plant will only employ 22 people so what is the ROI Return on Investment. This will be Flint Mich here in HB. Listen to the People and not the Politicians or reading the Poseidon Handouts.
I’d say thumbs down to Ed Ring’s vast oversimplification here. He totally missed several reasons for no desal:
• The new tech ocean intakes harmful to microscopic marine life still produce a growing dead zone vicinity.
• It would be “just” another brine generating industry – humans have so many. There is no future in raising the ocean’s salinity in spite of glacial melt. There’s the blind hope that throwing human feces and urine (wastewater) at the brine neutralizes it somehow before tossing it into the ocean, but it doesn’t really work that way. Fecal matter and urine do not neutralize salt.
• Ocean desal mandates involvement with hyper-expensive international consulting and civil engineering contractors who sometimes never go away from the project – take it over, employing few locals.
• Construction of pipelines has to go through the Ascon superfund site, reactivating water and airborne toxins.
• Another by-product of ocean desal is boron, meaning we’re dealing with water contaminated with boron.
• This water is not going into direct distribution, but will be stored in the OC groundwater basin, thereby contaminating that source.
His forestry comments are so far off I can’t take them seriously. The Sierra Club is more right than wrong in this.
Modern nuclear safety protocols, learned as a result of the Fukushima meltdown, could make nuclear a safer option. And if the electricity need was met acceptably, the other problems could be dealt with, especially if it meant fully taking care of Ascon. BUT, the US always stops funding sideline projects midway, and DTSC (CA dept of toxic substances control) is way way to lame to fix any superfund site completely and in a reasonable timeframe. Their total failure at the Santa Susana Field Lab superfund site is one good example among others. So I say thumbs down to Ed Ring’s flap about Poseidon desal. DPR is the way of the future for LA!!!
I’d say thumbs down to Ed Ring’s vast oversimplification here. He totally missed several reasons for no desal:
• The new tech ocean intakes harmful to microscopic marine life still produce a growing dead zone vicinity.
• It would be “just” another brine generating industry – humans have so many. There is no future in raising the ocean’s salinity in spite of glacial melt. There’s the blind hope that throwing wastewater at the brine neutralizes it somehow before tossing it into the ocean, but it doesn’t really work that way. Fecal matter and urine do not neutralize salt.
• Ocean desal mandates involvement with hyper-expensive international consulting and civil engineering contractors who sometimes never go away from the project – take it over, employing few locals.
• Construction of pipelines has to go through the Ascon superfund site, reactivating water and airborne toxins.
• Another by-product of ocean desal is boron, meaning we’re dealing with water contaminated with boron.
• This water is not going into direct distribution, but will be stored in the OC groundwater basin, thereby contaminating that source.
His forestry comments are so far off I can’t take them seriously. The Sierra Club is more right than wrong in this.
Modern nuclear safety protocols, learned as a result of the Fukushima meltdown, could make nuclear a safer option. And if the electricity need was met acceptably, the other problems could be dealt with, especially if it meant fully taking care of Ascon. BUT, the US always stops funding sideline projects midway, and DTSC (CA dept of toxic substances control) is way way to lame to fix any superfund site completely and in a reasonable timeframe. Their total failure at the Santa Susana Field Lab superfund site is one good example among others. So I say thumbs down to Ed Ring’s flap about Poseidon desal. DPR is the way of the future for LA!!!
I’d give that a C- plus effort at reciting talking points provided by the Sierra Club. The bullet points are a little too obvious. Weak. Yaaawwwwnnnn.
“increasing its commitment to wastewater reuse and other innovations.”
^^^ Code words for “toilet to tap”….
No thank you…
Meanwhile, the geniuses who run this state continue to allow fresh rainwater ( when available) waste out to the ocean via storm drain systems built over 100 years ago..
A state run by idiots my entire life…
The Sierra Club is against desal water, I get that. They are also against surface water because dams are needed and we can’t take a drop of water from the salmon. They no doubt are also against wells because that can lower the water table. They probably are against cisterns and rain water collection because that might take water from “nature”. The only remaining source of water is poop juice (recycled sewage). They should lead by example and have sewage water piped to all their members homes. They could also start bottling the stuff and sell it under the Sierra Club label. Let us see how well that sells. 😉
What happens if the drought persists for 10, 20, 30 years or longer? Surely the Sierra Club must agree about the fact that there is global warming. The disaster would be much worse than the impacts of the desal plants. I’m more than willing to pay higher taxes in order to avoid the apocalypse of no water.
Very Informative post. Thanks for sharing your knowledge with us.
Seawater Desalination
Let’s see…. California is (and has been, for DECADES) out of water! We let MILLIONS of Illegal Aliens into the country (our state), and our elected officials seem to care more about a STUPID (and WORTHLESS) fish in the Sacramento Delta, than they do about WE, THE PEOPLE.
You don’t want to kill the Delta Smelt, or build desalination plants? FINE! Then CLOSE THE DAMN BORDER, and STOP INCREASING the demand for our limited resources!
BUT, if you want to complain about the dangers of “climate change” (and the associated rise in sea levels), doesn’t it make sense to LOWER the sea level by converting it to potable drinking water for people and irrigation?
AND, if it takes a lot of electricity to do that, might I suggest we build nuclear power plants RIGHT NEXT DOOR?