Desalination During Drought: Solutions to a Growing Demand for Water Table of Contents
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Desalination During Drought: Solutions to a Growing Demand for Water Table of Contents Executive Summary..................................................................................................................................................................................................3 Introduction................................................................................................................................................................................................................4 California Drought: A Brief History........................................................................................................................................................................5 Why Desalination?...................................................................................................................................................................................................6 How Desalination Works..........................................................................................................................................................................................7 How Energy Recovery Fits In..................................................................................................................................................................................8 Desalination During Drought: The Cases of Australia, Israel, Spain, and California....................................................................................9 Carlsbad and New Plants......................................................................................................................................................................................10 Dusting Off Mothballed Plants............................................................................................................................................................................10 Challenges................................................................................................................................................................................................................11 Moving Forward.......................................................................................................................................................................................................12 2 Desalination During Drought: Solutions to a Growing Demand for Water Executive Summary Clean drinking water is fundamental to all life. As 2015 marks the end of the United Nations’ International Decade of Action recognizing water and sanitation as a basic human right, it also marks the beginning of a new era of water supply and usage across the state of California. Since a statewide drought began four years ago, California lawmakers have struggled to find rainfall-independent solutions. This is not the first time California has turned to desalination as part of a larger plan to tackle decreasing water levels and drought conditions. The multiple-year drought in the 1980s led to the construction and opening of the Charles E. Meyer Desalination Plant in Santa Barbara. When rainfall returned just three months after the plant opened, the facility was mothballed. Forward-thinking experts kept up plant maintenance in the meantime, knowing it would not be the last time such measures would be considered or implemented. There are also costs and other types of resource usage issues to consider. For instance, much of Southern California’s drinking water travels hundreds of miles from its origin in the Colorado River, transported using a massive and expensive aqueduct and conveyance system. With this current drought comes an opportunity to revisit tabled solutions and better prepare future plans to make desalination part of a larger framework to continue to keep California watered. Desalination is not a silver bullet. But technology has improved the process and subsequently lowered the cost. Stuart White, director of Sydney, Australia’s Institute for Sustainable Futures, has called the need to plan for future plants “desalination readiness.” In Australia, as in many other arid, desert-like parts of the world, desalination has become a necessary and useful part of a plan to increase water resiliency and drought preparedness. The capacity of large desalination plants is quantified by how many millions of gallons of water per day (MGD) the plant produces, with Sorek, the world’s largest seawater reverse osmosis plant located south of Tel Aviv, producing 165 MGD. The largest desalination plant using membrane technology, which typically uses energy recovery devices, is Magtaa in Algeria, with a capacity of 132 MGD. In the following pages, we’ll consider the success stories of desalination in California coastal cities, in Israel, and in Perth, where desalination helped pull the Australian city back from the brink of disaster during a decades-long drought. We’ll also look at other examples that circle the globe. Spain recycles 17 percent of its effluent, the second highest percentage world- wide after Israel, which treats 86 percent of its wastewater and irrigates more than half its crops with treated effluent. Domestically, states with desert climates, including Texas, are considering adding desalination plants to their resource management portfolio as a way to stay ahead of disaster and move ahead with progressive, affordable technological solutions to an age-old problem. Desalination During Drought: Solutions to a Growing Demand for Water 3 Introduction California is the nation’s most populous state and the third largest state by area, with 38 million residents spread across nearly 164,000 square miles. Already, the state oversees a complex system of complementary technologies and processes that collect, treat, and distribute clean water across the entire state. This solution set includes mountain runoff to rivers and lakes, groundwater pumped from aquifers, recycled gray water, storm-water capture, and a variety of conservation efforts. Across the state, cities have issued moratoriums on lawn watering, swimming pool levels, frequent car washes, and other water-intensive activities and industries. Clean drinking water requires energy, no matter its source. The costs include transport, treatment and purification, distribution, and residuals management and disposal. California’s agriculture sector demands much of the state’s arid land and an estimated 80 percent of the state’s developed water supply. But the problem in managing the state’s agricultural water use is unusually complex. According to an April 2015 report from the Pacific Institute, a major challenge in California involves the lack of reliable, robust water use data. For example, even though the California Department of Water Resources generates estimates of agricultural water use that are used by the state for long-term planning efforts and budgeting, these estimates are not based on observed or measured usage. “Data on agricultural production and water use are not collected at all, or are collected by individual irrigation districts, counties, and a variety of state and federal agencies using a range of tools from voluntary reporting at the field level to remote sensing from satellites,” the report’s author, Heather Cooley, wrote. “In order to truly understand the risks and opportunities for water use in California, more and better data are needed.” A drought is even more costly to the state. A 2015 study by the University of California, Davis, found that in 2015 alone, the drought would cost the state’s agriculture sector $2.7 billion and upwards of 18,000 jobs. These aren’t mere projections. This current drought has forced the state of California to come to a critical turning point in assessing how it will move forward with the tools necessary to survive this drought, as well as others that will surely follow. Desalination, as is explained in a later section, uses a relatively simple process to make use of one of California’s most abundant and obvious resources: the Pacific Ocean. 4 Desalination During Drought: Solutions to a Growing Demand for Water California Drought: A Brief History California’s conflicts between its arid climates and water-reliant industries and urban areas are the stuff of legend. In 1974, water scarcity was the stuff of Hollywood neo-noir, a plot device in Chinatown, a fictional film about the real-life California Water Wars. Desalination may make for fine filmmaking, but the state’s precarious relationship with water is serious business. California’s semi-arid regions depend upon mountain snowfall and accumulation and the resulting runoff to replenish groundwater and to fill rivers and streams and, by extension, reservoirs. This latest is the worst drought in 163 years, though the area now known as California did experience two mega-droughts in an earlier era. The first, which began in the year 850, lasted for a whopping 240 years. Fifty years after the first mega-drought finally ended, another 180-year drought choked the region. California has experienced a number of droughts in the past half century, including spans from 1976 to 1977 and 1987 to 1992. Constructed in 1963, the California Aqueduct system altered the landscape for farmers in the Central Valley. Despite its bounty of agriculture, the Central Valley is a semi-arid climate. The region receives an average of just 10 inches of rain per year. Statewide, Californians use a similar amount of water as residents did in the 1970s, meaning despite our greater numbers,