Planned Water Desalination Plant in California Approved Over Opposition Regarding Marine Impacts, Energy and Climate Costs

Permits for a $320 million desalination plant near San Diego, California have been upheld over the opposition of environmental groups, who argued that the environmental review of the project failed to consider its impacts on marine life and global climate change. Water desalination is the process of taking salt and other minerals out of seawater to make freshwater. Proponents of the project, located in the town of Carlsbad, say desalination is needed to overcome chronic water scarcity in the region. Opponents argue that the energy intensive technology has unacceptable environmental consequences, and favor reuse technologies, such as gray water and rainwater harvesting.

Desalination: How It Works

Desalination removes dissolved minerals (including but not limited to salt) from seawater, brackish water, or treated wastewater.[1] Desalination technologies include: reverse osmosis (“RO”), distillation, electrodialysis, and vacuum freezing. Distillation technologies separate salts and other minerals from the water by heating source water to generate steam. Reverse Osmosis and other membrane technologies pass water through tiny holes in membranes that block the passage of larger salt and mineral molecules. Four fifths of the world’s total desalination capacity still uses distillation.[2] Membrane systems make up 96 percent of U.S. desalination systems and 100 percent of the systems in the United States that provide municipal drinking water.[3] Municipalities, water districts, and private companies in California and other parts of the U.S. are primarily considering using RO and distillation to develop new seawater desalination.[4]

Desalination currently provides only a small portion of the world’s freshwater supply. Globally, desalination capacity is roughly 3 percent of the global tap water supply.[5] The world’s largest plant is in Saudi Arabia, and produces 128 million gallons a day (“MGD”) of freshwater. Saudi Arabia relies on desalination to meet 70 percent of that country’s drinking water needs.[6] Although there are desalination plants in over 120 countries, sixty percent of all desalination plants are located in the Middle East. Because water needs in the United States have not been as acute as in other parts of the world and the cost of desalination is generally higher than other water supply alternatives (e.g. water transfers and groundwater pumping), desalination has remained a relatively unused option in the U.S. That is starting to change.

California has a dozen or more desalination plants already, and plans for at least four new ones. The Carlsbad Plant is scheduled to begin operating in 2012. Huntington Beach will begin construction of a desalination plant next year. Camp Pendleton, just north of Carlsbad, also plans to build a plant.[7] Finally, several weeks ago the Marin Municipal Water District approved construction of what would be the first desalination plant in the San Francisco Bay area.[8]

Waste and Energy Costs of Desalination

Opponents of desalination argue that it is more expensive and creates more waste than other options, particularly water conservation. Other concerns about desalination are the amount of energy it consumes, impacts on marine life at water intakes and outfalls, and water pollution.[9] Salt extracted from seawater during the desalination process comes out as concentrated brine, which most plants return to the sea.[10] Desalination wastewater contains salts and also the products of corrosion during the process and chemicals added to reduce the corrosion and the buildup of scale in the plants.[11] Liquid desalination wastes may be discharged directly, combined with other discharges (e.g., power plant cooling water or sewage treatment plant effluent) before discharge, or dried out and disposed in a landfill.[12]

Among the more challenging issues with respect to desalination processes is disposing of the waste concentrates. Recovering important minerals from concentrates is possible and may be economically viable in some cases, because it would also reduce waste disposal costs.[13]

Impingement and entrainment of fish and other aquatic life in desalination plant intake is another concern.[14] Impingement occurs when aquatic organisms are trapped against intake screens by the velocity and force of flowing water. Entrainment occurs when smaller organisms pass through the intake screens and into the process equipment. Impingement and entrainment of aquatic organisms are not environmental impacts unique for open intakes of seawater desalination plants. Conventional freshwater open intakes from surface water sources (i.e., rivers, lakes, estuaries) may also cause impingement and entrainment. There are a number of surface and subsurface intake options that may be employed to mitigate these and other environmental impacts. For example, recent studies indicate that the incremental entrainment effect of desalination plant intakes co-located with once-through power plants is minimal.[15] The Environmental Impact Report (EIR) study for the Carlsbad plant shows that the maximum entrainment potential of the plant is reduced to less than 1% as a result of the co-location of this plant’s intake with the Encina Power Generation Station’s discharge.[16] Where, like the Carlsbad plant, desalination plants use warm cooling water collected from the power plant discharge and do not have a separate new open ocean intake and screening facilities, they reportedly do not cause an incremental impingement of aquatic organisms.

There is also the cost. Desalination plants are expensive to construct and operate. The Carlsbad plant is a $320 million project. The planned Camp Pendleton plant could cost up to $1.9 billion.[17] The Marin County plant, expected to open in 2014, is projected to cost $105 million to build and nearly $4 million per year to operate.[18] Although private funding may be available, public funding is more typical.

The costs for desalination plants – which include capital, operation, and maintenance – vary depending on the technology used. A typical reverse osmosis plant uses six kilowatt-hours of electricity for every 265 gallons of water produced.[19] According to Poseidon Resources, the developer of the Carlsbad plant, energy consumption can account for as much as one-third of the total cost of the water produced.[20] Operating the City of Santa Barbara’s desalination plant full-time to produce 7,500 acre-feet of water per year would require an estimated 50 million kilowatt-hours of electricity per year.[21] In contrast, pumping the same amount of water from the Colorado River Aqueduct to the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California requires 15 to 26 million kilowatt-hours per year. By comparison, a large refinery or small steel mill only uses 75,000 to 100,000 kilowatt hours per year.

The other frequent concern about the high rate of energy which desalination consumes is that, depending on the energy source, desalination plants could lead to increased carbon emissions and contribute to global climate change. Most of the power for desalination comes from burning coal, oil, and other fossil fuels.[22] Concerns about energy consumption are frequently cited when comparing water produced via desalination to water from other alternatives such as water recycling and conservation.

For cost and energy reasons, cogeneration facilities provide significant opportunities for efficiencies. There is an obvious synergy between desalination and energy plants.[23] Energy production plants require large water intakes for cooling purposes, and produce substantial amounts of waste heat that is usable in the desalination facility, and the spent water disposal system may also be shared. The Carlsbad plant was designed to take advantage of these efficiencies.

The Carlsbad Desalination Plant

State and local officials initially opposed the Carlsbad plant, primarily out of a concern over its high energy costs.[24] But water shortages eventually became an even bigger concern. With over half of California’s water supplies coming from the Colorado River in the south and the Sacramento River in the north, the state’s long-standing water supply problems have continued to worsen in the recent years due to droughts, population increases, and increasing requirements to maintain water instream for endangered species protection.[25] Water recycling, conservation, and restrictions have placed pressure on California governments to look for new water sources, including desalination.

The Carlsbad plant’s “basic purpose is to provide a local, reliable, and drought-proof water supply to the City of Carlsbad and the San Diego area, in order to reduce local dependence on imported water, and to provide desalinated water at or below the cost of imported water supplies.”[26] When completed, the Carlsbad plant will have the capacity to produce 50 million gallons of potable water a day; enough to serve 300,000 residents and supply 100% of Carlsbad’s potable water requirements.[27] The plant’s expected output is a central component of regional water supply planning, as the project will provide approximately 10% of the desalinated water needed in California by 2030.[28]

Legal Challenges

The Carlsbad plant and the Marin County facility noted above have generated heated opposition from environmental groups, including the Surfrider Foundation and Coastkeeper. They have principally focused their opposition on the proposed plant’s effect on marine life.[29] The Carlsbad plant required land use and environmental permits from the City of Carlsbad, the California Regional Water Quality Control Board, the California Department of Health Services, the California Coastal Commission, and the State Lands Commission.[30] The permits issued for the plant ranged from local land use permits to a state drinking water permit, a coastal development permit, and water quality discharge permit under the federal Clean Water Act. It took over six years for the Carlsbad plant to complete the permitting process.

On May 7, 2009 and August 6, 2009, a San Diego Superior Court judge entered orders that upheld the California Coastal Commission’s and the California Lands Commission’s (the “Lands Commission”) approvals of the Carlsbad Plant.[31] The judge’s August 6, 2009 order dismissed a lawsuit from the Surfrider Foundation alleging that the Lands Commission’s decision to approve the plant had violated the California Environmental Quality Act (“CEQA”).[32] With the August 6, 2009 dismissal all pending legal challenges to the plant have been exhausted.[33]

The judge found no merit in Plaintiffs’ arguments that plant developer, Poseidon Resources, had failed to account for the project’s effect on marine life or its potential contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. Surfrider had argued that approval of the plant violated California law because the plant was not designed or located to avoid unnecessary destruction of marine life. It asked the court to order the Lands Commission to require the developer to prepare a Supplemental Environmental Impact Report (“SEIR”) for the project.[34] Surfrider also claimed that the Commission should have required Poseidon to prepare a SEIR analyzing the plant’s potential impacts on global climate change.[35]

The Commission certified Poseidon’s Final Environmental Impact Report (“FEIR”) in June 2006 and decided not to prepare a SEIR.[36] The judge found that the Commission’s decision complied with CEQA and that the project did not require a SEIR because the desalination plant would operate in conjunction with the Encina Power Station and the power station’s existing intake and outfall structures, which already had approval for their impacts on marine life.[37]

Similarly, the judge found that the Commission was correct in not requiring a SEIR to analyze the project’s potential impacts on global climate change for several reasons.[38] First, citing the United States’ Supreme Court’s decision in Massachusetts v. EPA,[39] the judge found that information regarding greenhouse gas emissions (“GHG”) is not “new information” under CEQA because it was widely known and available long before the Commission certified the FEIR in June 2006. Second, the judge found that California’s enactments of Assembly Bill 32 in September 2006 and Senate Bill 97, acknowledging global warming impacts upon the State, did not constitute “changed circumstances” triggering a SEIR under CEQA because California had begun enacting climate change legislation in 2002 when it regulated GHG emissions from cars and trucks. Third, the judge found that Surfrider had unsuccessfully challenged the FEIR on grounds that it failed to evaluate how the project would contribute to global climate change and, therefore, the issue was known and knowable when the FEIR was certified in 2006.

Poseidon Resources expects to break ground on the Carlsbad plant by the end of 2009.[40]

For more information on desalination and water resource issues generally, please contact Jeff Kray at Marten Law Group.