Multi-State Salinity Coalition

The mission of the Coalition is to meet the growing need in the United States for safe, sustainable, adequate and affordable water supplies, the Multi-State Salinity Coalition (MSSC) promotes advancements in desalination-related technologies, salinity control strategies and associated policies as stated in the Articles of Incorporation.

The goal of the MSSC is to effectively foster communication and dialogue on related desalination and salinity management-related policy matters through quarterly meetings, correspondence, and the development, sponsorship and presentation of an annual national desalination and salinity management summit for local, regional, and national leaders.  The MSSC believes that collaborative efforts among water providers, state agencies, federal agencies, research organizations, congressional leaders and private industry are essential in pursuit of common educational interests as stated in the Articles of Incorporation.

The MSSC is not, nor is it intended to be, a substitute for local government.  It is, however, an organization through which its individual members can work on salinity management and desalination issues and coordinate their efforts.

What's New?

Presentations from the 2008 Summit have been posted here for viewing and downloading.

Headlines

Reid wants money for aging water projects - WASHINGTON -- Now that the Truckee Canal through Fernley is more than 100 years old, it's a bad time for the Bureau of Reclamation to cut back on maintaining its aging infrastructure, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told a Senate panel Thursday. Reid, a Democrat, introduced legislation last week that would give Read more...

County to sell use of storage water rights - As it has done in prior years, the Lyon County Board of Commissioners has approved selling the use of its storage water rights for Read more...

WATER: Desalination draws criticism for using too much energy

Protestors in Melbourne, Australia, are complaining that a proposed desalination plant near the city will generate too much fresh water.

The $3 billion plant would produce nearly 80 million gallons (300,000 cubic meters) of fresh water each day when it opens in 2011, making it one of the world's biggest desalination plants.

But environmental groups think the plant is unnecessary. Neil Rankine, a spokesman for protest group Your Water Your Say, said combining the new desalination plant's production with increased efforts to recycle water and harvest rainwater would produce an excess of 60 percent fresh water, even if consumption rose 25 percent.

And the excess water concerns the environmental groups because the desalination process is so energy intensive.
"Desalination is the most energy-intensive form of water supply," said Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute, an independent environmental think tank in California.

But concerns over energy consumption are not slowing down developers' plans to build more desalination plants. In California alone, proposals for 20 new large desalination plants have been proposed.

Technological advances should decrease desalination's energy consumption in the future.
Some plants are using beach wells to "pre-filter" seawater through sand before it goes through the standard reverse-osmosis membranes necessary to remove salt. The membranes typically need to be cleaned and replaced frequently -- an energy-intensive process. The beach wells decrease the need to clean and replace the filters as frequently and also prevent fish and marine life from getting trapped and killed in uptake pipes, the standard means of obtaining water for desalination plants.

Scientists are researching new membrane and filter methods as well. One new technology, "forward osmosis," uses low pressure to move seawater through the membranes. The lower pressure is less energy intensive than the hydraulic pressure used in standard reverse-osmosis plants, and it produces less brine as a byproduct, another concern environmental and conservation groups have with desalination. Concentrated brines ejected back into the ocean can have harmful effects on coastal ecology.

But scientists say they are getting close to reaching a limit in energy efficiency.
"You can further improve membrane materials and you can optimize energy-recovery devices," said Gary Amy, a desalination expert at the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's Institute for Water Education. "But no matter what you try, the energy efficiency of desalination will soon reach a plateau" (Quirin Schiermeier, Nature News, March 19).

Drought Could Force Nuke-Plant Shutdowns - Nuclear reactors across the Southeast could be forced to throttle back or temporarily shut down later this year because drought is drying up the rivers and lakes that supply power plants with the awesome amounts of cooling water they need to operate. Read more...

Expect it to rain less but when it does, watch out - Residents of the Southwest have heard the refrain that droughts caused by global warming will worsen the region’s already serious water shortage. Read more...

Desalination: Making the Case for Desalination
San Diego Union Tribune - 11-11-07
by Michael Burge, Staff Writer
After a year of pleading its cause through letters and stacks of documents, a private company will get a shot Thursday at persuading the state Coastal Commission to let it build the Western Hemisphere's largest desalination plant on the Carlsbad coast.

To approve the project, the 12-member commission will have to override its own staff, which recommends against allowing the plant. The commission's staff says the plant would degrade water quality and harm marine life in Agua Hedionda Lagoon, the source of the ocean water that would be desalinated.

The developer, Poseidon Resources, argues that if it can build the plant, it will care for the lagoon and assure its future health.

Company officials also say the desalination process it proposes is more environmentally friendly than any alternative.

From the outset – even before Poseidon submitted an application to build its plant last year – commission staff members have differed on the best way to turn ocean water into drinking water.

Water source debated

Poseidon Resources proposes tapping into the ocean-water stream that NRG Energy uses to cool its steam-driven turbines at the Encina Power Station on the south shore of Agua Hedionda Lagoon.

This method takes advantage of existing water intake and outfall pipes, which Poseidon says would cost $150 million to build, and makes it easier to treat the seawater because the power plant has warmed it up.

The Coastal Commission staff has long objected to this method because thousands of fish, larvae and other marine organisms are killed as water is drawn into and circulates through the power plant.

Commission analysts prefer a more benign technology of drawing water from beneath the ocean floor, either through wells or “galleries” of buried pipe.

The idea involves sinking a pipe in the sea bed, akin to a fresh-water well, or excavating a wide area of ocean floor, lining it with pipes and covering it with sand. The pipes would be connected to the onshore desalination plant.

The sand blanket would act as a natural filter for the ocean water, commission staff argues.

Commission analysts acknowledge that building such intakes is costly, but say the natural pre-filtering reduces operating costs.

Poseidon estimates such an ocean-floor system would more than double the construction cost, to $650 million from $300 million, and could destroy 150 acres of seafloor.

Although this technology has never been used on the scale envisioned for Carlsbad, the Coastal Commission staff points out it has been used on small-scale projects in the state.

Intake systems varied

Poseidon plans to draw 100 million gallons of seawater a day as it leaves the Encina Power Station, filter it and force it through reverse-osmosis membranes to produce 50 million gallons of drinking water. The other 50 million gallons would be returned to the cooling stream and on to the ocean twice as salty as when it came in.

While Poseidon rejects the commission staff's idea, two Southern California water agencies are investigating wells or buried pipes as intake systems for desalination.

The Municipal Water District of Orange County drilled a test well earlier this year at Dana Point that it regards as promising, and Long Beach is exploring a buried chamber.

The San Diego County Water Authority also is studying the feasibility of a desalination plant at Camp Pendleton.

“As part of that, we're looking at the possibility of both a subsurface intake and an open-ocean intake,” which would draw directly from open water, said Bob Yamada, the county water authority's water resources manager.

He said the authority also will study a combined seawater/groundwater desalination plant in South Bay.

The Long Beach Water Department recently won Coastal Commission approval to dig an undersea intake system as a test this winter.

Department spokesman Ryan Alsop said officials there were discussing their offshore geology when they learned that Fukuoka, Japan, a city of 1.4 million, installed a sub-ocean-floor intake in 2005.

Fukuoka desalinates 13 million gallons of ocean water a day.

Alsop described Long Beach's test chamber as a sandbox lined with pipes and covered with sand.

“The advantages are, we think, a reduction in pre-treatment costs,” Alsop said.

Karl Seckel, assistant manager and engineer for the Municipal Water District of Orange County, said his agency began exploring a buried intake on the advice of Coastal Commission staff. The water district is considering building a desalination plant at Doheny State Beach in Dana Point.

“They said if you can look at any other ways of bringing the water in you should do that,” he said.

In April the district drilled a test well – a perforated pipe – at an angle into the ocean bed. Seckel said the test was a success, and had the benefit of not affecting the ocean environment.

Habitat restoration

Poseidon is not sold on subsurface intakes, claiming they are more environmentally harmful than its proposal.

“If you look at everything that the Coastal Act serves to protect, had we proposed any one of those systems we would have been laughed out of the room,” Peter MacLaggan, Poseidon's senior vice president, said.

He said an ocean-floor chamber “would be a three-intake system, each a mile long, 400 feet wide and 15 feet deep,” through kelp beds. It would need 76 pipes from the beach to the ocean, with pump houses for each pipe.

He said Poseidon's proposal would kill 2 pounds of fish a day and destroy about 12 percent of the fish larvae in the lagoon, which he considers minor, given the plenitude of the species involved.

The company is proposing to restore 37 acres of habitat in compensation.

The commission staff disputes the idea that fish kills would be minor.

Significant numbers of sensitive and sport fish larvae, including California halibut, northern anchovy and Garibaldi would be killed by the plant, a staff report states. Six percent of the killed larvae would be Garibaldi, and there is a state ban on killing the species for recreational or commercial purposes.

MacLaggan said Garibaldi are more common at Agua Hedionda Lagoon than elsewhere, so the impact would not be significant.

The Coastal Commission's desalination expert, Tom Luster, said he doubts Poseidon's facts and figures particularly about the size of alternate intakes.

“They describe large concrete bulkheads up and down the beach,” Luster said. “That's not really needed.” #

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/northcounty/20071111-9999-lz1mi11desali.html

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Carlsbad seawater plan heads to commission

North County Times – 11/11/07

By Gig Conaughton, staff writer

SAN DIEGO ---- After more than seven years of study, a proposal to build a Carlsbad plant to turn 50 million gallons of seawater a day into drinking water is poised to be approved or rejected Thursday by California Coastal commissioners.

Despite overwhelming support from a slew of politicians, water officials, businesses and community groups, it appears the project will remain a contentious one even as it approaches the key commission judgment.

Because the seawater project is the first of its kind to be weighed, and because its approval could open the floodgates for other such projects, there was little evidence to suggest which way commissioners might vote.

Poseidon Resources, Inc., the company that has studied building the $300 million plant at Carlsbad's Encina Power Plant since 2000, says it has done exhaustive studies proving the plant will not hurt the ocean or add to global warming.

Poseidon officials also say the plant is badly needed to bolster dwindling Southern California water supplies.

But environmental foes say the plant would hurt marine life, sucking it in through the power plant's seawater cooling system.

They argue that water conservation could help the water supply as much as a new plant, and that they plan to fight the proposal "to the death."

The coastal commission's staff recommended Nov. 2 that commissioners reject the project.

Like environmental groups, and in direct contrast to Poseidon's assertions, the commission's staff said the plant would hurt the ocean and Agua Hedionda Lagoon. They also said the project would create millions of pounds of annual greenhouse gases.

A report from commission workers also questioned whether the plant could produce water at the price Poseidon reported. That left Poseidon officials questioning whether the commission ---- which was created by state voters in 1972 to protect and conserve California's coasts ---- was overstepping its bounds.

Decision scheduled Thursday

All of those issues will come to a head Thursday when coastal commissioners hold a hearing at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel to decide if they should approve the permit that would let the plant be built.

Marco Gonzalez, an environmental lawyer active in the Surfrider Foundation, said he thought there was a better than 50 percent chance that commissioners would approve the permit ---- but said environmental groups would challenge the project in court.

Tom Luster, the coastal commission's desalination expert who helped write the staff recommendation, said he expects "a long and interesting hearing."

Meanwhile, Poseidon Vice President Peter MacLaggan responded to Gonzalez's threat of court action.

"I wouldn't be the least bit surprised," he said. "We've been challenged at every step along the way."

Even though water officials have universally praised Poseidon's desalination plant plan, it has had a bumpy history at various times since 2000.

For several years, Poseidon negotiated to build the plant with the San Diego County Water Authority, the county's regional wholesale water supplier. But those on-again, off-again talks, which included Water Authority allegations that Poseidon withheld environmental information under protections for business secrets, eventually fell apart. The Water Authority has said it still supports the plan despite the absence of a deal with Poseidon.

Meanwhile, Poseidon continued pursuing the Carlsbad project by cobbling together contracts to sell the plant's water to the city of Carlsbad and seven other local water agencies. Those contracts promise to sell the water for no more than the roughly $730 the agencies pay the Water Authority per an acre foot of imported water.

Because the desalinated water is expected to cost between $800 and $1,050, Poseidon will sell the water at a loss. However, MacLaggan says the company expects the cost of imported water to rise faster than the plant's, and that the company is confident it will earn a profit.

An acre-foot of water is enough to sustain two households for a year.

Opponents: Project will hurt ocean life

The biggest complaints from both the coastal commission staff and environmental groups about Poseidon's project revolve around the intention to use the Encina Power Plant's existing seawater cooling system.

Currently, Encina sucks in ocean water to cool its electricity-generating turbines before spitting it back out to sea. Poseidon plans to take 304,000 gallons of that water every day and use powerful pumps to force it through high-tech filtering membranes. Fifty million gallons a day would be turned into clean drinking water. The rest, including the salty brine extracted by the filters, would be spit back out to sea.

However, a recent court case and studies have said ocean cooling systems hurt ocean life, killing fish, vegetation, and microscopic life ---- and Encina's owners have applied to move to an air-cooled system by 2010.

Poseidon has a deal to continue using the existing sea intake and outfall system. But coastal commissioners and environmental groups such as the Sierra Club say they should not be allowed to do so.

Poseidon Vice President MacLaggan said the company's research has found that it will kill about 2 1/2 pounds of fish per day as well as a less than significant amount of phytoplankton, fish larvae and other microscopic organisms.

He said the company plans to offset that environmental harm by creating 37 acres of new wetland habitat in a joint San Dieguito River Valley program.

But Luster and coastal commission staff members wrote in their report that they did not trust Poseidon's numbers, saying studies done elsewhere in the state in recent years "concluded that power plant intakes caused significant adverse impacts to local or regional marine biota."

MacLaggan said Luster and commission staff simply didn't like Poseidon's findings, and instead started reaching for unsubstantiated rebuttals.

"They're presenting no evidence, only occasionally saying 'somewhere else it was different,' " he said. "There's no evidence to counter our analysis."

Luster and coastal commission staff members have suggested that Poseidon could build their plant without the existing open-sea intake by digging subsurface wells, or beach wells.

But MacLaggan and Poseidon say it would take miles of beach wells ---- something the commission would never approve ---- to come up the amount of water Poseidon needs. #

http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2007/11/12/news/top_stories/21_42_0011_11_07.txt