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Monday, Mar 18, 2024
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Turning the Tide

Pumping drinkable water from Carlsbad’s Desalination Plant could begin by the fall of 2015, several months ahead of schedule, despite the challenges the $1 billion project has faced.

Both the plant just behind the Encina Power Station and a 10-mile pipeline that will deliver desalinated water inland to San Marcos is more than half complete, said Peter MacLaggan, senior vice president for Poseidon Water, the project’s developer.

A recent change to the pipeline called for undergrounding the 54-inch diameter pipes below a canyon rather than hanging smaller pipes from road overpasses after Poseidon’s customer, the San Diego County Water Authority, deemed that was a better way to go.

The change will increase the construction cost by about $4 million, but it’s a cost already built into the contract, said Sandy Kerl, deputy general manager for the County Water Authority.

The original permit called for hanging the pipes beneath the overpasses to traverse a canyon near the plant but that wasn’t the usual practice, and the Water Authority persuaded the state to change the plan and place the pipes underground, Kerl said.

The breakdown of costs for the Carlsbad Poseidon Water project is plant, $537 million; pipeline, $159 million; financing expenses for both, $227 million; and added system modifications, $80 million. The grand total is $1.003 billion.

Annual costs for the plant’s operations and maintenance are estimated at $49 million to $54 million.

When the plant is completed, it will produce up to 50 million gallons daily, or up to 56,000 acre feet of water annually to a system serving 3.1 million residents. An acre foot of water is about 326,000 gallons.

Yes, the cost to process saltwater through the most technologically-advanced and energy-efficient desalination plant in the world is nearly double the current costs for importing water from the Colorado River via the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California. But after about a decade, the price for desalinated water will likely be lower than the cost for water from MWD, Kerl said.

Given the drought conditions the state and region have experienced in the past three years, it’s an investment that appears to be a no-brainer.

Besides vastly reduced water levels from Northern California, San Diego has been paying much higher prices on the water it receives from MWD, which supplies about 50 percent of this region’s water. Overall, about 85 percent of the water used here is imported from sources outside the county.

Never Say Dry

“This supply is drought-proof and not subject to the vagaries of Washington, D.C., or Sacramento…and won’t be interrupted,” Kerl said.

The Carlsbad plant will provide about 7 percent of this area’s total water needs.

While costly, it’s a project that was vetted over many years, and received significant public backing, Kerl said. “There was huge support from the community to have this supply and a willingness to pay for it,” she said.

According to the County Water Authority communications, the initial estimate on the increase monthly cost resulting from the desalination project to a typical household of four people was $5 to $7.

Yet, based on current cost and sales assumptions that increase would likely be on the lower end in the first full year, or about $5.14 per household.

The desalination project was also costly from a legal perspective. It triggered 14 lawsuits, primarily on environmental grounds, with claims of negative impacts to the ocean flora and fauna.

Environmental studies done before the project was approved show the daily intake of 100 million gallons of seawater — the amount needed to generate the 50 million gallons of drinkable water — will sweep up numbers of three species of fish and larvae, along with larger fish.

Environmental Tradeoffs

As part of Poseidon’s agreement with the California Coastal Commission, the company agreed to restore at least 66 acres of marsh wetlands at the south end of San Diego Bay near a former salt works operation, which is now owned by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. The mitigation work will cost about $23 million.

“We weren’t able to completely eliminate the impacts (to Carlsbad’s coast) so we re-created sufficient habitat to compensate for the losses,” MacLaggan said.

The technology used at the Carlsbad plant was designed by IDE Technologies, an Israeli state-owned company in operation for 45 years, which has created some of the largest desalination plants in the world. It will be the lowest energy consuming desalination plant in the world, MacLaggan said.

While the project currently has 329 workers involved in construction, counting direct and indirect employment, it will result in creating 2,500 jobs in the region, and have a combined economic impact of about $350 million, he said.

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