SANTA CRUZ — Laura Brown, the longtime former director of Soquel Creek Water District, is fond of repeating a quote often attributed to Mark Twain: “Whiskey is for drinking — water is for fighting over.”
And a fight it has been and will continue to be for the district and neighboring Santa Cruz Water Department to generate a new water supply by building a seawater desalination plant. The cost to build the proposed Westside facility is estimated at $123 million.
But many “facts” underpinning the desalination debate — water supply and demand, construction and energy costs, the ability to treat or save more water — are really only best guesses that hinge on economic, climatic and regulatory uncertainties.
The proposed plant would be capable of making 2.5 million gallons of drinking water each day by extracting more than 5 million gallons from the Monterey Bay — the return on desalination is about 50 percent — and pushing it through high-pressure membranes to remove the salt. The “fresh-squeezed” water, as Santa Cruz”s Water Director Bill Kocher calls it, would be treated for delivery and the diluted salt solution sent to sea.
Given the vastness of the ocean, desalination appears to Brown, Kocher and others as the most reliable new supply available. As Brown says, “We need to take this to the bank.”
The plan is designed to recharge the Soquel Creek district”s overtapped groundwater basin and halt seawater intrusion while shielding Santa Cruz from severe drought-related rationing and fostering fish habitat restoration. Although few would argue against the merit of those goals, the plan is fraught with environmental, financial, political and philosophical questions.
WHAT WE FOUND
In April, the Sentinel began a six-month investigation into the desalination proposal, seeking to answer those questions and many more.
The three-day series, “Deconstructing Desal,” will show that Soquel Creek”s overdrafted aquifers are driving the urgency behind the desalination plant, and although Santa Cruz has an occasional drought problem, it is fish habitat protection that has upped the city”s stakes in getting desalination online. The investigation also determined the costs of desalination are but one piece of a nearly $300 million package of projects the two agencies may undertake during the next decade, leading to sharp increases in water rates.
While the city and district have exhausted alternatives to supplying the amount of water each needs to solve their respective problems, the Sentinel found there are ways to conserve and reuse water that may decrease the future need for the plant but hinge on the willingness of water customers to change their habits.
In the end, voters and a host of regulators — more than a dozen agencies with federal, state and local jurisdiction — will decide the fate of one the biggest infrastructure projects ever undertaken in the county. Funded by ratepayers, the plant is the highest-profile item on a long list of water improvement projects that could more than double bills for single-family households in the Soquel Creek district during the next 10 years and increase them in Santa Cruz nearly 50 percent.
The next few months will produce two important developments that should grab the attention of every water customer, even if desalination seems a no-brainer, environmental heresy or a massive puzzle that water managers should be trusted to figure out.
AN INDEPENDENT ANALYSIS
Beyond documenting the potential impacts and evaluating the need, the Sentinel delved into the larger issue of desalination, a topic of growing interest among scientists, regulators and municipalities grappling with how to secure more water in a state with the country”s longest coastline and a legacy of water shortages. The series will explore how desalination is playing out along the Central Coast.
What can be said is desalination is no one”s first choice for creating more drinking water. It”s expensive, in terms of money and energy, compared to how water is currently collected, produced and delivered through surface and groundwater sources — methods that taken their own negative toll on the environment.
But the concept of desalination isn”t new; nor is it going away. There are 17 desalination proposals pending in California and two in Mexico, according to the Pacific Institute, a nonprofit studying environment, development and security policies.
“Is desalination the ultimate solution to our water problems? No. Is it likely to be a piece of our water management puzzle? Yes,” the institute stated in a 2006 study called “Desalination, With A Grain of Salt.” http://www.pacinst.org/reports/desalination/desalination_report.pdf
PHILOSOPHY OF DESALINATION
In a county known for environmental doggedness, desalination would change, even if in arguably unnoticeable ways, how local residents interact with the federally protected Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary.
As the California Coastal Commission, which is expected to conduct the most wide-ranging and critical permitting review of Santa Cruz”s plans, notes in its own desalination policy: Making seawater into potable water establishes a new consumptive demand on the sea. Even though the amount taken for desalination is small relative to the size of the ocean, the process can have significant impacts.
“One of these differences is that seawater is transformed from a public trust resource held in common for public use to that of a commodity to be taken out of the larger resource to be sold and consumed,” the policy says.
Environmental scientist Tom Luster, the commission”s desalination expert, noted in an interview that water has long been the driver of California history. “Desal is the latest version of who has water in California — who gets to grow and develop while others don”t,” he said.
But Brent Haddad, director of the Center for Integrated Water Research at UC Santa Cruz, says maybe that”s not a bad thing.
“Desal is technology that is more profound than we think because, in the broadest sense, we are reversing the water cycle that has flowed in one direction since the beginning of earth,” said Haddad, who helped negotiate the city”s and district”s joint operating agreement for the proposed plant. “Desal allows us to reverse that and have an impact on our society — build economies where otherwise we couldn”t. I don”t think we have appreciated how profound that is, in terms of our ability to structure our surroundings.”
And Haddad, who led a seven-year-long study http://ciwr.ucsc.edu/UCSC_Desal_Prop_50_Final_Report.pdf on the economic and ecological aspects of desalination, argues that desalination”s potential impacts on the ocean should be evaluated alongside pollution and other human impacts — ones driven by the economy, recreation or other pursuits.
“Desal shouldn”t be the lamb expelled from town with all our sins on it,” he said.
A STUDY IN TRADE-OFFS
Indeed, desalination is full of trade-offs. The scientific community is split.
With so many facilities planned in California, regulators aren”t sharpening their axes to kill proposals. Rather, they are looking afresh at ways to ensure the process is pursued in an environmentally responsible way.
One is the state Water Resources Control Board, which is rewriting its desalination policy.
Peter von Langen, an engineering geologist for the Central Coast Regional Water Board, said, “There is going to be desal proposed in the future as part of the water supply issues. The questions are: Is it new water or replacement water for something else?”
Concerns mount about the potential for enabling growth and high energy demands — producing desalted water could require as much as 12 times more power than treating freshwater sources — and aggressive conservation is often pushed as the answer.
Conner Everts, who leads the nationwide Desal Response Group, said, “If we invested a fraction of the time and energy in (improving) local water resources (as opposed to desal), we would be in a much better position.”
Others trumpet desalination”s potential for restoring habitat damaged by groundwater overpumping and stream diversions.
Brent Constantz, consulting associate professor in Stanford University”s Department of Geological and Environmental Sciences, said, “If we just forget about people for just a second and forget about all the politics, of which there is plenty, and really look at the health of the marine sanctuary and Monterey Bay, our first priority is to restore flow to all these rivers and the way to do that is to stop overpumping groundwater basins.”
Constantz is the architect of the DeepWater Desal project in Moss Landing, one of three desalination proposals competing in Monterey County. But others disagree that pulling in oceanwater and sending it to people”s taps is the way to rebuild habitat.
In terms of creating the kind of water needed in a drought and in all years to recharge aquifers, desalination opponent Jan Bentley, a retired superintendent of water production for Santa Cruz, said, “I don”t think any one alternative that we are looking at alone could do that. However, any of them in conjunction could.”
It”s clear water director Bill Kocher and his former counterpart at Soquel Creek, Laura Brown, are counting on desalination after years of studying alternatives they say won”t solve their problems. Soquel Creek has abandoned the possibility of going it alone if a joint desalination plant doesn”t come to pass.
But as for another ready-to-go Plan B if voters or regulators say ”no,” Kocher says, “There isn”t one.”
Follow Sentinel reporter J.M. Brown on Twitter at Twitter.com/jmbrownreports
What we found
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