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Special Report: Welcome to New England
Plant in Massachusetts Signals Desalination’s Arrival in Region -
What Exactly Are We Getting Into? by Stephen Hochbrunn, NEIWPCC
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In Search of Solutions
Persuasive though they are, it’s doubtful Hass and Hinkebein would convince Killian to change his mind on the Brockton plant and desalination in general in the region. Nor likely would potential advances in the process, though they might have a better chance. As part of the National Centers Program, which is run by the National Water Research Institute and the Bureau of Reclamation, six facilities across the country are testing and evaluating desalination technologies. Soon, there will be a seventh. In Alamogordo, New Mexico, construction of the Tularosa Basin National Desalination Research Facility is almost complete. Wells at the site tap into extensive brackish groundwater resources, and scientists will use the center to study new technologies, alternatives for brine management and reuse, and the use of renewable energy. The new facility will allow researchers to build upon the already impressive work being done elsewhere.
At Sandia’s labs in Albuquerque, N.M., researchers are exploring numerous ideas, including one based on the science of biomimesis, where designs from nature are incorporated into machines. The researchers are looking into creating reverse osmosis membranes that filter salt and harmful particles from water in the same way as human cells. It’s a tantalizing idea, when you consider our cells contain proteins called aquaporins that filter water 1,000 times more efficiently than current RO membranes.
In May, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Cal., announced that its researchers had created a membrane made of hollow nanotubes that are more than 50,000 times thinner than a human hair. The narrowness means large molecules—salt, for example—can’t squeeze through, while the incredibly smooth surface inside the tubes allows liquids and gases to rapidly flow through. The increased permeability would mean far less pressure needed to accomplish reverse osmosis. Since generating pressure requires energy, a need for significantly less pressure could mean the long sought-after major reduction in desalination’s energy costs.
But hold on. “It’s pretty dangerous to start mentioning these quantum leap technologies as being commercially viable,” said consultant Tom Pankratz. “Look, we’ve been working on RO membranes since the late ’60s and there are still issues with them. Nanotubes and the aquaporin research are interesting, they should be pursued, and the government should encourage them. But you can’t start building water policy around them.”
Researchers understand the skepticism, but say the scientific breakthroughs that might make desalination doable for the Hulls and Seabrooks of the world are achievable—if the financial support is there.
Where Have All the Dollars Gone?
About the closest desalination has come to being a hot topic in recent years in the White House is on an episode of The West Wing. (In an episode that aired in February 2005, a water lobbyist slams the administration for not investing in desalination technology.) It wasn’t always that way.
In 1951, President Eisenhower declared the need for a “farsighted program for meeting urgent water needs by converting salt water to fresh water”; a year later, Congress passed the Saline Water Act, providing federal funding for desalination technologies. In 1962, President Kennedy said if we ever found a way to desalinate cheaply, it would “dwarf any other scientific accomplishments.” For decades, federal funds flowed to desalination, with the government spending more than $1 billion on R&D projects. The support led to major advances, including the development of reverse osmosis.
Then in 1982, Congress killed the Office of Water Research and Technology, and the desalination program moved to the Bureau of Reclamation. Federal funding for desalination virtually vanished. Congress did pass the Water Desalination Act of 1996, which renewed federal R&D in desalination, and it certainly didn’t hurt that the U.S. Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources was chaired in recent years by Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.), a major supporter of desalination research who secured funding for Sandia’s efforts. That funding should continue under the new Democratically controlled Congress, since the new committee chair is New Mexico’s junior senator, Jeff Bingaman, another desalination advocate.
But federal funding isn’t what is used to be—or should be, according to the 2003 Sandia/USBR Roadmap. It called for a “Renewed National Commitment” to desalination R&D, saying it was the only way to generate much needed next-generation technologies that will reduce the cost of the process. In our interview, Sandia’s Hinkebein didn’t press that point quite so hard, saying federal funding had been increasing somewhat, and that the growth in funding from states and non-profit groups such as the AWWA Research Foundation was having a real impact. Perhaps he’s just being a realist. After all, researchers aren’t the only ones in the desalination community chasing federal dollars.
“We feel that a lot of this research money just hasn’t produced enough,” said Sean Taylor, government affairs advisor for the U.S. Desalination Council, a lobbying group that represents 11 water agencies and utilities looking to encourage desalination projects across the country. “The number one thing that brings the cost down is when folks get out there, start producing the water, and start working on membrane technology and energy recovery. They bring the cost down themselves.”
For several years, the Desalination Council has been pushing for the passage of bills in the U.S. Senate and House that would provide funding to spur the development of desalination plants. In the latest House bill, owners of desalination facilities would receive federal incentive payments if they could show they’d significantly reduced the amount of energy used in the process. The amount of the incentive would be based on how much water they produced. The bill stalled in committee, as have other similar measures backed by the council.
A little push from the White House would help the council’s effort, but it hasn’t happened. Sean Taylor couldn’t explain why.
“I wish I could tell you, but I’m not sure,” he said. “Everyone is always interested in drought protection acts, but we just haven’t been able to get them into this.”
Bruised but Not Beaten
The decline in Washington’s interest may have slowed desalination’s progress, but it hasn’t stopped it. The experience in Florida’s Tampa Bay region has shown further that the industry can take a punch.
Beset by a water shortage brought on by a binge of development, water officials in the Tampa area approved plans in 1999 to build a reverse osmosis facility co-located with a power plant in Apollo Beach. With a capacity of 25 MGD, it was to be the largest desalination plant in the country. As in Dighton, the plant would be privately owned and operated, with the Southwest Florida Water Management District providing $85 million to help cover the projected $110 million cost of building the plant and a 15-mile pipeline. The grand scheme garnered international attention for the project—and its problems. In 2000, one of the contracted developers declared bankruptcy, and a private consortium led by Poseidon Resources, the Connecticut-based developer, took over. A year later, Poseidon’s partner in the consortium failed to post a required construction bond, prompting frustrated officials at Tampa Bay Water, the local utility, to buy out the developers and hire a new contractor.
It was a fresh start for the project, and construction went on. But the curse didn’t lift. In 2003, shortly after the plant finally began delivering water, it failed a series of performance tests due to numerous problems, including frequent clogging of its pretreatment filters and RO membranes. The contractor declared bankruptcy, and lawsuits began to fly. Ultimately, Tampa Bay Water settled on a new contractor, American Water-Pridesa, to repair the plant, but it’s been no simple fix. Multiple corrections are being done to the plant’s pretreatment, RO, and post-treatment systems, and the total cost of construction now stands at $150 million. While the plant has operated intermittently throughout the debacle—and produced nearly 5 billion gallons of water, according to Tampa Bay Water—it’s not expected to be operating consistently at full capacity until later this year.
With so much attention on the Tampa project, its problems might have sunk desalination in this country like a plume of heavy brine sinking to the sea floor. Instead, it’s turned into a case study on how to do it right the next time.
“Tampa has been a black eye for the industry around the world,” said consultant Tom Pankratz. “But does that mean RO isn’t a good process? There were certainly some things that were done wrong, and there’s a lot of blame to go around. But the industry has learned from it. We learned more about pretreatment. We learned more about the whole project development process. We learned about how to write contracts that have some teeth in them so that the errors can be borne by the proper parties. [Tampa’s] affecting the way business is done all over the world. That’s the way it should be. We learn from our mistakes.”
Private Projects, Public Oversight
One characteristic shared by the plants in Tampa and Dighton, and most modern desalination plants and proposals, is that they are so-called BOOT projects. The letters stand for “build, own, operate, transfer,” which essentially means a private entity constructs a plant and runs it for a set length of time in exchange for keeping the revenues from water fees. It’s a partnership that allows a public agency or water-service provider to get what it wants—desalinated water—while the private entity nets a profit (or so it hopes). In an interview with Peter Fairbanks, the president of Bluestone Energy Services (one of the partners in the Taunton River project), he didn’t hide his motivation when he spoke about his hope that more communities will buy the Dighton plant’s water.
“I’m optimistic,” Fairbanks said, “that there’ll be many more sales.”
And that would be a good thing, of course?
“Absolutely. More sales, more water, more money.”
This focus on profits, whether it’s in southeastern Massachusetts or Tampa, worries public policy specialists who fear that desalination projects represent an increased and dangerous privatization of the nation’s water supply. As the June 2006 Pacific Institute report put it, “Some individuals feel that privatized desalination violates the public trust doctrine by turning a public good into a private commodity subject to market rules.”
The legendary economist Adam Smith would have counterattacked by saying that in pursuing their self-interest, desalination developers would be guided by the “invisible hand” of the free market to act in the public interest. Regulators, however, aren’t putting their faith in an unseen appendage. Any desalination proposal is now extensively reviewed. Before Aquaria could break ground on its Dighton plant, the company had to obtain well over 30 permits and approvals from everyone from the Dighton Sewer Department to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. It took years.
“The problem was that we didn’t know the process here, and I think the agencies didn’t know it either,” said Aquaria’s Andrés. “In Spain, the process [of getting approval to build a plant] is very similar, but we have hundreds of desal facilities, so everyone knows what the process is, and everybody knows all the issues. I guess we have made the path for the next desal facilities in this area.”
Aquaria’s long, circuitous path to approval drove Massachusetts to seek ways to improve its policy on desalination projects. A workgroup of regulators and desalination developers convened in 2005 to refine and define the permitting and monitoring process to clearly delineate what’s required of future projects. Kathy Baskins, director of water policy at Massachusetts’s Executive Office of Environmental Affairs, said the new policy is in its final stages of development.
“We developed it because we do see desalination as a viable option for water supply,” Baskin said, “and we wanted to make sure that as towns consider it, they’ll know what’s expected from them in terms of environmental precautions. We wanted to lay out for them, for example, where they might get some relaxation in monitoring requirements if they veer a project in a certain direction.”
Baskin revealed little more about the details of the new policy, but it won’t be long before they’re known. She said various state agencies are reviewing the proposal, and that it still needs the approval of Ian A. Bowles, secretary of the Executive Office of Environmental Affairs. Once that process plays out, the policy will be released for public comment through the Water Resources Commission.
The Road Ahead
As desalination grows in prominence in this country, it is emerging not as a magic bullet that will cure all water supply ills, but rather one more tool, albeit an expensive one, in the toolbox for delivering clean, safe drinking water. Opposition remains, but there’s a sense of acceptance in much of the environmental community.
“We now have to consider desalination on a case-by-case basis,” said the NRDC’s Barry Nelson, “We need to sort out the good ones from the bad ones.”
During a visit over the summer to the site of the Dighton plant, about 30 men could be seen working on various tasks, but it was hot and the pace was languid. Only the base of the giant water tanks had been built, and the path to the river had yet to be cleared. But here it was, the plant that seemed destined never to be built, undeniably under construction. Aquaria’s supervisor at the site, Patrick Williamson, kindly tolerated conducting yet another tour, but in truth, there wasn’t much to see—no RO tubes yet, no pipeline from the river, nothing to reveal the significance of what would be happening there. Williamson was subdued, but when asked what it meant to be working on such a unique facility, he answered quickly. “It’s pretty exciting,” he said.
Aquaria is expected to begin delivering water to Brockton in early 2008, which means not only the plant but also the underground pipeline must be complete by then. For much of its 16-mile trek from Dighton to Brockton, the pipe will follow an old railroad route. But it will also pass through several towns, and getting those towns to agree to the idea has taken some give-and-take. In September, the town of Easton gave Aquaria a right-of-way agreement after the company agreed to build sidewalks and replace water mains in the area where the pipe will be installed. Easton’s decision left the city of Taunton as the main remaining holdout, according to Jeff Hanson, whose firm is managing the pipeline construction. But he said an agreement with Taunton had been worked out, and that it lacked only the formal approval of city officials.
Aquaria remains optimistic that more communities will sign on to buy its water, but so far the only confirmed buyer besides Brockton is the town of Norton, and it’s committed to just 150,000 gallons a day. Connections to the pipeline will be installed for four other towns, including Taunton and Easton, to use in the event of an emergency; the hope at Aquaria is that once the towns see desalinated water actually flowing through the pipe, they’ll want to use the connection on a regular basis. Perhaps that’s all it will take—tangible evidence that the water is indeed there for the taking. Considering the history of the project, skepticism about the project ever being finished is understandable. It’s been an exhausting process for all involved, so much so that some have had enough. Bluestone’s Peter Fairbanks said the Dighton plant marks the end of his affair with desalination.
“It’s one and out for me,” Fairbanks said. “This took 12 years of development to get it to the point of construction. I’m at the point of my life where that’s enough for me. I’ll let somebody else do the rest of them.”
By “them,” Fairbanks meant the other desalination plants that he fully expects will be built in the region. Hanson is counting on future expansion of the process as well, despite being stymied so far in his attempts to generate interest in a plant on Boston’s North Shore. Kerry Mackin of the Ipswich River Watershed Association has supported his efforts, even introduced him to key players in the area, but so far no takers. Hanson isn’t giving up.
“I can be very persistent,” he said. Don’t bet against him.
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