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Poseidon adventure: $350 million public subsidy for private desalination plant
November 13th, 2009, 5:00 am · 22 Comments · posted by Teri Sforza, Register staff writer
(Vote in our poll: Should Poseidon get the subsidy?)
The mighty Metropolitan Water District of Southern California agreed this week to pony up $14 million per year - or $350 million over the next 25 years, if you prefer to think of it that way - to pay for desalinated water in San Diego County.
That money will go to public entities - cities and water districts - to offset the cost of water they’ll buy from a private, yet-to-be-built, desalination plant in Carlsbad. That plant will be constructed and owned by Poseidon Resources LLC.
If this Poseidon thing rings a bell, it’s not just because you remember Shelley Winters from the disaster movie. Poseidon is also working on a similar project in Huntington Beach.
The San Diego project, however, is much farther along, and will be Southern California’s first major foray into ocean desalination. Construction of the $300 million-or-so plant should begin next year, and water is supposed to flow in 2012. It will provide enough water for about 300,000 residents, or 100,000 homes a year. (Over the quarter-century, that translates to some 1.4 million acre-feet of new water - nearly twice the capacity of Diamond Valley Lake, the region’s largest drinking water reservoir near Hemet, Met says. See Met report here: met-desal-report)
Poseidon hopes to issue more than $500 million in tax-free bonds to construct the Carlsbad facility.
The $350 million public dollars that will make their way to Poseidon’s pockets over the next quarter-century come from Met’s Local Resources Program, which aims to boost SoCal’s own water supplies, and reduce dependence on the imported stuff. It’s a controversial move:
- Critics want Met to fund public projects, not private ones.
- Environmentalists worry about the impact of highly salty brine, a byproduct of desalination, and want to pursue cheaper alternatives (conservation, recycling, recapturing stormwater and the like).
- Others worry about Poseidon’s splotchy track record. An expert who picked apart Poseidon’s plan for Carlsbad called it “poorly designed, badly financed, and environmentally unsatisfactory. It is going to become the new case study in how NOT to do desalination, replacing the previous case study (also of a Poseidon effort) of how not to do desalination - Tampa Bay, Florida.”
A protest letter circulated by Surfrider San Diego stresses Poseidon’s problems in the Sunshine State. “In Florida, Poseidon’s Tampa Bay desalination plant was $40 million over budget, five years late, and has yet to produce the 25 million gallons per day it promised on a regular basis,” the letter says. “Now Poseidon plans to bet the health of our marine environment on its latest attempt to build a plant twice that size.”
Peter Gleick, water expert, president of the Pacific Institute, and 2003 MacArthur Fellow, wrote that ” The desperate drive to do a desalination project in California is leading to a set of financial travesties. Despite their initial claim that Poseidon would bear all of the financial burden and risk associated with the private plan to desalinate ocean water at an old power plant in Carlsbad and sell it to public water agencies, Poseidon now says it needs massive public subsidies.”
How much of this is skin off John Q. Public’s nose? The $350 million Met has promised to pay for desalinated water will only be spent if there actually is desalinated water to buy. Public-private partnerships have been touted as a way to tackle all sorts of problems. And Orange County’s water wonks - a rather conservative bunch - do a collective shrug, saying they’re in favor of finding new sources of water wherever they may be. Building one desalination plant does not mean alternate avenues will not be pursued - such as conservation, recapturing storm water, etc. There are, as they say, many roads to Rome. Or something like that.
That $350 million will, however, be the largest grant Met’s Local Resources Program has made. And debate on whether this is the best way to spend that money will no doubt continue.
Poseidon and the its backers, however, are crowing over their victory. “We greatly appreciate the support that Metropolitan Water District has demonstrated on behalf of desalination,” says a statement on Poseidon’s web site, quoting Valley Center Municipal Water District General Manager Gary Arant (one of the nine San Diego agencies that will buy water from the Carlsbad plant). “With the ongoing drought, legal and environmental challenges, and State Water Project infrastructure challenges, the Seawater Desalination Program is a smart investment in California’s water stability both now and for the future. The water produced locally by our private partner, the Carlsbad Desalination Project, will assist our region in developing a more diverse water portfolio while reducing our dependence on imported water at no risk to taxpayers.”
Tampa is on everyone’s mind. Folks will be watching. And Orange County will try to learn from San Diego’s experience.
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If the population continues to rise then there is no question about will we ever have to desalinate sea water. It’s a question of when. If you don’t want to desalinate sea water then work on population control. Boiling sea water to make drinking water is very expensive. It’s a last resort but it is coming. They do it in Saudi Arabia and have been for a while. It’s a a very standard practice there. But I don’t think money or pollution is an issue there.
talkabout gov waste– forget the 15k per year employee pension stuff– this is a crime.
True that John,Makes me thirsty just reading it. Trouble is influential lobbies like Surf rider and the Sierra clubs have to complain about something to justify their “non-profit” status. Without them campaign contributions would suffer and there would be less junk mail to push agendas that kill jobs and growth. In this case clean water is evil and clearly not in the public’s best interest.
I wonder when someone will come up with another growth industry for Southern California besides big DEVELOPMENT. I believe that I remember Rep. Campbell taking one off the agenda in Congress to be built in Doheny as it resembled and ear mark. Sadly, California is already ruined.
Is this ‘history repeating itself?’ I remember, decades ago, driving past the construction of a water desalination plant on Ellis Ave. in Fountain Valley. It took years to build; I could not believe it when, upon completion, it was then taken apart bit by bit and sold to Saudi Arabia, for their use. Seems it was determined that it was not cost effective, but the Saudis could afford it. Is anyone doing their homework?
Desal is getting cheaper. The biggest cost associated with these plants has always been electricity to run massive water pumps that pump water under very high pressure through filters. With newer, better and more efficient filters and pumps, the electricity cost has been going down over time.
I disagree. Maybe in a conventional water distribution plant this may be true. But these plants will use steam to boil the water. That will be the cost. Not the pumps this time!
there’s a real-world desalinization plant on Catalina, providing them with drinking water. it’s been there for almost 10 years I believe.
I agree with Jake, the price has been going down; it just needs to be scaled up.
Just because there is a desalination plant there doesn’t mean it is cheap. They don’t get enough rain water or probably have enough well water on this desert island. What is the cost of this process? How much are the water bills there as compared to the mainland per gallon? What are the water usage restrictions there? Are there government subsidies to the company to reduce the cost to the customers? Do you have this information?
What are the real-world choices? Does desalinization cost less than upgrading the state’s water system to pump more and more water some 400 miles around the Sacramento/San Joaquin Delta, and then up and over the San Gabriel Mountains?
The biggest problem is that enviro-radicals will beef, moan, and complain about just about any solution to the state’s water problems, then try to block it.
We are WAY too reliant on imported water from Northern California and the Colorado River and both of those sources are drying up.
MWD understands the importance of local communities developing new local water resources, which is why the state water plan says we should have 500,000 acre-feet of desalinated seawater by 2030.
Just as you wouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket when it comes to your financial portfolio, we shouldn’t do that when it comes to water either.
Desalination will provide us with about 8% of our water supply here in Orange County. We also need recycled water (GWR provides about 10% of our water supply) as well as water conservation and yes, imported water too.
The more diversified we are, the safer we are.
I can’t wait for this project to come online. The sooner the better.
we haven’t been going through any major population boom the last decade; it’s just poor planning and more diverting of water that we used to get, plus a shift of population (i.e. “growth”) toward inland areas that require more water for people to live to the same type of standard.
if the government didn’t screw up the water from the Sac. Delta in the interest of some grub, it certainly would’ve helped.
munis also need to mandate drought resistant landscape materials as the standard.
… and fine those who don’t adhere to water rationing (e.g. watering their lawn on the wrong days of the week).
I did two searches just now on MWD’s website, one for Poseidon, no hits. Search for desalination gave no hits regarding this project. MWD should be trumpeting their involvement in this if it has promise. But why doesn’t the MWD use their own expertise and equipment and keep this money to fund their own desalination project? I bet the money would go farther and net better results.
I’m not normally in favor of ‘conservation’ as a solution to problems but we waste clean potable water in massive amounts. I remember living in Marin County in the 1970’s and 80’s when our reservoirs dried up. We were allowed 32 gallons per day per person as I recall. It wasn’t that hard once you adjusted to it. You didn’t leave the faucet running while you brushed your teeth, you found you got a better shave if you just heated a damp towel to wet your beard in the same fashion barbers had always done. I do it to this day. Microwave a moist cloth and clean your razor in a cup of water and read the OCR on line while you shave. You can irrigate your landscaping with your bath water, the grass and bushes don’t mind at all.
We need to stop wasting water and let the farmers use it to best advantage by growing crops we can eat, wear and export.
I and my wife do our part by take showers and baths together!
Oh and watering lawns and gardens after sunset helps too
Don’t inconvenience yourself like this. Residential consumption only accounts for 10%. Farming and industrial usage is the other 90%. If you saw how much much we dump down drains here where I work you would puke.
>We were allowed 32 gallons per day per person as I recall<
I can just see Illegals or welfare trash with 20 kids try to cut back
Aint gona happen!
No complaints about forced over-population thru our open border policy? When the State of California gets serious about our dwindling resources I will. We just spent the last forty years trying to clean up our state and pissed away much of that progress catering to a population that could care less about clean water, recycling, littering and family planning.You cant just keep raising the price of everything to compensate for poor government and dishonest greedy politicians who give lip service to the taxpayer but buy votes at the cost of our childrens enviroment.
This is just a way to anchor the blighted, obsolete, murcury-spewing power plant to the Huntington Beach neighborhood that gets no benefit and all of the risk from it. Those people live with the fallout of those smoke stacks, and the electricty goes out of the city.
We have a long way to go to catch up to San Francisco as far as water conservation. We use about three times what that city uses per person. Conservation would eliminate the necessity of such a plant. There is nothing special about San Francisco, other than that they are already using one third the water that we do.
The desalination needs to be done along with conservation and gray water reuse. It is just the manner in which it is being done. Fix the problem. Fight the methods and the politics. Route the pipes farther out. Strike a deal to turn the funding into a loan. Create oversight but do the desalinization one way or the other. I am glad that Surfrider will be there to watch over the regulators and monitor water quality. We are going to need us;-)
Maybe we should just haul them chunks of ice down from the north, then we could use the fresh water they are made of to drink and what not, and that would also keep them from the ocean when they melt.