A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment
November 13, 2007
2. Supply
DESALINATION:
Making the case for desalination - San Diego Union Tribune
Carlsbad seawater plan heads to commission - North County Times
Water forum focuses on planning, regional cooperation - Chico Enterprise Record
WATER BANKING:
Officials visit Rosamond water bank site; Planning for the future - Mojave Desert News
WATER CONSERVATION:
IID to discuss water rationing - Imperial Valley Press
Guest Column: A crisis we can't afford to ignore - North
DROUGHBUSTERS BACK IN ACTION:
'Drought busters' may be calling soon on water wasters; Department of Water and Power employees will roam L.A. and issue friendly advice to residents they see wasting water. Excessive lawn watering and sidewalk spraying are expected to be top targets - Los Angeles Times
DESALINATION:
Making the case for desalination
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
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
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
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
The Municipal Water District of Orange County drilled a test well earlier this year at
The San Diego County Water Authority also is studying the feasibility of a desalination plant at
“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
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
Alsop described
“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
“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
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
By Gig Conaughton, staff writer
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
Poseidon officials also say the plant is badly needed to bolster dwindling
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
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
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
Water forum focuses on planning, regional cooperation
By Heather Hacking, staff writer
The League of Women Voters held a forum Thursday in order to motivate Northern California leaders to take a regional approach to
About 100 people attended, including county water and planning leaders.
Jim Gregg, retired political science professor from
League member Barbara Hennigan pointed out the political inequities on water issues. Eighty-six percent of the water that runs through the California Delta originates in the
However, only 0.2 percent of
She said there is no better time than right now to have the voices from
According to a trend report prepared for the Butte County General Plan process, the county is expected to grow from the current 200,000 population to more than 300,000 in 2030, putting more pressure on the local groundwater resources. At the same time, population is expected to grow dramatically throughout the state.
But few
"We can't wait until 2030," Gregg said.
The Lower Tuscan aquifer was specifically discussed. That groundwater aquifer that lies under several
"Politically, we have tremendous odds to deal with," he said.
Issues creeping up on the
"By not planning, we risk serious consequences," Gregg said.
The guest speaker at the meeting Thursday was Carol Patterson, a board member of the Edwards Aquifer Authority for the past 15 years.
Edwards Aquifer lies under eight counties in and around
The League invited Patterson to share her experiences of working with communities in the area to form the aquifer authority and to make the water source sustainable.
Similar to the
With increases in water use, the area needed to find a way to sustain the use of groundwater and join stakeholders together for a solution.
For decades, those involved with management of the aquifer had their ups and down, including political pressures from different interests, environmental concerns, property rights issues.
And after much wrangling, the aquifer authority was able to avoid a federal takeover and allow
Among the solutions was to ban all new gas stations on areas known to be recharge zones for the aquifer, she said.
Conservation has also contributed to 150,000 acre-feet less water use in normal years, despite growth in population.
Per capita water use in
Through all the wrangling, Patterson said "one of the best lessons we've learned is to remain flexible."
She said one key is to get everybody at the table at the beginning "so he doesn't fight with you later."
"I finally found a way to make friends with my enemies," she said.
http://www.chicoer.com/news/ci_7439343
WATER BANKING:
Officials visit Rosamond water bank site; Planning for the future
By Jill Barnes Nelson, staff writer
Planning for the future; QUOTE:"It's a giant step forward for Rosamond.”— RCSD General Manager Bob Neufeld
ROSAMOND — It's like money in the bank. The water bank, that is, and anyway you look at it, it's all liquid.
"It's a giant step forward for Rosamond to be part of this water banking project," said Rosamond Community Service District general manager Bob Neufeld. "It give us a distinct advantage to able to supply water to our residents in the future."
The Rosamond Community Service District recently held a tour of its new water banking site, located near
SemiTropic general manager Will Boschman said water banking projects started back in the early 1990s. "We were looking for new water storage areas where we could bank one million acre feet," he said. "We were stepping into a new area and a lot a research needed to be done." SemiTropic also partners with several other water storage facilities throughout the
"This entire project is nothing short of innovative with the different partners," said Cole Frates of Western Development. "It's a rarity to find everyone so professional."
Storing for the future
The main purpose of the water bank is to be able to put water into the ground when there is a surplus of water from winter rains, and keep it there to use as needed during dry times. And by having this partnership, the district can tap into other water banks in the State if needed.
"The advantage for us is that we're just about ready to put water into the ground now," Neufeld said. "We have all the permits to bank some 800,000 acre feet of real water for real people."
"This is cutting edge stuff," said Rex Moen, field representative to Senator Roy Ashburn. "Water in
Started in 2001
Andrew Warner of Western Development explained what was considered before choosing the Rosamond site. "It started back in 2001. We had to cover a lot of bases," he said. "First we had to find land suitable to bank water. It couldn't impact on local residents, septic systems, or have too much clay. We had to check levels of other chemicals in the land such as arsenic. And it had to be in a place where the water could easily flow to its destination."
>From 2002-2004, he said they looked over hundreds of data bases, maps and did all types of water testing to find the right spot.
By 2005, a feasibility report put them in this location, which was the Van Dam Farm. The area is 1630 acres and had been used to grow alfalfa, onions and carrots. The cost was $7500 per acre.
It then took another year to get all the proper permits and approvals.
Financial partner
Once Western found the best location, it went looking for a financial partner – SemiTropic. And it also wanted to work with a public agency and found RCSD. "We did lots of presentations about the bank and plan to do more," Werner said. "We want the public to know exactly what we're doing."
Werner said they should start banking in the next month or so. "Once we start, we should bank some 100,000 acres in three months," he said.
Werner also said the area to be banked will at first look a rice paddy. The location will be surrounded by a berm, and then flooded on top until it sinks to the storage area below. "We have a test area now where we're growing carrots on top. We'll continue to do some farming, unless for some reason, we need to use the top layer."
The numbers for the program, in addition to the 800,000 acre feet, will include an additional 500,000 acre feet in
Another plus to the project is it will eventually tap into the California Aqueduct, which is located just a few miles away. "We hope to run pipes right along theirs to our bank," Frates said. "That way the water can flow back and forth as needed."
Neufeld pointed out this will be a money-making venture for all parties. "We already have had offers from other agencies to put water in our bank. That shows a high level of confidence for this program."
AVEK project
Meanwhile, the Antelope Valley/East Kern Water Agency has released an environmental impact report for their projected water bank near
“There are other places to do it and other issues,” Scott said at last week’s Rosamond Municipal Advisory Council meeting. #
http://desertnews.com/mdn/story9.html
WATER CONSERVATION:
IID to discuss water rationing
By Brianna Lusk, staff writer
Water rationing will be at the forefront of Imperial Irrigation District meetings this week as the district’s Board of Directors discusses the issue with agriculture and community members.
The district is facing a tight deadline in which to implement “equitable water distribution” to make up for water shortfalls in 2008.
The district is already on track to exceed this year’s water apportionment for the second year in a row.
On the agenda for the informational meeting, scheduled at 5 this evening, is the approval of a $600,000 software system that would regulate and track water flow.
The board could take action on the item tonight. The software would play an integral part in the water distribution program.
It is expected to be functional by January.
An equitable distribution workshop is scheduled for 5 p.m. Wednesday to address any lingering community concerns about the equitable distribution program.
Conservation is becoming an increasingly necessary measure as the IID copes with the limitation of 3.1 million acre-feet of water imposed by the controversial Quantification Settlement Agreement.
The QSA, a 75-year water pact meant to prevent future water wars, took effect in 2003 and has continued to be mired in a number of lawsuits against the agreement.
Earlier this year the board declared an imbalance in the water budget and the proposed straight-line method that has emerged is opposed by some farmers and community members.
The straight-line method would distribute 5.13 acre-feet of water to farmers and any excess water the farmers did not use could be sold within the district to other farmers.
IID would not set the price for the water transfers between farmers, but would facilitate the exchange.
Some have said the plan puts landowners at the helm of owning the water and the straight-line method is cause for concern.
The Imperial County Farm Bureau has backed a transitional method and IID officials have said they hope there is a compromise reached in the coming days. #
http://www.ivpressonline.com/articles/2007/11/13/news/news03.txt
Guest Column: A crisis we can't afford to ignore
By Timothy Quinn, executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies
The firestorm of 2007 underscored the importance of water to the
During this disaster, many residents were forced to boil water for several days as local water systems were treated to protect against contamination. Though safe drinking water was soon flowing again, the experience is a reminder that we can't take our water for granted.
A critical resource to
Despite intense media coverage and focus by the governor and legislators, the public remains largely unaware of the problems confronting
The state's growing population puts increased pressure on our water supply. The San Diego Association of Governments projects that by 2030, the region will add another one million people. Those projections raise new challenges for a region that relies heavily on imported water.
While
One of our biggest worries is the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, the single most important link in
Recently, a federal court ordered the state's two largest water systems to cut deliveries by one-third next year to protect a threatened fish species -- potentially the largest court-ordered reduction in
Never before has the state's water system faced the troubles it faces today. It is critical that Californians take the combined threat of drought, climate change, supply reductions and potential natural disasters seriously. We simply cannot afford to ignore these problems --
http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2007/11/13/opinion/commentary/20_29_0011_12_07.txt
DROUGHBUSTERS BACK IN ACTION:
'Drought busters' may be calling soon on water wasters; Department of Water and Power employees will roam L.A. and issue friendly advice to residents they see wasting water. Excessive lawn watering and sidewalk spraying are expected to be top targets
By Steve Hymon, staff writer
Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced Monday that he would reactivate a program of "drought busters" to preach the message of water conservation.
Department of Water and Power employees will roam the nation's second-largest city and issue friendly advice to residents they see wasting water.
Excessive lawn watering and sidewalk spraying are expected to be top targets.
Earlier this year, the mayor asked residents to voluntarily cut water use by 10%. By putting drought busters on the street, Villaraigosa hopes to avoid restrictions on water use.
The mayor will unveil details of the program, which centers on having five to 10 people patrolling the city, at a news conference today at DWP headquarters.
But even as the city's top water official told the City Council last month that he was contemplating reviving the drought busters program, he warned that such measures might not be enough to get the city through the latest dry spell.
DWP acting general manager Robert Rozanski said that if this year is as dry as the last -- the driest on record -- mandatory conservation rules might be necessary. #
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-drought13nov13,1,6155863.story?coll=la-headlines-california
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