Water world

The Earth’s population has doubled since 1950, but the amount of available fresh water has stayed the same. While the statistic alone might be enough to cause concern about a water shortage, it’s compounded by the fact that water use has tripled in the same amount of time, and the freshwater supply is increasingly at risk of contamination by pollution, water-borne disease and shifting rain patterns caused by global warming, according to a recent report released by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The report indicates that 40 percent of the world’s population could suffer water shortages by 2050.

In 2000, Scientists at the International Water Management Institute predicted a third of the world’s population would suffer from water shortages by 2025. In a report compiled by the institute over a five-year period and presented in April 2006 at World Water Week in Stockholm, the same scientists reported the one-third threshold has already been crossed.

Where there is scarcity and demand, there is money to be made — and water is no exception. At an April 2007 water conference in Barcelona, Jean Louis Chaussade, CEO of French utility Suez, said China, Saudi Arabia and Algeria, where water shortages have become acute, are already spending billions of dollars looking for ways to increase the water supply. He also noted that China plans to provide water services for an additional 100 cities by 2010.

Only 2 percent of the world’s water is fresh, and those looking to cash in on the pending shortage are either pursuing ways to make the most of the 2 percent or technologies that tap into the other 98 percent.

Desalination, a process that uses either pressure (reverse osmosis) or heat (thermal distillation) to turn saltwater into freshwater, has become an increasingly popular idea in the United States over the past five years. The processes have been proven successful in Israel and throughout the Middle East, and — due to recent technological advances — it is more economically feasible than it has ever been. Now, the first of 17 proposed desalination plants in California is one permit away from starting construction. But as water runs short from one source, is grabbing it from another really so easy?

The water rush
The primary reason that desalination has recently become a realistic option, rather than a what-if scenario, is a reduction in the cost of the process. New membranes improve the efficiency of the reverse osmosis process and cost less than older, less-efficient filters. Reverse osmosis is now less expensive than the traditional thermal distillation process and is becoming the process of choice for desalination plants worldwide.

Before the latest membranes came out, the majority of desalination plants relied on thermal distillation, a process whereby saline water is heated to produce water vapor, which is then condensed to produce freshwater. In the reverse osmosis process, water is forced through a series of membranes that separate out salt, minerals and marine organisms. Because reverse osmosis relies on pressure rather than heat, it requires 15 percent less energy than the distillation process, according to Heather Cooley, a research associate with Oakland, Calif., nonprofit Pacific Institute’s water and sustainability program.

During recent tests at a U.S. Navy facility at Port Hueneme, Calif., energy costs were reduced even further with plant designs that included efficient energy-recovery systems, says Tom Seacord of Boise, Idaho-based Carollo Engineers, a member of the Affordable Desalination Collaboration (ADC). A group of utility companies, engineers, equipment manufacturers and government agencies, ADC says it was able to assemble a system using off-the-shelf technology that produced 1,000 gallons of freshwater with just six kilowatt-hours of electricity.

Potential problems

There are a number of potential environmental impacts — beyond energy concerns — associated with coastal desalination plants. The California Coastal Commission, which will have to approve all plans for the proposed desalination plants along California’s coast, says it is well aware of the potential impacts and plans to require proper study of them before granting permits to any of the plants.

The commission stated in a 2004 report that desalination plants were almost certainly coming to California’s coast, and the plants would be required to undergo a series of environmental impact tests throughout the permitting process. The report also included detailed information on potential problems associated with desalination plants.

The waste product created by the desalination process is a briny solution that is twice as salty as the ocean water it comes from. A desalination plant produces 50 million gallons of freshwater for every 100 million gallons of ocean water it takes in, according to Cooley, co-author of a 2006 report entitled “Desalination, with a Grain of Salt: A California Perspective.” Typically, the 50 million gallons of brine created by the desalination process are dumped back into the ocean.

Though there have been some early lab tests, the effect of the brine on a real marine ecosystem has yet to be analyzed.

“The ocean is not like a fish tank in the lab, where the organisms can’t escape,” Cooley explains. “For all we know, in the real world they might just leave the area entirely, causing a drastic change to the coastal ecosystem.”

The membranes used in reverse osmosis — the most commonly employed desalination technique — also pose another, more direct, threat to marine organisms. Organisms can either be impinged on the initial membranes and killed, or sucked through a series of other membranes, dying along the way.

With recent advancements in nanotechnology and ongoing research at Sandia National Laboratories, which is funded by the U.S. government, the membranes are likely to become more effective, less costly and more widespread over the next few years. But their effect on marine life has not been studied in depth.

Duking it out over desalination dollars
Still, the threat of multiple environmental impacts (and associated impact reports) has not kept companies from investing in California’s fledgling desalination industry. Confidence in the potential of desalination was bolstered in May 2007 when a market research report produced by analysts at Frost & Sullivan stated that advances in technologies related to desalination and an increased demand for clean water would positively impact desalination technology’s market potential in the next five to seven years.

GE Water and Process Technologies, a subsidiary of General Electric (NYSE: GE), is already advertising desalination in the United States with slick, expensive ads that show deep-sea fishermen pulling nets full of bottled water out of the ocean and celebrating. The company recently announced an investment in a 50- million-gallon-a-day desalination plant being built in Carlsbad, Calif., by Poseidon Resources Corp., a company that specializes in developing, financing and managing water infrastructure projects, primarily seawater desalination and water treatment plants.

The $270 million desalination plant is on schedule to be constructed and in operation as early as 2009, provided it makes it through the California Coastal Commission’s permitting process, which Cooley says will be the primary stumbling block for all of the proposed plants. In an announcement of its involvement with the desalination plant, GE Water called it a viable long-term investment, though the company’s spokespeople declined to discuss the amount of the company’s investment.

GE Water has more riding on the Carlsbad plant than its investment in the plant’s completion. Following a 16-month pilot test, Poseidon announced it will use GE’s “ecomagination-certified” ZeeWeed ultrafiltration (UF) technology in the plant. When and if the plant becomes operational, it would be the largest seawater desalination plant in the world to use UF membranes for pretreatment — an important proof of GE’s technology that could position it very well to dominate a new market in California.

To do so, GE will have to beat out its primary rival in the membrane business, The Dow Chemical Co. (NYSE: DOW). Dow’s FilmTec membranes, produced by the FilmTec Corp., a subsidiary of Dow, were used in the Affordable Desalination Collaboration’s tests, which managed to create the most energy-efficient reverse osmosis system to date.

Dow also licensed a patent-pending technology in 2006 that could solve the brine problem by diverting salt and mineral supplies created as byproducts of the reverse osmosis process to eventually create gypsum, which can be sold to the building industry. The technology, called Zero Discharge Desalination (ZDD), was developed at the University of South Carolina and not only reduces or eliminates the briny discharge associated with desalination, but reportedly increases the amount of freshwater produced. Dow has not yet commercialized the ZDD process, but it says is looking to do so in the next few years, according to statements released by the company.

Meanwhile, Dow’s FilmTec membranes are currently being employed in the world’s largest desalination plant in Israel, the birthplace of desalination. The plant is designed to produce a total of 330 million gallons of water per day, providing freshwater to approximately 15 percent of Israeli households. Dow claims its FilmTec membranes have helped to decrease the cost of reverse osmosis desalination threefold in the past ten years.

While demonstrated success in the Middle East, where desalination has been a viable source of freshwater for some time, might seem like an indisputable stamp of approval, Cooley cautions against comparing U.S. coastal desalination plants and Middle East plants too closely. “It’s a good indication that the technology works,” Cooley explains, “but it’s not a simple case of what works there will work here.

Freshwater is far more scarce in the Middle East, so the need is greater,” she continues. “There is also a ready supply of cheap fuel, so the cost of getting the freshwater to residents is negligible. Plus, the environmental regulations in the Middle East tend to be less stringent than they are in the U.S.”

In order to create a U.S. market for their membranes, both Dow and GE have a strong interest in seeing the currently proposed U.S. plants (in California, Florida and Texas) get off the ground. What they don’t want to see is another Tampa Bay fiasco.

Poseidon Resources Corp., the company leading the Carlsbad plant proposal — as well as a proposed 50-million-gallon-a-day plant for Huntington Beach — may have learned from its mistakes, but the well-documented failures of the Tampa Bay plant are largely responsible for a slowdown in American interest in desalination that has only recently turned around, according to Frost & Sullivan research analyst Rebecca Bright, who contributed to the firm’s recent market research report.

The Tampa plant stands as a lesson to developers in what not to do when pursuing desalination: namely, cut corners. Thanks to the choice of cheap materials and inadequate study of the development area, the project sent two contract engineers into bankruptcy, fell six years behind schedule and went close to $40 million over budget.

In the midst of it all, Tampa Bay Water — the local utility — bought Poseidon out of the project and paid for the remediation needed to bring the plant on line. Tampa Bay is now set to become the largest fully operational desalination plant in the United States by 2008.

Conservation vs. desalination
When Cooley and her colleagues at the Pacific Institute compiled their report in 2005, there were 21 plants proposed in California. Now Cooley says two have been completely killed and two are on hold, bringing the list to 17 proposed plants for 16 different sites. With the recent GE investment, the Carlsbad plant is the closest to completion, but even with recent technological advancements and cost reductions, Cooley says desalination’s time has not yet come.

“There has not been any detailed analysis done on any particular plant, and the cost is still relatively high compared to various conservation measures that can be implemented to optimize currently available freshwater stores,” Cooley says. She adds that while improvements in membrane performance and energy efficiency may make desalination more feasible, rising fuel and construction costs still make it relatively expensive.

At the end of the day, Cooley cautions against wasting water now with the idea that there’s an endless supply in the ocean.

“We like to think of it in terms of a leaky bucket,” she says. “What’s the more logical solution, to just add more water, or to plug the holes?”