Water, Water Everywhere!

Mix Salt and Sand, and it Shall Puzzle the Wisest of Men
--Thomas Henry Huxley

HB Closed for Business.
Photo: Courtesy of Keith May and OCWeekly

Desalination: The Solution or a New Problem?
A Conversation with Surfrider's
Southern California Regional Manager John Geever.

By Chris Dixon

On December 15th,at 7PM, the Huntington Beach City Council is set to vote on the contentious issue of establishing a water desalination plant alongside the aging oceanside power plant at the south end of town.

Desalination, or the process of turning salt water into fresh, would seem like a perfect solution to water-starved southern California. But recent articles have run in the Los Angeles Times and the OC Weekly that point out considerable concerns with this project -- and as many as 18 more planned up and down the Southern California coast.

Of real concern to surfers is the fact that these plants might have a negative impact on the surfing environments in towns where they are planned. But in the case of the Huntington Beach plant, even far away Trestles is apparently threatened. This is because the primary destination for HB's water is not Huntington Beach itself, but the gargantuan 14,000 home development planned for Rancho Mission Viejo -- directly upstream of Trestles clean-flowing San Mateo Creek. The HB plant, it seems will be the primary source for this project's water. Not only that, the desalinated water will return to the beach -- both at Doheny and Trestles -- as polluted runoff. Carrying fertilizer, motor oil, antifreeze, brake dust and possibly sewage. The water pumped out at HB could ironically, become a major polluter in south county. Additionally, should the operating plant in nearby Carlsbad be ramped up to high levels, Surfrider Southern California Regional Manager Joe Geever asserts that it could have serious impact on marine life in the area around Tamarack and Terramar.

Interested? Read on.

Chris Dixon: Joe, how did you become interested in the issue of desalination?

Joe Geever: In my previous job, I've worked in fisheries management. We looked at cooling water intakes and the impacts on marine life during that job and because some of the desal proposals that are on the table right now are integrally linked to cooling water intake. It raised some red flags with us.

CD: What are the issues from Surfrider and your perspective with this project?

Water, water, everywhere,
Nor any drop to drink (in HB)
Photo: Courtesy of James Bunoan,
OC Weekly

JG: The big red flag for me is that these cooling water intakes use ocean water to cool their generators. They suck in raw water, run it through the plant one time and then discharge raw water, run it through the plant and discharge the hot water out the other side. And they kill everything that's in the water -- there are two kinds of mortality there: one is adult fish and larger marine life -- it gets pinned against the intake screens and dies from the pressure. They're giant - that plant runs I think up to 520 millions gallons of water a day. And it's under pretty high pressure - so it sucks in animals from a zone around that intake - anything that's swimming by.

CD: It's like getting caught in a vacuum cleaner.

JG: But the more troubling aspect - not that that's not troubling - because it's a pretty huge impact, but any larvae, or fish eggs or any juvenile marine life gets through the screens and goes through the cooling system and gets introduced to real high pressures and temperatures and can't survive. They call that entrainment.

CD: So it goes in with the train of water and comes out cooked.

JG: Right. So, we don't have a real idea of the cumulative impact all these generators are having on the region-wide populations of marine species.

CD: So there hasn't been much research done?

JG: Well, what they do is study these things site by site to see what's being killed at each site. But because we don't really have a good idea of what the total populations of these species are in the oceans to begin with, we don't know what fraction of that population has been affected.

CD: So there's this proposal to build this desalination plant -- will it result in even high draws of water?

JG: Well that's the big question. What's on the table now is that the US EPA is looking at these cooling water intakes and looking for technology that can avoid these cooling water intakes altogether and build what they call cooling towers that cool the water and recycle it through the generator like a radiator. So there's the potential for getting rid of these cooling water intakes and along with that you get the added benefit of these coastal generators don't really need to be located on the coast anymore, so you free up a lot of coastal space where these generators used to be.

There are two problems I see with adding a desal plant to a coastal generator -- one, is that coastal generator is probably pretty outdated and wouldn't survive much longer on their own. But if you add a desal plant to it, it gives it extended life.

CD: So it gives an added incentive to keep a potentially dated and dirty plant open.

JG: Right. Some of the generators that would have been decommissioned will continue to exist with or without cooling towers. We would hope that they would convert to cooling towers but they should probably just be decommissioned.

The other aspect is that we don't really know much about the mortality of sea life associated with these plants. There may be a small fraction of all species that survive this entrainment and if they do, they will be impinged on the reverse osmosis that are used on these desal plants. Even the dissolved salts don't get through these reverse osmosis filters. So we don't understand what's happening with the survival rates, and the other thing is that oftentimes, these plants, especially Huntington, they will only be running one generator even though they have three on site. But when you add a desal plant -- because desal plants take so much electricity to run -- there's a good chance that the generators will be running overtime and running at times when they wouldn't have been otherwise.

CD: Adding more pollution to the air…

JG: Adding more pollution to the air and higher marine life mortality. You're pulling in more water and the more water you pull, the more marine life you kill.

What their response is that pumps are running all the time anyway and that's true, but my counter response is, they shouldn't be. If you're not cooling a generator with this thing, you shouldn't be running it.

CD: Is it run to keep barnacles out of the pipes?

JG: Right, if the water sits there, you have marine life encrusting those pipes. So they keep the water flowing as much as they can to hold down that marine life growing on the pipes. Then the other thing they do is reverse the flow so that you're pumping the hot water out through what used to be your intake. That kills those barnacles.

So marine life mortality for them is just the nature of doing business. That to me is very offensive. Especially when there's other technology out there that could avoid that mortality.

The desal plant itself has said point blank that we don't create any additional marine life mortality above what is happening now just by the generator itself. I think there are some questions as to whether that's true. Just because they've made that kind of conclusion their environmental study didn't document whether that was true or not.

CD: It seems like a no-brainer that anything that did survive the heating surely wouldn't survive a trip to the desal plant. Plus, if it keeps the plant running longer than it normally would, then it's going to kill more.

JG: Right

CD: Isn't there also the issue of what you do with the brine -- the highly concentrated salt water that comes out of this plant?

Tamarack - Site of Carlsbad's Desal Plant, and a Productive Fishery:
Photo Courtesy, Surfline

JG: Yeah, it's a case by case, site specific study and in the case of Huntington, their discharge is in fairly flat, sandy ,not very productive marine habitat. So my sense is that in Huntington, most of what you're doing is adding salt in a fairly low concentration and it dilutes fairly quickly. So there is a zone around that discharge pipe where you're displacing animals that would have normally lived there -- and they're most likely to be replaced by animals that can withstand that salinity. And it's probably mostly scavengers because you're pumping out all that dead marine plankton.

CD: What are some other areas up and down the coast where these are being looked at?

JG: The first is probably the Carlsbad generator. They actually have a pilot facility there that's producing a very small quantity. They're using it to kind of model what this thing would look like on a larger scale.

That one is troublesome because their intake is in a coastal estuary, and you know, we've lost 95 percent of our coastal estuaries in Southern California. So you're having a potential impact on an estuarine habitat where there's very little left.

CD: That's where the warm water jetties area is.

JG: Right the intake jetty is up by Tamarack and the outfall is right there by the power plant. And that outfall is not miles offshore in deep water, it's just going out into the surf zone -- right next to some hard bottom reefs and surf spots that are just south of there. And that hard-bottom rocky reef habitat is very productive for fish.

CD: So there you could really see a heightened impact from the brine.

Possibly. We haven't seen or done any studies on what those impacts are -- but it would certainly be different.

CD: But doesn't the fact that studies haven't been done call into question the need to do this so quickly? If you don't know what the result is, it seems like you're trying to get forgiveness instead of permission, which is always easier if you screw something up.

JG: There are two things about the rush to desal that are disturbing. One is that we really don’t know the answer to a lot of key questions. The other is the need. Because we really haven't taken water reclamation or conservation to the extremes that you could. Our argument is that before you go racing into producing desal water, let's exhaust all these other remedies we have.

Let's do all these water conservation activities so that we're not using as much water. Two things happen with that. One is that you get the supply you're looking for and two our water usage patterns are creating pollution that we want to avoid.

CD: Meaning things like polluted runoff. You increase the runoff because there is more water to flow to the ocean. The desal water becomes additional water that's going to pick up oil, antifreeze, dog crap, fertilizer and brake dust and dump it into the ocean.