In Search of a Drought-Proof Source - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 287

other pollutants than ocean water, desalting it requires less power and fewer membranes
than ocean desal and is therefore less expensive. The Yuma plant was built to reduce
the salts in the Colorado River water that the United States is obliged by treaty to de-
liver to Mexico. It took twenty years and $250 million to build the plant, but thanks to
design flaws and changing environmental circumstances, it has been idled since 1993.
When I visited Yuma in the spring of 2007, the plant had just undergone a $30 million
upgrade and was being run at 10 percent of capacity. It may be used for its original pur-
pose in the future, but at present the Yuma desalter is run as the nation's only full-scale
RO research-and-testing facility, to help answer the question, is desal the magical tool
that will solve the world's quest for a drought-proof supply of water?
Saudi Arabia, where temperatures hover at 130 degrees in the desert, and the popu-
lation is rising to an expected 36.4 million by 2020, once considered towing an iceberg
from Antarctica or filling oil tankers with water from Norway to slake its people's thirst.
But as prices and technology have improved, the Saudis have become the world's largest
users of desalination, with twenty-eight plants supplying 70 percent of the kingdom's
water. In April 2009, King Abdullah pushed a button to start up the world's largest de-
salter: the $3.4 billion Shoaiba Desalination Plant, in Jubail Industrial City, on the Per-
sian Gulf, which produces eight hundred thousand cubic meters of water a year and
generates electricity for 1.5 million people. But the nation's desal plants consume 1.5
million barrels of oil a day, and the Saudi government plans to open the world's largest
solar-powered desal plant in 2012.
One lesson learned in Saudi Arabia is that the high cost of a desalter can be reduced
when built next to a coastal power plant, which typically uses over a million gallons of
seawater a day and can supply relatively cheap electricity. This was the theory behind
choosing Tampa, Florida, as the site for the largest desalination plant outside the Middle
East.
In 1998, twenty local governments in Florida, locked in a fierce competition over
dwindling groundwater supplies, put their differences aside and established Tampa Bay
Water (TBW). It is now the largest water wholesaler in the state, serving over 2.5 mil-
lion people. In 1999, TBW approved a plan to construct a large desalination plant at
Apollo Beach. The company driving this plan was a small firm called Poseidon Re-
sources Corp., based in Stamford, Connecticut. Poseidon and its partner, the engineer-
ing giant Stone and Webster, estimated the desalination plant would cost $110 million
to build and would produce water costing $677 an acre-foot.
Walter Winrow , Poseidon's cofounder and president, was an engineer who had spent
most of his career working on power projects around the world for GE. “I travel a bit,”
he said blandly, by which he meant he was in near-constant motion, monitoring desal