In Search of a Drought-Proof Source - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 289

In 2002, California passed Proposition 50, which provides grants for desalination,
and in 2005 the state's Department of Water Resources underwrote $25 million worth of
desalting projects. About twenty of these have been proposed for the coast, but they are
all waiting to see what happens to Poseidon's latest gamble. If the Carlsbad desalination
plant is built, it will supplant Tampa's as the largest desalter in the western hemisphere.
Carlsbad lies between San Diego and Los Angeles. For the moment, Poseidon's oper-
ation is not much to look at: a wide green lagoon, the old Encina Power Station, a shim-
mering black parking lot, a mobile home, and a long blue contraption that is mostly
tanks, pipes, and valves—a scaled-down version of a reverse-osmosis desalinator.
Peter MacLaggan , the Poseidon senior vice president in charge of the project, looks
like a surfer but speaks like an industrialist. He toured me along the scaled-down desal-
inator: it is about as long as a railway car, begins with a couple of tanks, proceeds to a
panel full of gauges, then to two long white tubes, and ends with a water fountain. It is
essentially a mechanical intestine. Seawater used for cooling the Encina Power Station
is piped through a series of filters to remove impurities. Purifying chemicals are added,
then the water is pumped through reverse-osmosis membranes (the white tubes), which
remove salts and other microscopic impurities. (If the plant is built, it will use a slightly
different process developed in Israel by IDE Technologies.) It takes two gallons of salt
water to make one gallon of “ultra-high-quality freshwater.”
At the end of the tour, MacLaggan offered me a drink at the fountain. I leaned down
and took a sip. What was ocean water about half an hour earlier now tasted like cool,
clean tap water. Actually, it tasted more like the RO-cleansed bottled waters made by
Aquafina and Dasani, which is to say it has been so thoroughly stripped of minerals that
it doesn't have much identifiable character at all. MacLaggan said that the total dissolved
solids in this water are about half that of the existing water supply, which pleases local
biotech and other high-tech industries that rely on superclean water for their manufac-
turing.
It will cost an estimated $450 million to build the full-scale plant in Carlsbad, which
will be housed in a low, square one-story building across the lagoon. The plant will pro-
duce 50 million gallons of drinking water a day, enough for three hundred thousand
residents, or about 8 percent of San Diego County's water consumption in 2020.
In keeping with the new emphasis on “blue,” or water-smart, technology, Poseidon
will offset its footprint by building or remediating 66 acres of wetlands, planting trees,
using efficient pumps, and purchasing renewable energy credits. The company intends
its Carlsbad desalinator to be the first major infrastructure project in California to be
completely carbon-neutral.
MacLaggan had been pushing the plant through the permitting process for five and a
half years, facing down protests, lawsuits, and negative editorials. The Carlsbad project