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A desalination plant opens that will soon add 25-million gallons a day to the region's water supply.
By CRAIG PITTMAN, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times, published March 18, 2003
APOLLO BEACH -- Former St. Petersburg Mayor David Fischer compared the taste to "Perrier without the fizz."
Jerry Maxwell, executive director of Tampa Bay Water, declared it "bland as hell."
With plastic cups containing their new product, Tampa Bay Water officials on Monday toasted the long-delayed opening of a new $110-million desalination plant. The plant sprang to life at 6:10 p.m. Sunday, when it produced its first 3-million gallons.
The purified water is blended with water from rivers and the underground aquifer, so Tampa Bay Water's 2-million customers likely will notice no difference in the flavor.
By Monday afternoon the plant was producing 8-million gallons a day. It should hit its capacity of 25-million gallons per day by mid April. At that point, it will be the largest desalination plant in the nation.
Water officials savored the moment more than the taste.
"This is a landmark day for our region," said Pinellas County Commissioner Bob Stewart, the chairman of the Tampa Bay Water board.
The result of four years of planning and 18 months of construction, the plant in Hillsborough County isn't much to look at. The building is about the size of a Wal-Mart and requires only a dozen employees to operate. It's dwarfed by its next-door neighbor, Tampa Electric Co.'s gigantic Big Bend power plant.
To reach Monday's landmark, Tampa Bay Water had to overcome legal challenges, survive the bankruptcy of two contractors and correct technical glitches that postponed the plant's opening by three months.
The biggest hurdle, though, was the cost. For that, they needed help from taxpayers.
The science behind desalination is hardly new: Take seawater and force it through tightly woven membranes to screen out the salt. The result is drinkable water and leftover brine.
As a peninsula surrounded by salty seas, Florida might seem an ideal locale for desal. But the cost was prohibitive. As recently as 1995, the estimated price was $8 per 1,000 gallons. By comparison, water pumped from underground cost Tampa Bay utilities no more than $1 per 1,000 gallons.
But slaking the thirst of Tampa Bay's booming population required 200-million gallons of groundwater a day. The heavy demand depleted rivers, shrank lakes and drained swamps.
Widespread outrage over the environmental damage led to the Southwest Florida Water Management District ordering Tampa Bay to make drastic cutbacks in pumping, dropping to 90-million gallons per day by 2008.
That forced utility officials to consider alternatives they had once dismissed, including desal. They found there were ways to make desal less expensive.
Building next to the TECO plant saved money. The power plant uses saltwater from the bay for cooling, so the desal plant could draw 44-million gallons of the discharge rather than building its own intake pipes. And because Tampa Bay is not as salty as the Gulf of Mexico, removing the salt was not as costly.
But what really made the deal work was the Southwest Florida Water Management District. Commonly called Swiftmud, the district agreed to use $85-million of the taxpayers' money to pay 90 percent of the plant's construction cost.
Without Swiftmud's help, the wholesale cost of water from the desal plant would still be $2.49 per thousand gallons over the next 30 years. Swiftmud's tax money will lower that average to $1.88 per thousand gallons.
Although the price will climb above $2 in coming years, that's the cheapest desal water in the world, Maxwell said.
Despite the cost savings it offered, the TECO location turned out to have a couple of disadvantages.
Because TECO burns coal for power, its smokestacks put out so much air pollution that part of the water purification process that normally would be left open had to be covered.
The larger problem, though, was that by hitching the desal plant to TECO, the plant became a target for public anger over TECO's environmental record.
In 2000, when the state's top environmental regulator convened a hearing on desal at East Bay High School, it drew 700 people. Some carried signs: "No Brine in the Bay," "Too Much Salt Kills," and "If I Wanted the Dead Sea, I'd Live in Israel."
Most of the speakers talked as much about TECO's pollution as about what 19-million gallons a day of brine might do to Tampa Bay.
Legal challenges to the plant's permit from the state Department of Environmental Protection failed to derail the project. But they prompted requirements the utility spend $1-million a year monitoring the bay's salinity. If the brine becomes too salty, an alarm system will alert engineers to shut the plant down.
The plan to let the desal plant use some of the 1-billion gallons of salty water the TECO plant uses and disposes every day came from the company that won the contract to build the plant. The company was a partnership between Poseiden Resources of Stamford, Conn., and a Boston engineering firm, Stone & Webster.
Stone & Webster seemed an especially safe choice, since it had extensive experience building desal plants. But a year after it landed the contract, Stone & Webster was in Chapter 11. The company picked to replace it, Covanta Energy, ran into similar financial problems last year, hobbling Tampa Bay Water's attempt to borrow money to build the plant.
Tampa Bay Water wound up buying out Poseiden and Covanta's interest in the plant, but the utility decided against changing contractors again. A Covanta company finished the plant and another will run it for the next three decades.
There was one more surprise: Covanta officials predicted for months that they would finish work early enough to earn a bonus. Instead, they wound up asking for more time and another $1.8-million.
Tampa Bay Water gave Covanta about $500,000 extra and another four months. The new deal included a series of deadlines. Covanta missed two of them, and as a result owes the utility more than 200-million gallons of free water.
Despite the bumpy path, Tampa Bay Water already is planning a second desal plant next to Florida Power's plant by the mouth of the Anclote River north of Tarpon Springs. Swiftmud has not agreed to spend any money on that plant, although Swiftmud chairman Ronnie Duncan said Monday he hopes to continue the partnership with Tampa Bay Water begun with the Apollo Beach plant.
If the Apollo Beach plant succeeds, the biggest desal plant in the nation could get bigger. There is enough room to expand its 25-million gallon a day capacity to 35-million gallons -- but not right now.
"We want to see five years of operation," Maxwell said, "before we even think about any expansion."
-- Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this report.