As water use mounts, all eyes on bay area desal plant
By ROBERT TRIGAUX
Published March 29, 2004
An image of the globe rotates behind Tampa Bay Water chief Jerry Maxwell as he tells an international audience of water experts that the world has plenty of H2O.
People nod when Maxwell notes most of it is too salty. And the bulk of the small reserve of fresh water is inaccessible as polar ice or increasingly polluted by a few billion human inhabitants.
"Regions with the greatest water shortage often have the highest population growth," said Maxwell, who spoke in Tampa last week at a meeting of the International Desalination Association. Some 1,000 desalination plants produce water for human consumption in 45 countries. Yet it is not nearly enough.
What's a thirsty planet to do?
For better or worse, Maxwell is emerging as one of the country's great defenders of desalination - the process of creating drinkable water from salt water. It's not a title Maxwell really anticipated. It was thrust on him after Tampa Bay Water, a public agency charged with managing the area's water resources, took control of the troubled desalination plant built along the brackish waters of Tampa Bay.
The plant is the largest seawater desalination facility in the United States. Maxwell's agency reluctantly acquired the facility after two companies involved in its construction and operation filed for bankruptcy.
The plant started producing water last year and for one week even achieved its goal of producing 25-million gallons of water a day. But now the plant faces ongoing startup problems with clogged filters. Membranes meant to filter salt are getting plugged up with other impurities, requiring expensive and frequent cleaning.
Now all eyes are on Maxwell to see how much time - and money - it will take to fix the desalination plant. Typical of complex, large-scale engineering projects gone awry, the Tampa facility suffers from finger-pointing by the various building and design companies eager to place the blame elsewhere. Whatever the solution, the price to fix the Tampa facility looks likely to add $8-million, and possibly up to $20-million, to the plant's costs.
Those extra expenses are critical. From the start, the price-per-gallon of producing drinkable water from saltwater hovered on the high end of acceptable. Of course, desalination prices soon will start looking much more attractive. Improved technology will trim the cost of filtering seawater. And the price of fresh water drawn from traditional sources in Central Florida will continue to rise as greater demand confronts an increasingly limited supply.
(To help capture more groundwater and rainfall, Tampa Bay Water also is involved in constructing a 15-billion-gallon reservoir in Hillsborough County.)
As many as two dozen proposed U.S. desalination projects are closely watching the Tampa Bay facility for signs of financial and operational success. Near Jacksonville, St. Johns River Water Management District officials are looking at several sites as possible locations for a saltwater desalination plant.
But the vast majority of new "desal" projects are in California, where water demand in the country's most populous state long ago outstripped its historical dependence on the overtaxed Colorado River.
"Within the water industry, (the Tampa plant) was seen as a groundbreaking development that would throw open the U.S. market for private desalination efforts," says a Los Angeles Times story this month that ran with the headline, "A wave of desalination proposals."
Corporate involvement in building desalination plants offers thirsty metro areas the chance to tap private capital to help build expensive facilities and to share the risks of ownership and operation. It also opens up metro areas, as the Tampa Bay region has discovered, to the potential headaches of companies going bankrupt or failing to deliver a service on time and on budget.
Of special interest to California water officials is the role of Poseidon Resources, the Stamford, Conn., company that initially developed the Tampa desalination plant.
Poseidon now is aggressively pushing to secure desalination contracts in California. It has proposed building two ocean desalination plants, each one nearly twice the capacity of the Tampa Bay plant.
To fix the Tampa Bay desal plant, Maxwell said three groups of companies are looking at the facility and will offer competing solutions. They are American Water Services, which has partnered with sister company Pridesa; Ionics and Montgomery Watson Harza; and France's Veolia Water (formerly U.S. Filter).
Pilot tests at the plant will occur next month. Formal proposals from these companies will be due to Tampa Bay Water by mid July. A final decision will be made by Aug. 30, Maxwell said.
The sooner, the better.
By 2020, three states - Florida, California and Texas - will experience a combined population gain of 15-million people and suffer a daily shortage of water approaching 2-trillion gallons, warns Lisa Henthorne, a chemical engineer and a vice president with the International Desalination Association.
Today's U.S. desalination industry still feels like an expensive experiment. But we're on the verge of a major desal boom as the country's aging boomer population starts to pour into this and other Sunbelt states.
