News

Troubled desal plant on verge of final test

By Craig Pittman
Published October 16, 2007

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CLEARWATER - Tampa Bay Water's perpetually troubled desalination plant may at last be free of its operational woes, an official from the company repairing the plant told the utility's board Monday.

"I sometimes say that this plant has ghosts with it," Kent Turner of American Water Pridesa told the board. "I think the ghosts are gone."

Since the start of a test run that began Oct. 2, Turner said, the $158-million plant has been producing its capacity of 25-million gallons of water every day.

If this phase, known as a "run-in," continues without a major glitch, the company will end it Thursday, take a two-week break and begin the plant's formal acceptance test in early November, Turner said.

If the plant passes that test, then it will be ready to begin full-fledged operation, he said.

The Apollo Beach plant, the largest in the United States, was supposed to be ready in 2003, but it flunked its acceptance test, and the company that built it went bankrupt. Turner's company, hired in 2004 to fix the plant, has missed several deadlines to complete the $29-million job.

Beginning in January, Tampa Bay Water, the state's largest regional wholesale utility, will have to begin drastically scaling back the amount of water it pumps out of the aquifer.

To replace the groundwater, the utility has turned toward both desal and pulling water out of the area's rivers. But the drought that has plagued the area for the past two years has left the rivers running so low thatsometimes the utility cannot take any water from one.

Even with the desal plant, utility senior manager Alison Adams said, the utility will be cutting it close in staying within its new pumping limit - and then is likely to make it only if there is a regular rainfall.

The desal plant was designed to take 40-million gallons of seawater a day from Tampa Bay and turn it into 25-million gallons of drinking water. But the plant has been plagued by problems, including Asian green mussels that clogged water intakes and pumps that rusted prematurely.

Turner has said that the fate of the desal industry worldwide hinges on the success of the Apollo Beach plant. With so much riding on the plant's success, the German-Spanish consortium agreed Monday to give Tampa Bay Water a $600,000 price break to settle its claims on the repeated project delays.

Also Monday, the utility voted to pay departing general manager Jerry Maxwell $30,000 to act as a consultant for a year to whomever is his replacement. Maxwell is retiring in February.

[Last modified October 16, 2007, 07:23:49]