Desalination no panacea for Calif. water woes

MARINA, Calif. (AP) — In the Central California coastal town of Marina, a $7 million desalination plant that can turn salty ocean waves into fresh drinking water sits idle behind rusty, locked doors, shuttered by water officials because rising energy costs made the plant too expensive.

Far to the north in well-heeled Marin County, plans were scrapped for a desalination facility despite two decades of planning and millions of dollars spent on a pilot plant.

Squeezing salt from the ocean to make clean drinking water is a worldwide phenomenon that has been embraced in thirsty California, with its cycles of drought and growing population. There are currently 17 desalination proposals in the state, concentrated along the Pacific where people are plentiful and fresh water is not.

But many projects have been stymied by skyrocketing construction costs, huge energy requirements for running plants, regulatory delays and legal challenges over environmental impacts on marine life. Only one small plant along Monterey Bay is pumping out any drinking water.

From Marin County to San Diego, some water districts are asking themselves: How much are we willing to pay for this new water?

"We found that our demand for water had dropped so much since the time we started exploring desalination, we didn't need the water," said Libby Pischel, a spokeswoman for the Marin Municipal Water District. "Right now, conservation costs less than desalination."

Desalination plants can take water from the ocean or drill down and grab the less salty, brackish water from seaside aquifers. Because of their potential impacts to marine life, the California Coastal Commission reviews each project case-by-case.

There was great fanfare in 2009 when the last regulatory hurdle was cleared to build the Western Hemisphere's largest desalination plant in Carlsbad, north of San Diego.

At the time, it was proposed that the $320 million project would suck in 100 million gallons of seawater and be capable of producing 50 million gallons of drinking water a day. It was expected to come online by this year.

Since then, the plant owner, Poseidon Resources LLC, has been negotiating a water purchase agreement and is close to clinching a 30-year deal with the San Diego County Water Authority, a wholesaler to cities and agencies that provide water to 3.1 million people.

The compact is essential for Poseidon to obtain financing to build what has become a $900 million project, which includes the seaside plant and a 10-mile pipeline. The San Diego agency hopes the plant opens in 2016 and anticipates desalination will account for 7 percent of the region's supply in 2020. It estimates the cost is comparable to other new, local sources of drinking water, such as treated toilet water or briny groundwater.

Interest is still high, but "people are realizing that desalination isn't a magic fix to the state's water issues," said coastal commission water expert Tom Luster.

Water can be de-salted in different ways. Poseidon's project will use reverse osmosis. Other plants shoot ocean or brackish water at high pressure through salt-removing membrane filters. Because pumps must be used constantly to move massive amounts of water through filters, these facilities are extremely energy intensive.

Also, in many cases, desalinated water is pricier than importing water the old-fashioned way — through pipes and tunnels. And it is cheaper to focus on conservation when possible: new technologies like low-flow toilets and stricter zoning laws that require less water-intensive landscaping have helped curb demand in communities throughout the state.

Desalination has been around for years in Saudi Arabia, other Arab Gulf states and Israel, which last year approved the construction of a fifth desalination plant. The hope is that the five plants together will supply 75 percent of the country's drinking water by 2013.

The process also has helped ease thirst in places such as Australia, Spain and Singapore. Experts say it has been slower to catch on in the United States, mainly because companies face tougher rules on where they can build plants and must endure longer environmental reviews. Poseidon, for example, is facing opposition by environmental groups over its proposed plans to build another facility in Huntington Beach. The company has received several permits for the Orange County project, but still needs approval from the coastal commission.

About six miles south of the ghost desalination plant in Marina, the mechanical whir coming from a nondescript cinderblock building in a Sand City industrial park is the only evidence that the state's sole operating municipal desalination plant is at work.

The $14 million facility has the ability to produce up to 600,000 gallons a day of drinkable water for the town of about 340 people. Sand City's plant now produces half that amount each day; a third is used by the city with the rest sent elsewhere in Monterey County.

City leaders hoped to develop the former military town into an artsy, Bohemian beachside destination. With no other possible water options, they turned to desalination. "We're just like Saudi Arabia. There's nowhere else to get water and we want to develop," said Richard Simonitch, the city's civil engineer.

It's not that easy in Monterey Peninsula, where regional water use from development has exceeded its yearly rainfall replenishment and desalination is one of the only options available.

Proposals have been fraught with mistakes, political infighting and scandal, and have cost Monterey area ratepayers tens of millions of dollars.

Earlier this year, state utilities regulators rejected Monterey County's desalination plan, citing problems with environmental review. The plan was also mired in alleged corruption by a county water official, who now faces criminal charges.

Still, desalination will be an important part of the Central Coast's future: the state ordered water suppliers to stop drawing from the Carmel River, its main source of the precious resource, starting in 2017. Even officials in Marina, with its shuttered plant, see a future in which demand will require their current desalination plant to resume operation and are planning another, larger plant to help make up for the expected water loss.

"Water politics in Monterey County is a blood sport," said Jim Heitzman, general manager of the Marina Coast Water District.

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Chang reported from Los Angeles; Elliott Spagat in San Diego contributed to this report. Jason Dearen can be reached on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/JHDearen.

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Rover probes role water may have played on Mars

The arm of NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity is seen extended toward a light-toned rock, ''Tisdale 2'', during the 2,695th Martian day, or ''sol'', of the rover's work on Mars, in this picture taken by the rover's front hazard-avoidance camera on August 23, 2011. The rock, ''Tisdale 2'', is about 12 inches (30 cm) tall. The rover used two instruments on the robotic arm, the microscopic imager and the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer, to examine Tisdale 2. In this image, the turret at the end of the arm is positioned so that the microscopic imager is facing the rock.

Credit: Reuters/NASA/JPL-Caltech/Handout

By Irene Klotz

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida | Fri Sep 2, 2011 8:13am EDT

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - NASA's Mars rover Opportunity is uncovering new details about the role water may have played on what is now a cold, dry planet, scientists said on Thursday.

Opportunity is one of two small rovers that landed on opposite sides of Mars in January 2004 for what were expected to be 90-day studies to look for signs of the past presence of water on the planet. Water is believed to be a key ingredient for life.

Sister probe Spirit succumbed to the harsh Martian environment last year, leaving Opportunity to go solo until the U.S. space agency's next rover, Curiosity, arrives in August 2012.

Opportunity originally touched down near the equator in an area called Meridiani Planum and almost immediately discovered evidence the plain was once covered by shallow, salty and highly acidic water. It later spent two years studying exposed bedrock and other features in a small crater named Victoria.

At a new destination, a 14-mile- (22-km) wide crater named Endeavour, Opportunity has discovered a different type of terrain with a chemical makeup unlike anything previously encountered.

"We may soon be able to study clay minerals and rock types that formed in low-acid, wet conditions, which may tell us more about a potentially habitable environment," Dave Lavery, who oversees the Mars Exploration Rovers program at NASA headquarters in Washington, told reporters during a conference call.

The first rock probed by Opportunity at Endeavour Crater shows very high levels of zinc, which on Earth is commonly found in rocks that have been exposed to hot water, such as thermal springs.

"This rock doesn't look like anything else we've ever seen before," said Cornell University planetary scientist Steve Squyres, the lead rover scientist. "We are thinking very hard over what this means."

The rock is basically basalt, a common volcanic rock, which was cemented together from fragments of other rocks shattered by an impact, for example.

"We may be dealing with a situation where water has percolated or flowed -- somehow moved through these rocks, maybe as vapor, maybe as liquid, don't know yet -- but has enhanced the zinc concentration in the rock to levels far in excess of anything that we have seen on Mars before," Squyres said.

Scientists plan to look for other zinc-rich rocks to see if the concentrations are the same, as well as probe for other minerals likewise tied to water.

Opportunity is on the hunt for bedrock, in particular, which is rock that has not been moved by impacts or other processes.

"We've got some strange stuff going on, but we're not ready to draw any firm conclusions," Squyres said.

(Editing by Tom Brown and Peter Cooney)

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Study: Water vapor may help 'flatten global warming trend'

Why the Earth's surface temperature hasn't warmed as expected over the past decade continues to be a puzzle for scientists. One study out earlier this month theorized that the Earth's climate may be less sensitive to greenhouse gases than currently assumed.Another surprising factor could be the amount of water vapor way up in the stratosphere, according to a new study out Thursday in the journal Science.

Water vapor, a potent, natural greenhouse gas that absorbs sunlight and re-emits heat, is "a wild card" of global warming, says the paper's lead author, senior scientist Susan Solomon of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Boulder, Colo. Solomon was also a co-chair of one of the groups within the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that put out the definitive forecast of global warming in 2007.

In the Science paper, Solomon and her colleagues found that a drop in the concentration of water vapor in the stratosphere "very likely made substantial contributions to the flattening of the global warming trend since about 2000."

While climate warming is continuing — the decade of 2000 to 2009 was the hottest on record worldwide — the increase in temperatures was not as rapid as in the 1990s.

The stratosphere is the layer of the atmosphere just above the troposphere, which is the layer of air here at the planet's surface. (The troposphere goes from the surface up to about 8 miles, and the stratosphere is from about 8 to 30 miles above the surface.)

The decline in water vapor in the stratosphere slowed the rate of surface warming by about 25%, compared to that which would have occurred due to carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, notes the study. Specifically, the planet should have warmed 0.25 degree F during the 2000s, but because of the influence of the water vapor, it rose just 0.18 degree F.

"We call this the 10/10/10 paper," says Solomon. "10 miles above your head, there is 10% less water vapor than there was 10 years ago."

Why did the water vapor decrease? "We really don't know," says Solomon, "We don't have enough information yet."

The findings are "surprising," says Bill Randel, an atmospheric chemist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, who was not part of the study. He said it was surprising how big an effect such a very little change in stratospheric water vapor has had on the surface climate.

These fluctuations in water vapor could be part of a feedback loop. Although it's known that water vapor in the troposphere increases as the climate warms — and is a major climate feedback that is well simulated in global climate models — in sharp contrast, models do a poor job of simulating water vapor in the stratosphere, according to the paper.

But Solomon points out this isn't an indication that predictions on global warming are overstated: "This doesn't mean there isn't global warming," notes Solomon. "There's no significant debate that it is warmer now than it was 100 years ago, due to anthropogenic (man-made) greenhouse gases."

And how will this water vapor affect future global warming? "We really don't know the answer to this," says Solomon. "If the water changes are due to the specific way the sea-surface temperature pattern looks right now, then it may well not be linked to the overall warming. It could just be a source of variability from one decade to another as the ocean pattern slowly changes. Or it could be linked to the overall warming of the tropics, in which case it could continue to 'put the brakes on.' Only time will tell, and more data."

Contributing: Associated Press

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