- LOS ANGELES -- Peter
MacLaggan turns the small tap and carefully fills the plastic cup with
a clear liquid that is precious and scarce. Holding it up to the light,
he looks proud of what he has done.
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- "This may not be the entire solution, but it is
part of the solution," says the man from Poseidon Resources.
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- The problem is drinking water, and how California is
going to provide enough of it for the people who live here. The clear liquid
in the plastic cup is water; but not ordinary water. Mr MacLaggan's water
is filtered seawater, desalinated to make it safe for human consumption.
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- Some 90% of California's water is piped more than 250
miles to its consumers, the majority of it from the Colorado River. But
with that supply endangered by declining levels, rising costs and contamination
- and with memories still fresh of the droughts of the 1970s and 1980s
- attention is turning to alternative sources.
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- Eighteen desalination plants are under consideration
in California, offering a possible way out of the state's seemingly inexorable
water crisis.
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- "God never intended southern California to be anything
but desert. Man has made it what it is," the Californian essayist
and activist Carey McWilliams quoted a visitor to the state saying in 1946.
That sense of foreboding and impermanence infused much of the state's dealings
with its scarcest resource during the last century.
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- And as with any resource that is in short supply, water
has offered the unscrupulous unrivalled opportunities to make money. California's
great answer to the threat of drought in the early part of the last century
was the Owens Valley project, a 233-mile aqueduct from the Owens river
to Los Angeles and the San Fernando valley. But the scheme was actually
designed to make money for a handful of powerful backers; their exploits
formed the basis of Roman Polanski's 1974 film Chinatown.
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- The latest plans for California's future have caused
rows that will be familiar from Britain's recent past. In an echo of the
controversies surrounding the privatisation of UK water utilities, opponents
of desalination are concerned about handing over a natural resource to
private companies which will be subject to the vagaries of market forces.
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- Some allege that the private companies intend to get
their hands on public subsidies to process and sell what is seen by many
as a public resource.
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- There are also fears about the presence of foreign-owned
companies in the sector.
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- "The most troubling thing about this is the notion
that private venture capitalists can own and control these plants that
invest in the conversion of a public resource into a private resource,"
said Mark Massara, the director of coastal programmes for the environmental
pressure group the Sierra Club.
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- "Did we know it was going to be this controversial?"
asked Mr MacLaggan, standing next to the desalination machinery. "I
don't know," he said wearily.
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- Inside the site's temporary office, Mr MacLaggan and
his team keep a fishtank. The sea urchins, rays and other marine life it
contains are testing the safety of the system by swimming in the waste
water from the desalination process before it is pumped back into the sea.
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- Mr MacLaggan dismisses concerns about the effects of
dumping waste water back in the sea. Explaining that it goes through several
processes to reach acceptable saline levels, he points to the inhabitants
of the tank.
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- "They're pretty happy. The urchins had some babies,
which is a very good sign."
-
- The water used at the small Poseidon prototype plant
in Carlsbad, San Diego County, comes from the neighbouring Encina power
station.
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- It is drawn from the sea and serves as a cooling agent
in the power station. Once used, it is piped to the desalination plant
where it undergoes a four-stage filtration process, passing through coarse
and fine sand, a cartridge filter and finally reverse osmosis.
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- The final stage removes the salt from the water by forcing
it through a membrane punctured with tiny holes which, Mr MacLaggan says,
are "half a million times smaller than the width of a human hair".
-
- But opponents of the process question not only the outflow
of waste water but the safety of the intake.
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- "It may harm the area where you suck in water,"
says Jim Metropulos, a lawyer for the Sierra Club. "There are concerns
about fish being sucked in."
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- His doubts go beyond the purely environmental to address
concerns about commerce and big business.
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- "Is there a need for desalinated water?" he
asks. "If you build these plants, they need to be big and to produce
a lot of water. Water supplies could then be enlarged, and would then have
to be sold.
-
- "Would expanded supply lead to expanded population
growth in areas that are already facing population growth? Are we meeting
existing supply needs, or are we going to facilitate growth?"
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- Demand
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- The Carlsbad plant would be the biggest in the world,
producing 50m gallons of water a day, enough to provide water for 300,000
people, and to satisfy 9% of the demand for water in San Diego County.
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- Mr MacLaggan is caustic when asked for his opinion of
opposition to the scheme. "If you scratch the surface, one of the
things that they're trying to do is limit the growth of southern California,"
he said.
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- "In 10 years' time, California will have an additional
population equivalent to a state the size of Massachusetts. We have a couple
of choices: we can do nothing and hope that we start having fewer babies;
or we can plan for the future."
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- Mr Massaras counters: "There is no crisis in existing
communities. It's all about making a profit."
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- Mr Massaras also questions the motives of politicians
eager to encourage desalination plants. "A lot of times, politicians
will seize decision-making control over a process and improvements will
be made to help their backers," he said.
-
- Critics point to California's experience when the energy
sector was deregulated in the state. Energy prices leaped as private companies,
including most notably Enron, traded in energy costs.
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- But Mr MacLaggan insists that the price of his company's
water will be fixed and linked to inflation for 30 years.
-
- Recently California's coastal commission began formal
consideration of a report thought to be hostile to the plans for more desalination
plants. If adopted, it will carry considerable weight with state legislators
and could mark an end to plans to convert the Pacific Ocean into an acceptable
beverage.
-
- For Mr Massaras this would not be a bad thing. "We're
not anti-desalination, and we have supported other plans when the circumstance
have been right," he said.
-
- "But desalination represents a real challenge and
a dangerous threat to the quality of life of coastal region communities."
-
- And, he adds, one important environmental aim has been
forgotten: "In all the cheerleading around desalination, nobody has
mentioned conserving water."
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004 http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1190598,00.html
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