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Call to Action
As goes Carlsbad, so goes Huntington Beach

By Joe Geever
(Oct. 2007)

Surfrider Foundation and Residents for Responsible Desalination (R4RD) are planning two trips to San Diego to oppose a desalination factory as it's designed—the one proposed by Poseidon Resources for Carlsbad, CA. It may seem odd that R4RD of Huntington Beach would be compelled to oppose permitting a seawater desalting plant in Carlsbad. Carlsbad is not R4RD's town, is it?

R4RD is organizing this public outpouring at the two upcoming hearings on Poseidon's desalination permits in Carlsbad because such permitting will set a precedent (or standard) for state permits on the same or similar design here in Huntington Beach. So, those of us who want to ensure that ocean desalination is designed in a way that avoids the unnecessary killing of precious marine life and adding to the greenhouse gas emissions are going to San Diego.

At the meeting on October 30 the State Land Commission (SLC) will decide whether to grant a multi-decade lease to Poseidon Resources. The SLC is the agency responsible for safeguarding our public-trust resources—both the use of our public lands and the natural life these lands support. We intend to show that permitting a desalination factory to take its “feed water” through open pipes in the ocean or coastal wetlands is a violation of the SLC's duty and unnecessarily destroys fish and other aspects of a healthy and natural marine ecological system.

Like here in Huntington Beach, Poseidon proposes to co-locate its desalting factory in Carlsbad with a local power generating plant. However, unlike the operators of the AES plant in Huntington Beach, NRG Energy, In. (NRG), the electric power generator at Carlsbad, has already voluntarily chosen to transition away from this destructive and antiquated “once-through-cooling” and retrofit their plant with “closed-loop” cooling water. This is a very important difference. AES in Huntington Beach has yet to see the writing on the wall and is still clinging to their outdated once-through cooling process like addicts to their syringe.

Responsible desalination proponents are already demonstrating better intake technology using sub-seafloor intakes to provide seawater for a desalination plant. The Municipal Water District of Orange County (MWDOC) recently completed a pilot project on “horizontal slant wells” that shows ocean water can be adequately delivered from the shallow wells drilled to below the ocean's floor. The pilot greatly exceeded MWDOC's expectations on the amount of water that could be drawn from such wells. More important, the pilot showed that these wells can pre-filter the seawater and avoid complicated and expensive pre-filtration processing, which Poseidon has yet to prove it can do effectively. Long Beach Water Department is also looking at sub-seafloor intakes that are man-made galleries, buried under the surface to mimic the seawater aquifers that MWDOC tapped.

Save these Dates

In October, we R4RD, Surfrider and all the participants we can muster—will present our case beofre the State Lands Commission. Then in mid-November, we also intend to show the California Coastal Commission that Poseidon will violate several portions of the Coastal Act with other aspects of Poseidon's poorly designed and incomplete desalination proposal.

As always, we will emphasize that we are not opposing seawater desalination where it has show to be necessary and has been designed to avoid unnecessary adverse impacts on our precious coast and ocean. We prefer water agencies to prioritize conservation, recycling and capturing fresh water to re0charge groundwater supplies before the flow reaches the ocean. But if they absolutely have to build desalting factories (and we don't believe they do), it has to be done the responsible way.

Joe Geever is the Southern California Manager for the Surfrider Foundation www.surfrider.org

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Oct. 2007

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