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Former Senator Barbara Boxer (D) and former Assembly Speaker Fabian Núñez (D) have called on the state’s leadership to finally approve the proposed Huntington Beach desalination project. Both Boxer and Nunez are currently serving as consultants for the Poseidon Water project.
The proposed project would produce 56,000-acre-feet per (50 million gallons per day) of locally controlled, drought-proof drinking water thereby reducing Southern California’s Orange County’s need to import water from Northern California and the Colorado River. The project would be the first large-scale water treatment plant in California to be 100 percent carbon neutral. Additionally, Poseidon Water, the plant’s developer, has also proposed a plan to offer funding to restore and maintain the nearby Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve. The plan would provide much-needed funding for the restoration and maintenance of one of California’s last remaining large-scale wetlands.
“The Huntington Beach desalination project is a positive and critical response to the severe impacts of climate change in California,” said Boxer. “The five-year drought that we experienced between 2012 and 2016 caused great suffering and I saw it first hand; it turned our farmers against our fishermen and caused anxiety for all our families. We should and must respond in an environmentally sound way, not with damaging large dams or importing more water.”
“One year of good rainfall doesn’t mean we can sit back and not prepare for our future, climate change, and the next drought,” said Núñez. “The Huntington Beach desalination project will be the most technologically-advanced, environmentally-friendly desalination plant in the world. This is what makes California beautiful – we use our ingenuity and innovation to solve problems and protect our planet.”
The Huntington Beach desalination project would utilize 1mm (1/25th inch) slot width seawater intake screens — approximately the thickness of a credit card — and have a through-screen water velocity of less than 0.5 feet per second in an open-ocean setting. State-of-the-art diffuser technology would also be used to ensure that the salinity level in the plant’s seawater discharge meets the State Water Board’s new, stringent receiving water quality requirements. These technologies would be used to help ensure the protection of marine life.
But critics say desalination plants consume excessive amounts of energy and harm the marine environment thereby generating some of the most expensive drinking water available. Also at issue are the unresolved questions of how the desalination plants would pull the seawater from the Pacific, and how they would dispose of the brine — twice as salty as the ocean — left over from the desalination process.
According to a December 2016 Los Angeles Times’ article, Poseidon has agreed to install fine-mesh screens to keep fish out of the intake pipe. It also says it will attach diffusing equipment to the end of the outfall to prevent the dense brine effluent from falling to the ocean floor in a deadly mass.
The next step in the approval process will be at the California State Lands Commission in August, followed by a hearing at the Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board, and finally, the California Coastal Commission. And, though the plant is one of President Trump’s top 50 priority projects in the country, critics note that none of the regulatory agencies overseeing the plant’s construction are federal agencies; the plant’s construction would be overseen by California regulatory agencies.
“As a long-time proponent of desalination, who wrote the desalination provisions in the last federal water bill in 2016, I urge all the state administrative agencies to move forward on the Huntington Beach proposal that has been languishing for over a decade, resulting in nearly 220 billion gallons of lost water,” said Boxer. “I am proud to team up with Fabian, the co-author of California’s climate change legislation, to encourage a smart, state-of-the-art plant that responds to one of the most pressing issues of our time. Combined with the fact that it is carbon neutral and ensures the continued beauty of the Bolsa Chica wetlands, support of this project should be a no-brainer.”
“As someone who has always fought to protect the environment, I urge the state to quickly approve this project,” said Núñez. “Not only do we need to find new sources of locally controlled water, we need to show our residents that we want projects that make sense, like the Huntington Beach desalination facility.”
