Guest essay by Eric Worrall-
![sydney-seawater-desalination-plant[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/sydney-seawater-desalination-plant1.jpg?quality=83)
Here is the story of what happened to those plants.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_desalination_plants_in_Australia
The Gold Coast desalination plant: $1.2 billion / unknown
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Coast_Desalination_Plant
The Perth desalination plant: $387 million / 180GWh / year
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perth_Seawater_Desalination_Plant
The Sydney desalination plant: $1.8 billion / 257 GWh / year
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Desalination_Plant
The Victorian desalination plant: $5.7 billion / unknown
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian_Desalination_Plant
The Southern seawater plant: $955 million / unknown
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Seawater_Desalination_Plant
The Adelaide desalination plant: $1.8 billion / unknown
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adelaide_Desalination_Plant
Naturally, like any government programme, especially *hasty* government programmes, the result has been a public financial disaster. The Gold Coast plant was mothballed a year after construction, and has never worked properly – the initial opening was delayed because fittings rusted up, before the plant was even switched on. The Perth plant is still operating, though in 2008 it was shut down twice because it was causing ocean die off – deoxygenation of Cockburn Sound. The Sydney plant has been criticised over water quality concerns, regarding the proximity of the seawater inlet to the desalination plant to the nearby sewage ocean outfall. Although it is still operating at low capacity, economists have described the project as a billion dollar bungle.
The Victorian plant, the most expensive at $5.7 billion, has been an unmitigated disaster – it finally went fully operational in 2012, and was immediately shut down, because it wasn’t needed. Due to the deal struck with the private operator of the plant, Victorian residential water bills have risen by 64%.
The Southern Seawater plant according to Wikipedia is operational – details on it appear to be a bit sparse, which who knows, might be good news.
The Adelaide desalination plant – OK, maybe that one was a good idea. There is an old saying in Australia, that there are 2 places in the world that ships won’t take on water, Adelaide and Azerbaijan. Before the desalination plant, Adelaide’s only source of potable water was 1500 miles of farm irrigation runoff extracted from the Murray River (I accidentally tried to drink a glass of Adelaide water once – horrible).
So what should California do, if the current drought turns into a megadrought? Frankly I would consider building a pipeline, and importing the water. I doubt you would get enough water to keep current farming practices going, but that applies to desalination as well, at least with current technology. At least pipes are well known technology, they work, and they are already used on a large scale to shift petroleum. Shifting a bit of water should surely be a lot cheaper than trying to desalinate it.
If the pipeline isn’t enough, then you could look at dusting off the old plans for using icebergs as a source of fresh water – we’ve got plenty of Antarctic sea ice to spare. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/science-warms-to-iceberg-harvesting-idea/story-e6frg6so-1226110420439
If you really want to avoid seeing your water bills go up by 64%, while the dams fill with rain, as the poor Victorians in Australia did, or see the plant fittings go rusty before it is even switched on, as the Queenslanders did, at least make sure there is some proper oversight and accountability. And try to avoid building the seawater inlet pipe next to a sewage outlet, as they did in Sydney.
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There is no problem with the water quality in Sydney, the sewerage outfalls don’t affect it.
Droughts come, droughts go, California needs to look at the MWP (dont ask Michael Mann-he wont know what you are talking about) to see what happens when its a little warmer.
Look what Libya did, largest scheme in the world. Until they blew it up.
Adelaide’s desal plant:
The development has been controversial because of its $1.8 billion price tag, delays in construction and the death of a worker in 2010.
In October, SA Water admitted the plant is likely to be mothballed in 2015 after its warranty period expires.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-03-26/desalination-plant-officially-opens/4595640
Eric Worrall, you say “Due to the deal struck with the private operator of the plant, Victorian residential water bills have risen by 64%.” WOW… if that doesn’t get the Progressives in California to start demanding desal plants, nothing will.
If I could be a dictator, I would build a 30m wide by 30m deep channel from the ocean to Death Valley (total length would be a couple hundred miles). Would have great salt water recreation sites and new businesses. Could set up a few desal plants along the route as well. At the end of the channel before getting to Death Valley, could set up a large hydroelectric plant to make use of the 200ft drop in elevation. Turn about 400 sq miles of death valley into a divided flood plain at the base of the hydroelectric plant, flooding about 200sq miles at a time. After the water depth in the first 200sq mile half reaches about a foot in depth, flood the other half and let first half evaporate to dryness. Mine the salt layer that results for metals (Au?) and road salt. The vast amount of water that evaporates from DV would be immense as it is the hottest place on earth in summer. May results in a wetter southwest as all of that water will come down as fresh water rain somewhere else. May also aid in slowing global warming
Mmmm… mean 300m wide by 30m deep. 30×30 is too small. 🙂
Typical dictator stunt.
Just a little North and East is a place called the Great Salt Lake and a very large area called the Bonneville Salt Flats.
Well, a days drive anyway from Death Valley. Ever drive for hours at 75mph (121kmh) over a flat white surface? Easy to do on the flats West of the Great Salt Lake.
Kinda cool in it’s own way, occasionally a rain/snow cloud breaks loose and manages to drop some rain on the salt flats.
Residents and passerby’s get a terrific chance to throw salt balls at each other; sodden salt packed into a ball and thrown. Try not to get hit though, especially as one isn’t usually wearing thick insulating snow duds and it is really hard to get salt out of one’s clothes without a shower; and showers are scarce on the flats.
Morton, the blue box people “when it rains, it pours”, still mine salt on the flats near the Great Salt Lake; only I understand that they get purer cheaper salt out of mines in America’s Midwest for table salt.
Yes, America has a number of salt mines underground. Also cool places; they drive the giant ore trucks (street legal size) right in/out the mine. The salt is blasted and scooped into the trucks; the miners leave large pillars to support the mine roof.
There are companies who lease space in the excavated mines for secure, very dry storage; their employees tend to get a, er, little odd. Too many long days underground without sunlight. Employees desperate for signs of outside life put up window frames on their walls and then fill the interior with day type pictures. One employee even had up a moose head over his desk.
That routing water idea from Canada sounds interesting to me. There are many dry lake beds in America’s West that could use a refresher; they’ve been lacking fresh water since after the last ice age.
And there are many folks in Utah and Nevada that might be interested in buying water from Canada and then reselling it to California. Significantly a large portion of Idaho and Southeastern Oregon are high desert.
High deserts are desert areas of significant altitude, in this case generally well above 3000 feet (914m); the kinds of deserts where it gets royally hot during the day yet can frost/freeze at night. The Bonneville Speedway area is at 4200 feet (1280m) altitude and is a very popular place for attempting speed records.
Idaho’s high desert is above 4000 feet (1220m), dry enough that Idaho would be interested in helping a water pipeline, and getting a share of water and money.
Before refrigerators caught on, business entrepreneurs would mine ice during the winter for resale during the summer. Perhaps it is not so unreasonable to send mining ships to Antarctica to bring back ice? That Turney turkey character would be a great fool, er, experienced adventurer to Antarctica for winter mining of ice…
Unless you have invented som new way to induce water to run upwards it will either (1) have to be a lot deeper than 30 m in the middle (2) pumped (which will require a lot more power than your hydro plant can produce, friction and losses you know) or (3) Be in a deep tunnel most of the way. A for the last I would not recommend trying to cross the San Andreas fault zone with a rock tunnel. Sure, it’s possible, but it would be enormously expensive.
Eric, you need to update the status of Kurnell (Sydney); Although it is still operating at low capacity
Sydney’s (Kurnell) desalination plant has sat idle for two years, costing taxpayers $390 million. It is costing tax payers $534,246 a day to sit idle……..doing nothing.
Daily Telegraph, 24th August, 2014
http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/desalination-plant-at-kurnell-costing-taxpayers-534246-a-day-as-it-sits-idle-while-water-levels-remain-high/story-fni0cx12-1227033578428
Just to add, not a single drop of water has come out of the Kurnell facility since July 1st 2012
Sydney Water’s managing director Kevin Young stated in Sept 2013;
“My best estimate is it will still be about four to five years before we turn the desalination plant on,”
I heard that harvesting water on the Gold Coast of Australia was banned because the local government wanted to make sure their project was well patronised and therefore financially viable.
Is this true?
If so, my advice to California is to make sure you harvest your own water.
By the way, harvesting water means catching water off your roof when it does rain. The bigger the tank the better.
Cheers
Roger
Another thing California could learn from Australia is don’t let your dams fill up to over 90% because of CAGW “permanent drought” scares, or when the inevitable heavy rains come you’ll be devastated by floods like the unfortunate residents of Queensland courtesy of their genius Labor government.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desalination
“Desalination is particularly relevant to dry countries such as Australia, which traditionally have relied on collecting rainfall behind dams to provide their drinking water supplies. According to the International Desalination Association, in June 2011, 15,988 desalination plants operated worldwide, producing 66.5 million cubic meters per day, providing water for 300 million people.[4] Production is expected to reach 120 million m3 by 2020; some 40 million m3 is planned for the Middle East.[5] The world’s largest desalination plant, producing 640,000 m3 per day, is the Jebel Ali Desalination Plant (Phase 2) in the United Arab Emirates.[6] The largest percent of desalinated water used in any country is in Israel, which produces 40% of its domestic water use from seawater desalination[7]”
Well Australia really cocked up then didn’t it?
Cheers’
Roger
Two things come to mind.
No matter how much the climate chamges, the amount of water on earth will be all but constant. It can only change form and distribution. As it already does through decadal oscillators and such.
All megaprojects I’ve seen so far are cronies getting taxpayer funds to do something no entrepreneur would do. Solyndra and A123 are our examples, but even wind farms and solar. If they were actually worried about climate change, there are ways not to completely waste the money.
Maybe some of the more hydrologically or geologically inclined could comment on this, but are you folks familiar with a project they are trying to launch in India, where they plan on building a dam across a currently salt-water-filled bay/gulf, the Gulf of Khambat in the Indian state of Gujarat (whence the current PM hails as former “governor” [Chief Minister, I believe is the title state leaders have there ] ).
Overview at http://www.narendramodi.in/gujarat-all-set-to-create-world%E2%80%99s-largest-manmade-freshwater-reservoir-in-the-sea/
One advantage I see is that no new hectares of water-covered land are involved. I’m guessing they’ll be forfeiting a huge estuary of the types that usually form where brackish waters are mixed.
If it works, it could be pure genius. But will it?
Like all such projects it has a massive environmental impact that is not easy to predict in advance.
The simple solution for California (lacking any major west flowing river systems) is of course, limit Californian population to what the available fresh water can support.
Or tax the water even more till people no longer want to live there, or until some form of artificial water supply becomes cost effective.
A good start would be to do like many cities in Arizona – prohibit lawns in LA, which are idiotic in a semi-arid climate in any case. And using water for irrigating golf-courses which are equally insane in a dry climate.
California, if they had a brain in their capital, would build lots and lots of nuke power plants by telling the typical greens it’s needed for desalting the oceans. Not only would it reduce the carbon foot/hand/finger prints of the Californians but it would allow “nature” to revert to it’s normal hydrologic state (aka, rain/snow). The electricity generated would be used to replace all those animal killing windmill and solar fryers while desalting the ocean and dumping the salt into the San Andreas. Then, some years from now, when flooding is a huge problem, the desalt plants which were never built, pending building the nuke power plants would have their funds switched to building synfuel plants. And thus, they would eliminate fracking altogether. Oh, and they could still build desalt plants – sort of a “forever” project to save the planet.
Last time I looked, the cost for fresh water via pipeline (new) in California was more than the cost from de-sal (also new). Land is very expensive in California and a large pipeline must go a very long ways to get water that isn’t already tapped…. We’ve already got pipelines or aqueducts over most of the State; so “new” water would have to come from…. well, a very long ways away. (As noted above, past the Coastal range of mountains, it is all desert all the time from Nevada, through Oregon and Washington and even up into Canada. Yes, I’ve been in Canada’s Desert. They are quite proud of it. Cactus and everything. If a bit cold…)
Also a factoid from a couple of decades back was that urban water usage was about 5% of the total. It is the farms growing tomatoes and cotton and orchards that consume the bulk of all water in the State. The history of water rights generally assures that if you had water before, you need to keep using it to keep having it…. So folks grow a lot of water demanding crops on effectively desert lands. (Thus the salt and selenium build up in Kern County and related… evaporating a LOT of water…)
So rather than offend some significantly powerful farming lobbies by stealing their water, the State has generally gone off to a mountain area far away from sight and stolen their water….
Latest iteration on the Peripheral Canal was to put the Sacramento River into a tunnel at about $10 Billion (starting price… to be inflated 4x to 10x after construction partially completed…) and ship it to L.A. Nice trick given the EPA and mandated fresh water flows out the delta…
Most reasonable thing to do is nuke driven de-sal plants ( ours work…) but California won’t do that. It will choose martyrdom instead… on the Green Altar…
Or just face up to the Central Valley farmers and their extraordinarily cheap water (nowhere near a market price, with politically set subsidized prices… though they did pony up to build the system so it really is ‘theirs’…) and “Show them the money”. Buy out 5/95 of their water and grow another L.A. in size… Would we really miss the Kern County cotton? Yet more cheap tomato sauce? (Leave the lettuce and avocadoes alone though! 😉
But that won’t happen either…
> Most reasonable thing to do is nuke driven de-sal plants ( ours work…)
Thanks to California’s geology, building nuclear powered anything on the coastal strip is something of an act of faith. I’m actually a fan of nuclear and I think our descendants a few centuries from now will probably be getting most of their energy from solar, nuclear and hydro with the remaining fossil hydrocarbons being used for petrochemicals..But that’s then and this is now. Frankly, nuclear plants built in a populous, tectonically active area whose geology we do not yet fully understand by the lowest bidder to politically negotiated standards and potentially managed by fools seem to me a dubious idea. 50 or 100 years from now … maybe
Water is never a problem, there is plenty of fresh water on the planet. The difficulty is catching it. For example Brisbane receives plenty of water to keep its two dams full, but we dont use it. The rain falls in the coastal strip east of the range, but the two water sources, lake Wivenhoe and Lake Sommerset are both located in a drier area west of the range. The runoff from brisbane’s streets and roofs does end up in pipes, but it is all just released into the Brisbane river and washed out to sea.
Really most places just need geographical diversity of sources, Perth Australia for example would be just fine with a water pipeline from the tropics and another fron the deep southwest for winter rains. California needs a feed from the north, and one from the tropics in the south, I’m sure Mexico would be happy to build some dams and export to California for a reasonable fee.
I believe we (Canada) have federal laws against exporting water. There was a proposal to fill tankers with BC water just before it poured into the Pacific, sail it California, sell it, drink it, let it pass through Californian kidneys into the Pacific. But even this zero-sum game was blocked by the government of the day and even today I don’t think you can even export boutique bottled water.
That leaves you with shared water resources like the Great Lakes and these are highly protected/contested. Keep in mind the Great Lakes are slowly losing water since the catch basin is nowhere near large enough to sustain them (they are 80+% post ice age melt water) so we protest every change you make to drainage (e.g. changes to the Chicago shipping canal). The good news for you: thanks to rebound in a few hundred years they will start draining into the Mississippi.
Or they could move. Just not to Phoenix.
“Frankly I would consider building a pipeline, and importing the water.”
I suggested some months ago that, with all the water falling on the Pacific NW and abundant water from snow melt, a pipeline to California would seem feasible.
I know that the Carlsbad Plant has been mentioned in a couple of previous comments on this subject. I lived in Carlsbad (North San Diego County) for 28 years. I welcomed the plant to be built, because it seems to have been well-planned and well-designed after following its progress the past 10 years (after all the gloom and doom tree huggers said it would destroy the fish farm and ocean sea life next to it). You can track the progress here: http://carlsbaddesal.com/desalination-plant.
When we first moved to Carlsbad, my wife got a job with the city. And we naturally attended a city council meeting regarding the subject of the “30 year drought” we were “just emerging from” in San Diego County. That was 1985. My take on what the consultant to the city said way back then, was “despite the ocean next door, San Diego County is still desert”. The land, prior to development, was all scrub land, sandy, void of trees and each year during the Santa Ana winds, tumble weeds blew around everywhere. But during the decades, especially the 1980s, people tamed the land. Developers planted trees and put in ice plant everywhere. They even imported Eucalyptus trees from Australia (which grow very twisted in North America, they say because of the magnetic field in the Northern hemisphere affects them …not sure about that one, eh?). But the trees can survive on very little water. That entire county is and was basically desert next to an ocean. Same with LA.
So many citizens realized that over-growth and over-use of the Colorado River was indeed a serious problem. Hence that “30-year drought” got the city council thinking over the next decades, despite some good years every so often, of abundant rainfall. Let’s see if the better planning by the good City of Carlbad works.
So as not to tell everyone that desalination is bad, let’s blame the Australian government for irrationally hurrying desalination. When you hurry, especially with government-sponsored programs, it is typically a disaster with cost over-runs, poor design, poor planning, etc. Just look at Mr. Obama’s support of the Solyndra plant and all the other projects that make electricity at extermely high cost compared to natural gas and coal.
Imagine a world where the billions upon billions of dollars our governments have spent “researching” CAGW had gone to researching things like better desalination plans… err… well… if just a fraction of that money had gone to desalination research…
Instead a moron with no hair, a big brain and the athletic ability of a 20 year old poodle gets paid big bucks to talk about a broken hockey shtick.
Some points:
1) The “pipeline(s)” already exist (the Delta-Mendota Canal and the California Aqueduct) in order that agribusiness in the Southern San Joaquin Valley can irrigate crops in a desert and the spares living in the LA Basin can fill their pools. If you doubt this, a quick grab-sample on Google Earth [118.267 W, 34.236 N] and “eye-altitude” at 1.07 km) shows about 50 pools. There are other areas with double that number – e.g. near Glendale.
2) Our – ahem – governor is intent upon running a tunnel or two under the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta to insure that so-Cal doesn’t get increasingly brackish water during dry periods when marine water pushes inland. The purported “reason” for this is to “protect” the Delta environment and threatened species like the Delta smelt, which were never at hazard until the state started shipping serious water south.
3) The “watering” of the Los Angeles basin is the direct cause of the desertification of the Owens Valley, as well as conflicts with the Imperial Valley farming interests in California, and other interests in Arizona and southern Nevada.
While working for the US Forest Service years (decades!) ago I worked with a former DWP employee who remarked that what lead to his quitting the DWP was actually experiencing the Owens Valley, which is now a desert, economically poor region solely because due to the seizure of most local surface water, including essentially the entire Owens River by LA DWP. According to him, the DWP had at least one speculative plan that considered transporting water south from the Yukon(!!!) ultimately to the Colorado where it would be stored behind Hoover Dam.
Perhaps California and Australia (or better yet, entrepreneurs) could build smaller desal plants on ships or barges, and rent them to each other as needed. Rain in Oz, drought in Cal: send the barges east. Drought in Oz, rain in Cal: send them west.
I understand that Saudi Arabian interests have been quietly buying up Southern California Mercedes Benz dealerships; maybe to eliminate car radios from Mercedes cars.
But the real reason is, that at the appropriate time in California’s totally unprecedented catastrophic drought desertification cataclysm, they plan to cash in on the exchange of Mercedes cars, for camels.
Tim Flannery – our former labor government hired and paid mouthpeice for climate change – told us it was never going to rain/flood again and our dams would always remain empty. He got paid over $300k per year to jet about the country scareing us and when it rained again and all the dams filled up he never battered an eyelid.
Boy, reading through all the comments above says one thing to me….California, yer hooped! Nobody seems to keen to let you suck them dry. Instead of the alarmista barking “climate change” I’m guessing (mind you) that they should be accepting “climate normalcy”….and figuring out the cost locally. No matter how you slice it, it’s gonna be hugely expensive.