Carlsbad seawater plan heads to commission

By: GIG CONAUGHTON - Staff Writer | Sunday, November 11, 2007 9:52 PM PST ∞

SAN DIEGO ---- After more than seven years of study, a proposal to build a Carlsbad plant to turn 50 million gallons of seawater a day into drinking water is poised to be approved or rejected Thursday by California Coastal commissioners.

Despite overwhelming support from a slew of politicians, water officials, businesses and community groups, it appears the project will remain a contentious one even as it approaches the key commission judgement.

Because the seawater project is the first of its kind to be weighed, and because its approval could open the floodgates for other such projects, there was little evidence to suggest which way commissioners might vote.

Poseidon Resources, Inc., the company that has studied building the $300 million plant at Carlsbad's Encina Power Plant since 2000, says it has done exhaustive studies proving the plant will not hurt the ocean or add to global warming.

Poseidon officials also say the plant is badly needed to bolster dwindling Southern California water supplies.

But environmental foes say the plant would hurt marine life, sucking it in through the power plant's seawater cooling system. They argue that water conservation could help the water supply as much as a new plant, and that they plan to fight the proposal "to the death."

The coastal commission's staff recommended Nov. 2 that commissioners reject the project.

Like environmental groups, and in direct contrast to Poseidon's assertions, the commission's staff said the plant would hurt the ocean and Agua Hedionda Lagoon. They also said the project would create millions of pounds of annual greenhouse gases.

A report from commission workers also questioned whether the plant could produce water at the price Poseidon reported. That left Poseidon officials questioning whether the commission ---- which was created by state voters in 1972 to protect and conserve California's coasts ---- was overstepping its bounds.

Decision scheduled Thursday


All of those issues will come to a head Thursday when coastal commissioners hold a hearing at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel to decide if they should approve the permit that would let the plant be built.

Marco Gonzalez, an environmental lawyer active in the Surfrider Foundation, said he thought there was a better than 50 percent chance that commissioners would approve the permit ---- but said environmental groups would challenge the project in court.

Tom Luster, the coastal commission's desalination expert who helped write the staff recommendation, said he expects "a long and interesting hearing."

Meanwhile, Poseidon Vice President Peter MacLaggan responded to Gonzalez's threat of court action.

"I wouldn't be the least bit surprised," he said. "We've been challenged at every step along the way."

Even though water officials have universally praised Poseidon's desalination plant plan, it has had a bumpy history at various times since 2000.

For several years, Poseidon negotiated to build the plant with the San Diego County Water Authority, the county's regional wholesale water supplier. But those on-again, off-again talks, which included Water Authority allegations that Poseidon withheld environmental information under protections for business secrets, eventually fell apart. The Water Authority has said it still supports the plan despite the absence of a deal with Poseidon.

Meanwhile, Poseidon continued pursuing the Carlsbad project by cobbling together contracts to sell the plant's water to the city of Carlsbad and seven other local water agencies. Those contracts promise to sell the water for no more than the roughly $730 the agencies pay the Water Authority per an acre foot of imported water.

Because the desalinated water is expected to cost between $800 and $1,050, Poseidon will sell the water at a loss. However, MacLaggan says the company expects the cost of imported water to rise faster than the plant's, and that the company is confident it will earn a profit.

An acre-foot of water is enough to sustain two households for a year.

Opponents: Project will hurt ocean life


The biggest complaints from both the coastal commission staff and environmental groups about Poseidon's project revolve around the intention to use the Encina Power Plant's existing seawater cooling system.

Currently, Encina sucks in ocean water to cool its electricity-generating turbines before spitting it back out to sea. Poseidon plans to take 304,000 gallons of that water every day and use powerful pumps to force it through high-tech filtering membranes. Fifty million gallons a day would be turned into clean drinking water. The rest, including the salty brine extracted by the filters, would be spit back out to sea.

However, a recent court case and studies have said ocean cooling systems hurt ocean life, killing fish, vegetation, and microscopic life ---- and Encina's owners have applied to move to an air-cooled system by 2010.

Poseidon has a deal to continue using the existing sea intake and outfall system. But coastal commissioners and environmental groups such as the Sierra Club say they should not be allowed to do so.

Poseidon Vice President MacLaggan said the company's research has found that it will kill about 2 1/2 pounds of fish per day as well as a less than significant amount of phytoplankton, fish larvae and other microscopic organisms.

He said the company plans to offset that environmental harm by creating 37 acres of new wetland habitat in a joint San Dieguito River Valley program.

But Luster and coastal commission staff members wrote in their report that they did not trust Poseidon's numbers, saying studies done elsewhere in the state in recent years "concluded that power plant intakes caused significant adverse impacts to local or regional marine biota."

MacLaggan said Luster and commission staff simply didn't like Poseidon's findings, and instead started reaching for unsubstantiated rebuttals.

"They're presenting no evidence, only occasionally saying 'somewhere else it was different,' " he said. "There's no evidence to counter our analysis."

Luster and coastal commission staff members have suggested that Poseidon could build their plant without the existing open-sea intake by digging subsurface wells, or beach wells.

But MacLaggan and Poseidon say it would take miles of beach wells ---- something the commission would never approve ---- to come up the amount of water Poseidon needs.

Contact staff writer Gig Conaughton at (760) 739-6696 or gconaughton@nctimes.com.

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