Our view: State commissions should approve Poseidon project to secure our water supply

In any survival-at-sea story, the moment when those adrift contemplate drinking the ocean's saltwater is a sure sign that times are truly desperate. The same can be said for the circumstances surrounding the Carlsbad desalination project proposed by Poseidon Resources, which is scheduled to be considered by the State Lands Commission today.

The key difference, of course, is that drinking seawater leads quickly to dehydrated death in those adventure tales. In our case, desalination promises to help nourish our coastal desert communities as other drinking water supplies dry up.

Under study since 2000, the idea of building a desalination plant capable of producing 50 million gallons of fresh water a day next to the Encina power station was certainly a neat idea. But the key question was always would desalination's considerable costs come down enough and regional water demand come up enough to pencil out.

Fast forward seven years and the idea doesn't seem like something from a futuristic Tomorrowland. Most of the Western United States has endured a multiyear drought, meaning much less water to be fought over by the thirsty states of the Colorado River basin. California's other major supply, the Sierra snowpack, was sharply curtailed by a court ruling meant to protect a small, endangered fish swimming toward extinction in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

After years of fits and starts, which included a failed courtship with the San Diego County Water Authority, the plant's fate now rests with a pair of state agencies, the State Lands Commission \ and the California Coastal Commission . The State Lands Commission manages the leasing of tidelands and submerged lands, while the Coastal Commission has sweeping powers over the state's coastal region.

Both agencies are expected to examine the plant's potentially significant impact on the environment, including the release of greenhouse gases.

There's little doubt that this kind of project will have some negative consequences for marine life. Proponents argue that since the power plant already uses large amounts of seawater for cooling -- water that Poseidon will then desalinate -- the plant's impacts will be minimal. Studies by both the Water Authority and city of Carlsbad reached a similar conclusion. With the Encina plant's owners planning to move farther inland, Poseidon may not be able to piggyback on its seawater intake for too long.

Those problems can't be glossed over, but to help compensate for them, Poseidon has offered to set aside $2.79 million for several coastal restoration projects in coastal North County. The company also plans to make its desalination carbon-neutral through energy efficiency and buying credits that pay for projects that take carbon out of the atmosphere. These exemplary efforts earned the project an endorsement from State Lands Commission staff.

The Coastal Commission staff is set to make its recommendation public on Friday, and its concerns are expected to go beyond direct environmental effects. The commission could mull everything from the effect increased drinking water supplies may have on population growth and development to the privatization of public water supplies.

Clearly, the commission wants to saddle a straightforward, sensible project to increase our dwindling supply of drinkable water with ideological concerns far beyond its brief. This kind of mission creep is the same sort of fuzzy logic that convinced our state leaders to stop building roads for the better part of three decades.

We must better conserve the precious water we have, and we must recycle more of the water we use. But we also need the Poseidon desalination plant if we are to survive a dry future in this coastal desert.