Floating an Idea : Entrepreneur Hopes to Barge Water Here in Bags
At first, Terry Spragg wanted to tow icebergs.
But technical problems prompted the Manhattan Beach real estate broker to regroup. What he really wanted, he decided, was to bring fresh water--not ice--to Southern California in his bid to cash in on the arid region’s thirst.
Five years later--with interest among buyers slackening despite continued fears of drought and with critics jeering his water source--Spragg is about to demonstrate water delivery by one of the most unorthodox schemes ever proposed: giant, waterproof bags, towed down the coastline by oceangoing tugs.
The bags--half-size demonstration versions of bags that would each hold three times the volume of the Goodyear blimp--will float at the ocean surface during a 20-day voyage in July. (Fresh water is lighter than salt water.)
“When someone asks me if this is crazy,” Spragg says, “I tell them, ‘You don’t have to believe in me; I’ve surrounded myself with the best people in the world.’ ”
Indeed, most experts say the technology is the least of Spragg’s worries. The challenge, they say, is to make his prices competitive with those of other water sources.
“It certainly isn’t a crazy idea; I think it has merit,” said Raymond Hart, chief of statewide planning for the California Department of Water Resources. “We get all kinds of ideas, and that’s one of the few we’ve spent some time on.”
Hart recently turned down a rival proposal to use seaborne bags to augment water supplies for the State Water Project. But he did so with the proviso that if water economics change, he will reconsider.
In any event, Spragg is winning few friends in the state of Washington, whose fresh water he wants to bring south.
An editorial in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer urged state officials to “pop” Spragg’s “water balloons” after the newspaper learned that Spragg had applied for a permit to take water from Washington’s Olympic Peninsula.
The state can deny a permit for “southbound water-jacking,” the editorial sneered, “if it can demonstrate some future need for the water right here at home. That shouldn’t be hard, given our own vast expanse of thirsty desert, our choking Columbia River salmon and our growing population of former Californians.”
Undaunted, Spragg hopes to draw water from the outflow of an electric generating plant just before the water enters Puget Sound. Since not even fish use that water--though it is perfectly potable, Spragg contends--the state should have no jurisdiction over its export.
And if Washington does balk, he says, he will buy from Alaska, which for years has been trying to peddle its water to help replace sagging oil revenues.
“Spragg’s Bags,” as they are known by some in the small world of water marketers, are the latest in a long line of arcane proposals to bring water to Southern California.
Among the others: a plan in the 1960s to carry water south from the Yukon by connecting a series of Western valleys called the Rocky Mountain trench, a scheme to haul Alaskan water in old oil tankers, and a proposal to build an undersea pipeline along the coastline from Alaska to Los Angeles.
Southland officials don’t doubt the need for new sources of water.
Ed Means, director of resources for the Metropolitan Water District--the water wholesaler that supplies 15 million customers from Ventura County to the U.S.-Mexico border--estimates that Southern California will need a third more water annually within two decades.
Much of that will probably come from farmers, who in growing numbers are willing to sell their federally subsidized water to cities. Other water managers are betting on desalination and water reclamation. But Means, for one, believes that even exotic technologies such as Spragg’s could find buyers in such niche markets as coastal cities of 50,000 or fewer.
“This might have some application in smaller communities that are growing and have reached the limits of their own local supplies and are facing expensive alternatives,” Means said.
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But the economics of water don’t yet clearly favor such technologies, said Tony Willardson, associate director of the Western States Water Council, a quasi-governmental body in Salt Lake City that advises 17 western governors.
“The wild card, though, is that no one knows what the future may bring,” Willardson said. Indeed, amid renewed concerns about drought conditions, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power raised retail water prices 9% last week to allow it to acquire extra water.
Water costs vary widely, depending on such factors as whether the water comes from a new or long-established source. Some districts pay only a few hundred dollars per acre-foot. (An acre-foot is one acre of water one foot deep--roughly the amount used in a year by two families of five.)
Northern San Diego County pays as much as $700 an acre-foot at the tap. And water-parched Santa Barbara pays more, delivering water to customers at an average of $1,600 an acre-foot. It has made economic sense for the city to run its new $34-million desalination plant only for a brief three months since it was completed in 1992; at the moment, it costs $1,900 per acre-foot to operate.
Spragg says he could deliver water in the range of $1,000 per acre-foot.
“There’s nothing magic about bags,” said James A. Cran, who is promoting a similar ocean system. “They are tricky to engineer and awkward in operation, but they are very cheap.”
Cran, president of Medusa Corp. of Calgary, Canada, has successfully tested a bag with the volume of five supertankers. His first target market is the Middle East, where he is bidding to haul fresh water from Turkey to Israel and other nations now dependent on desalination plants.
Spragg is interested in the Mideast too. He is making four prototype bags for demonstration runs sometime in the next few months--one down the Oregon and California coasts to Los Angeles, the other from Turkey to Israel.
His goal is to gain credibility.
“I think he should demonstrate that it can be done,” Means said. “Until someone demonstrates that they can tow one of these things down the coast, it has the air of implausibility, like icebergs.”
Fresh Water by Sea
Manhattan Beach entrepreneur Terry Spragg has developed a scheme to bring fresh water from Washington or Alaska to Southern California in immense, flexible, waterproof bags to be towed down the coastline by ocean-going tugboats.
HOW IT WOULD WORK:
The bags are 500 feet long and 50 feet wide. Each holds three times the volume of the Goodyear blimp--14 acre-feet of water, enough for 30 families for a year. Pipes would be used to fill the bags. Most likely, the water would come from a river or utility outflow just before the fresh water empties into the Pacific Ocean.
Linked end-to-end in a miles-long string, as many as 50 bags are towed south along the coastline by a single tug. Like race cars “drafting” each other, drag is lowered by each bag following in the wake of those in front.
Since fresh water is lighter than seawater, the bags float just at the waterline, undulating with the swells. The tug pulls the bags at a leisurely 2 to 4 knots in a 20-day trip from Washington state to Los Angeles.
Off the Southern California shoreline, the water is stored in the bag or pumped ashore into a water district’s treatment and distribution system.
WHAT WATER COSTS
Cost per acre-foot, or 326,000 gallons; prices are wholesale, before distribution to consumers:
Big-city water districts, from all existing sources: $200 to $700 Water reclamation: $350 to $900 Water transferred from Central Valley farmland: $75 to $175 Additional water from State Water Project, other sources: $400 to $1,100 Desalination: $1,200 to $2,000 Spragg ocean transfer from Washington state: $1,000 (est.)
Sources: California Department of Water Resources, Metropolitan Water District, Terry G. Spragg & Associates
