Desalination Seen as a Solution to Water Shortage

With officials seeking ways to meet growing demands for drinking water, plans are underway to construct two desalination plants and a “brine line” in Ventura County that will also help improve the quality of water used by farmers.

Construction has already begun on a 32-mile-long pipeline that will carry salt discharges from treatment plants in the east county to the Pacific Ocean. The $60-million project is being built along with a $75-million desalination plant near Simi Valley that will open up new supplies of drinking water.

“In the water business, you’re always planning 10 years in advance,” said Don Kendall, general manager of the Calleguas Municipal Water District, which serves most of Ventura County. “If we’re going to continue to have new demands [for water], we have to say, ‘Where is this water coming from?’ ”

In fact, water agencies across the state are considering more desalination projects to help meet those demands. Although the process is more expensive than importing water, local purveyors are concluding that the extra cost might be worthwhile if the plants can provide a reliable source of water in drought-prone Southern California.

“This is sort of the wave of the future,” said Charles Keene, executive officer for the recently formed California Desalinization Task Force, which is assessing the state’s potential role in such water purification efforts.

Population growth and an ever-diminishing flow of Colorado River water to California are largely driving the search for new sources of potable water.

Last month, water agencies in Los Angeles, Orange and San Diego counties joined forces to push for federal grants and other incentives to construct desalination facilities.

Desalination of briny groundwater and seawater is expensive because of the high energy costs involved. But advances in filtration technology over the last decade have drastically reduced the cost of purification, making the price of desalinated water more competitive with water from traditional sources.

In Ventura County, Calleguas officials said their desalination plant will help provide another reliable source of drinking water. Calleguas, which distributes water imported from Northern California, serves about 600,000 county residents.

At the same time, the agency’s brine line now under construction will help reduce the high salt content of Calleguas Creek, which flows from Simi Valley to Oxnard. Crops absorb the salt and dry out, causing agricultural production to drop.

“I’m very bullish on the whole concept,” said David Schwabauer, ranch manager for Leavens Fairview Ranch in Moorpark, which operates hundreds of acres of lemon and avocado orchards. “If you can clean it up, then that’s wonderful.”

The Simi Valley brine line will take the salt extracted from groundwater and creek water and dump it into the Pacific Ocean or coastal wetlands, Kendall said. When both the brine line and the desalination facility are completed in the next five years, the large underground pipeline will transport 1.5 million gallons of salt and other mineral discharges per day, Kendall said.

The brine line will be the first of its kind in the county, officials said. Similar pipelines are already being used in Los Angeles and Orange counties.

The Calleguas projects will be financed mostly through federal and state sources, Kendall said. The water agency is not planning any major rate increases, he said.

Across the county, Oxnard is planning to build a regional desalination plant to make brackish water drinkable and to recycle wastewater for farm use to reduce pumping, said Ken Ortega, the city’s water superintendent. Construction of the $50-million facility will be paid for through the sale of bonds and could begin as early as 2004, with operations commencing in 2006, Ortega said.

The city plans to recycle 1,000 to 1,500 acre-feet of wastewater a year and to purify at least 4,000 acre-feet for drinking water, thus reducing its dependence on expensive imported water. The amount of the city’s drinking water could be increased by 15,000 acre-feet in the future, officials said. An acre-foot is 326,000 gallons, or enough water to supply two typical homes for 12 months.

Oxnard currently gets its water from the Oxnard Plain aquifers, the United Water Conservation District and Calleguas.

“This will stabilize, if not reduce, our operational costs and reduce our reliance on Calleguas,” Ortega said.