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Earth Day: Thirsty California looks to the ocean

"This may not be the entire solution, but it is part of the solution."

Peter MacLaggan, of Poseidon Resources

Peter MacLaggan turns the small tap and carefully fills the plastic cup with a clear liquid that is precious and scarce. Holding it up to the light, he looks proud of what he has done.

"This may not be the entire solution, but it is part of the solution," says the man from Poseidon Resources.

The problem is drinking water, and how California is going to provide enough of it for its people. The clear liquid in the plastic cup is water; but not ordinary water. MacLaggan's water is filtered seawater, desalinated to make it safe for human consumption.

Some 90 percent of California's water is piped more than 400km to its consumers, the majority of it from the Colorado River. But with that supply endangered by declining levels, rising costs and contamination -- and with memories still fresh of the droughts of the 1970s and 1980s -- attention is turning to alternative sources.

Eighteen desalination plants are under consideration in California, offering a possible way out of the state's seemingly inexorable water crisis.

"God never intended southern California to be anything but desert. Man has made it what it is," the Californian essayist and activist Carey McWilliams quoted a visitor to the state saying in 1946.

That sense of foreboding and impermanence infused much of the state's dealings with its scarcest resource during the last century.

And as with any resource that is in short supply, water has offered the unscrupulous unrivalled opportunities to make money.

California's great answer to the threat of drought in the early part of the last century was the Owens Valley project, a 375km aqueduct from the Owens River to Los Angeles and the San Fernando valley. But the scheme was actually designed to make money for a handful of powerful backers; their exploits formed the basis of Roman Polanski's 1974 film Chinatown.

The latest plans for California's future have caused rows that will be familiar from Britain's recent past. In an echo of the controversies surrounding the privatization of UK water utilities, opponents of desalination are concerned about handing over a natural resource to private companies which will be subject to the vagaries of market forces.

Some allege that the private companies intend to get their hands on public subsidies to process and sell what is seen by many as a public resource.

There are also fears about the presence of foreign-owned companies in the sector.

"The most troubling thing about this is the notion that private venture capitalists can own and control these plants that invest in the conversion of a public resource into a private resource," said Mark Massara, the director of coastal programs for the environmental pressure group the Sierra Club.

"Did we know it was going to be this controversial?" asked MacLaggan, standing next to the desalination machinery.

"I don't know," he said wearily.

Inside the site's temporary office, MacLaggan and his team keep a fish tank. The sea urchins, rays and other marine life it contains are testing the safety of the system by swimming in the waste water from the desalination process before it is pumped back into the sea.

MacLaggan dismisses concerns about the effects of dumping waste water back in the sea. Explaining that it goes through several processes to reach acceptable saline levels, he points to the inhabitants of the tank.

"They're pretty happy. The urchins had some babies, which is a very good sign," he said.

The water used at the small Poseidon prototype plant in Carlsbad, San Diego County, comes from the neighboring Encina power station.

It is drawn from the sea and serves as a cooling agent in the power station. Once used, it is piped to the desalination plant where it undergoes a four-stage filtration process, passing through coarse and fine sand, a cartridge filter and finally reverse osmosis.

The final stage removes the salt from the water by forcing it through a membrane punctured with tiny holes which, MacLaggan says, are "half a million times smaller than the width of a human hair."

But opponents of the process question the outflow of waste water and the safety of the intake.

"It may harm the area where you suck in water," says Jim Metropulos, a lawyer for the Sierra Club.

His doubts go beyond the purely environmental to address concerns about commerce and big business.

"Is there a need for desalinated water?" he asks. "If you build these plants, they need to be big and to produce a lot of water.

Water supplies could then be enlarged, and would then have to be sold.

"Would expanded supply lead to expanded population growth in areas that are already facing population growth? Are we meeting existing supply needs, or are we going to facilitate growth?"
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