Mexico currently ships televisions, cars, sugar and medical equipment to the US. Soon, it could be sending water north.
Western US states are looking south of the border for water to fill drinking glasses, flush toilets and sprinkle lawns, as four major US water districts help plan one of two huge desalination plant proposals in Playas de Rosarito, about 24km south of San Diego. Combined, they would produce 568 million liters a day, enough to supply more than 300,000 homes on both sides of the border.
The plants are one strategy embraced by both countries to wean themselves from the drought-prone Colorado River, which flows 2,335km from the Rocky Mountains to the Sea of Cortez. Decades of friction over the river are said to be a hurdle to current desalination negotiations.
The proposed plants have also sparked concerns that US water interests looking to Mexico are simply trying to dodge US environmental reviews and legal challenges.
Desalination plants can blight coastal landscapes, sucking in and killing fish eggs and larvae. They require massive amounts of -electricity and dump millions of liters of brine back into the ocean that can, if not properly disposed of, also be harmful to fish.
However, desalination has helped to quench demand in Australia, Saudi Arabia and other countries lacking fresh water.
Dozens of proposals are on the drawing board in the US to address water scarcity, but the only big project to recently win the blessing of regulators would produce 189 million liters a day in Carlsbad, near San Diego. A smaller plant was approved last year in Monterey, about 177km south of San Francisco.
Mexico is a relative newcomer to desalination. Its largest plant supplies 19 million liters a day in the Baja California resort town of Cabo San Lucas, with a smattering of tiny ones on the Baja Peninsula. Skeptics already question the two proposed plants in Playas de Rosarito — known as Rosarito Beach to US expatriates and visiting college spring-breakers.
“It raises all kinds of red flags,” said Joe Geever, California policy coordinator for the Surfrider Foundation, an environmentalist group that has fought the Carlsbad plant for years in court, saying it would kill marine life and require too much electricity.
Water agencies that supply much of Southern California, Phoenix, Arizona, Las Vegas, Nevada, and Tijuana, Mexico, are pursuing the plant that would produce 189 million liters a day in Rosarito near an existing electricity plant. They commissioned a study last year that found no fatal flaws and ordered another one that will include a cost estimate, with an eye toward starting operations in three to five years.
Potential disagreements between the two countries include how the new water stores will be used.
The US agencies want to consider helping pay for the plant and letting Mexico keep the water for booming areas of Tijuana and Rosarito. In exchange, Mexico would surrender some of its allotment from the Colorado River, sparing the cost of laying pipes from the plant to California.
Mexico would never give up water from the Colorado, which feeds seven western US states and northwest Mexico, said Jose Gutierrez, assistant director for binational affairs at Mexico’s National Water Commission. Mexico’s rights are enshrined in a 1944 treaty.
“The treaty carries great -significance in our country. We have to protect it fiercely,” Gutierrez said.
Rick Van Schoik, director of Arizona State University’s North American Center for Transborder Studies, said that laying a pipeline across the border would be too costly.
“It’s expensive enough to desalinate. I just don’t see how it calculates out,” he said.
The other big plant proposal comes from Consolidated Water Co, a Cayman Islands company, with Mexican investors. That would send much of its 379 million liters a day from Rosarito to the US via a new pipeline, with operations beginning in 2014.
Mexico is unlikely to approve both plants, said Gutierrez, whose government is sponsoring the 189-million-liter-a-day plant with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the San Diego County Water Authority, the Central Arizona Water Conservation District and the Southern Nevada Water Authority.
A key question is whether Mexico would allow water first used at the neighboring electric plant to be desalinated — a giant potential saving. California recently adopted rules that prohibit the state’s -electric plants from sucking in vast amounts of seawater to cool their machinery.
The Carlsbad plant illustrates how difficult it can be to build a plant in California. Poseidon Resources Corp, based in Connecticut, has survived about a decade of legal challenges and regulatory review.
The company, which plans to begin major construction work when it secures financing, was required to restore 27 hectares of wetlands and take other measures to offset carbon emission from the electricity it consumes.
The San Diego County Water Authority is also considering a plant at Camp Pendleton in Southern California that would produce up to 568 million liters a day. Poseidon also wants to build one in Huntington Beach, near Los Angeles, that would churn out 189 million liters a day. Those ideas face significant challenges.
“The planets will never be in alignment like they were in Carlsbad,” said Tom Pankrantz, editor of Water Desalination Report. “They had the right project, at the right place, at the right time.”
The San Diego agency wants to obtain 10 percent of the region’s water from desalination by 2020 to lessen its dependence on the Colorado River, which is connected by aqueduct about 320km away. Tijuana also wants to rely less on the river, a priority that gained urgency after an earthquake last year knocked out its aqueduct for about three weeks.
The US and Mexico can save money by joining forces and achieving economies of scale, said Halla Razak, the San Diego agency’s Colorado River program manager. At least half of the plant’s water would stay in Mexico, she said.
“Mexico is the entity that is driving the project, even more than the United States,” she said.
US and Mexican officials said they expect the new plants will adhere to the same standards as California, including water quality, but Mexico’s regulators could act faster and shield sponsors from legal challenges.
“The Mexicans will ask all the same questions that we ask here, but it’s not endless lawsuits,” said Mark Watton, general manager of Otay Water District, which would buy about 76 million liters a day from Consolidated’s Mexico plant for its San Diego-area customers. “You get an answer quicker.”
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