Water, water, every where
Nor any drop to drink.
—from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Drinking a big ol’ glass of saltwater sounds good to . . . no one. But folks in Carlsbad, California, may soon be slurping seawater. A new plant could transform Pacific Ocean water into fresh. The billion-dollar experiment may decide the future of desalination in the United States.
California is in the middle of a drought. For the fourth straight year, rainfall levels are extremely low. Parched lawns, dry river beds, dead trees—all are signs of how bad the drought is. The state’s governor has issued water restrictions, and residents are drastically reducing household water usage. But it’s not enough.
Only God can make rain. When rain doesn’t fall, people in California and other dry regions consider other options. One option is desalination.
Desalination (or “desal”) removes salt and minerals from water. That makes it usable for drinking or plant irrigation. Desal is one of the earliest forms of water treatment. Sailors on ancient vessels used it to change seawater into drinking water. Today, ships and submarines still use small desal devices to provide fresh water at sea.
The desal process is fairly simple. Pull water from the ocean; force it through a series of filters; get rid of the gunk and unusable water—usually by returning the saltwater to the ocean; irrigate with or drink what’s left.
The desalination market has grown rapidly in the last ten years. Desal plants around the world produce billions of gallons of fresh water every day. Population increases could make desal even more important in the future. Global Water Intelligence analysts estimate that 4.8 billion people will use some form of desal by 2050.
The Carlsbad facility will be the largest desal plant in the Western Hemisphere. It may produce about seven percent of San Diego County’s water. But the plant faces an uphill battle against environmentalists and naysayers.
So far high cost and environmental concerns have hampered desalination. Pumping and filtering use lots of electricity. Critics worry about how the water is pumped. They are concerned with where the salt goes.
Yet desalination seems to be a possible answer to the need for fresh water. As Christopher Gasson of Global Water Intelligence says, “Unless people get radically better at water conservation, the desalination industry has a very strong future indeed."
