CA Water Wars - Are There New Solutions or Just The Old Run-around?

The drought in California has restarted the water wars.  Of course they never ended over teh past 35 years, but a new battle has been waging since everyone has realized that 2014 is not going to bring the needed 30 inches of rain we need to just partly catch up after the last two dry years.

I have been following the rhetoric on both sides, although a lot of what I hear is the farmer's and Central Valley perspective, because farming is the life-blood of this part of California where I now live.  From my perspective, the truth lies closer to what the Central Valley folks espouse than what the Sacramento and Washington folks want.

My sweetie sent me an interesting article and asked me to comment (see red text below).  The article is by a reporter at UC Berkeley, describing a new book by UC author David Sedlak.  In it he is proposing that it is time for a 4th generation of the technologies that humans have developed to use water resources.

Time is now for a new revolution in urban water systems

By Sarah Yang, Media Relations | February 18, 2014  BERKELEY —

As California grapples with what state water officials have called a drought of “epic proportions,” UC Berkeley urban-water expert David Sedlak has been watching for signs that people are ready for a water revolution.

Could this drought, perhaps the worst in five centuries, provide the kick in the pants needed for a major shift in how we source and deliver water throughout the state?  Perhaps in 500 years seems to be an exaggeration or for shock value – not backup given.  Still the situation is serious.

David Sedlak, professor of civil and environmental engineering (Peg Skorpinski photo)

Consider this. Even without the drought, Sedlak, deputy director of Re-inventing the Nation’s Urban Water Infrastructure (ReNUWIt), sees signs of stress in the state’s current water delivery and treatment system. Decaying infrastructure, ranging from aging treatment plants to levees that could fail in a major earthquake, must support an ever-growing population.  Signs of stress is a nice way of saying the situation is very serious, on botht he political and physical sides.

Instead of finding new ways to pipe in water from other areas, Sedlak projects significant growth in water recycling, rainwater harvesting and seawater desalination.  All new technologies, ways of changing people’s attitudes to conservation, actual conservation methods, etc. must be involved as parts of the overall solutions.  Solutions also are different for different areas of the state, as discussed below.  However, the article in this paragraph alludes to say that new tech and conservation can re[place the need for more storage and movement of stored water.  I find this a subtle but serious slight at those folks who know that storage (above and below ground) is a critical component.

Recognition of the need for investment in such advances may be growing. During a recent visit to California’s parched farmlands, President Barack Obama proposed a $1 billion “climate resilience fund” that, if approved by Congress, could include support for “breakthrough technologies and resilient infrastructure” to cope with the impacts of climate change.  Yes, Obama proposed as fund and some direct money help, to be spent in many states, but most of it is aimed at conservation and changing how farmers work and direct welfare to workers put out of work.  Storage again was not mentioned. 

“Here in California, we’ve got a confluence of factors that could spark major advances in technologies that usher in the fourth generation of urban water,” said Sedlak, a professor of civil and environmental engineering.  True, let’s go for it, and use all methods.

In a conversation with UC Berkeley Media Relations, Sedlak – whose new book, “Water 4.0: The Past, Present and Future of the World’s Most Vital Resource,” was published in January by Yale University Press – described what this fourth generation might look like.

Let’s start off by explaining the title of the book. What does Water 4.0 mean?

The term Water 4.0 is a nod to the tech industry’s naming convention for signaling a major change in computer systems. In this book, each number is associated with a revolution in which people recognized that the system they have no longer meets their needs.

Water 1.0 applies to the first revolution, the aqueducts of the Roman Empire. Rome was the first city of over a million people, and water demand quickly exceeded the ability of the local water sources. The Romans built aqueducts that brought millions of gallons of water into the city every day. They then put their used water into canals, and eventually they covered the canals over, so they also gave us sewers.

Water 2.0 involves treating drinking water, first by filtration and later with the addition of chlorine. This came around the turn of the 20th century, as cities became more crowded and people started getting sick from their water. When the flush toilet replaced the outhouse, it created a public health problem as wastes were discharged directly into the water supply of downstream communities.

Engineers, led by a team from MIT, developed filtration systems that were the basis for the first modern drinking water treatment plants. This revolution largely alleviated typhoid fever and cholera in the West.

So our drinking water was safe, but untreated sewage was still being discharged into the environment. Water 3.0 gave us sewage treatment plants. After the Second World War, people started noticing that the Great Lakes, coastlines and estuaries were dying because of water pollution.

By the early 1970s, people were fed up. The environmental movement took off and in 1972, we passed the Clean Water Act. By the end of the 1970s, most cities in the U.S. had well-functioning sewage-treatment plants.  One must understand that about 350 billion gallons of sewage (much is  treated but still contains nitrogen) pours out of dozens of cities upstream of the Sacramento Delta each year.  Delta toilet bowl  This plus smelt-eating salmon, not the delta pumps, are the real threats to the delta smelt that no one wants to tackle because of the cost to build systems.

So now we’re at a point where drought, an aging infrastructure and a host of other problems are leading us to examine the future sustainability of our water supply. Interim solutions, like water conservation and retrofits to treatment systems, can help, but eventually we’ll need a major upgrade.

How we deal with this will be Water 4.0, the next revolution in our water system.

All of the above section is nice background but helps little to solve the problem.  

What would this new revolution look like? Where do we need to go from here?

In California, I predict we’ll see major investments in local water supplies. These new water systems will feature lots of water recycling, the capture and use of rainwater that would otherwise become urban runoff that pollutes beaches, and seawater desalination.  Watch my words, the state will declare all groundwater and all rainwater to be state property (I think they have already done so for rain).  They will demand water meters everywhere (maybe good, maybe not) and they will demand the ability to control when you turn on your well and how much you use.

The tough thing about upgrading water infrastructure is that it requires smart investments over a long period of time. We’re not talking about downloading software from the Internet. These are complex systems that are meant to last. Now is the time to start planning systems that will be built in the next decade.  Huge investments are required.  Using the High Speed Rail money would not even make a dent in the possible water investments needed to obtain all the high-tech stuff envisioned here.  He is right that starting NOW is too late.

We are already seeing examples of Water 4.0 all around the world. For example, due to concerns about security of its imported water supply, Singapore already uses a mixture of water recycling, desalination and stormwater capture to supplement their imported water.

Closer to home, parts of this new approach are being built in places like Orange County, where the Groundwater Replenishment System supplies about 60 million gallons per day of recycled water to a drinking-water aquifer. Using advances in treatment processes that include reverse osmosis and UV disinfection, the treatment plants injects highly treated sewage back into the drinking water aquifer. The local utility also diverts water from the Santa Ana River — a river that in the summer consists almost entirely of wastewater from upstream neighbors — into infiltration basins that percolate water into the aquifer. They’ve been doing this for over 35 years in Orange County, and it’s how they expect to support additional population growth and ride out droughts.

Yes, Orange county and other places have been cleaning up used water for a long time.  Mostly this involves RO plants (it is much easier to remove 5000 ppm of TDS (total dissolved solids) from used water than it is to remove 35,000 TDS from seawater.  Oil companies like Chevron have RO plants operating (San Ardo project that I worked on) to cleanup oilfield produced water and put it to use on farmers’ fields and in rivers.  However, these efforts are small when compared to need.  And they are very expensive.  RO-treated water is what you use for potable water.  The volumes necessary for farming are too large to be solved with RO.

(Picture) Shown is a microfiltration basin used by Orange County’s Groundwater Replenishment System. Microfiltration is the first step in the wastewater purification process. (Photo by Steve Crise, courtesy of American Water Works Association)

What do you see as the biggest barriers to moving forward on water-recycling projects? What will it take to overcome them? 

For potable-water recycling, sometimes ridiculed as the “toilet-to-tap” approach, I would have said 10 years ago that public perception was the biggest impediment. But utilities are becoming more confident of their ability to gain public acceptance for this approach. In Big Springs, Texas, a potable-water recycling recently went online, and now about 10 million gallons a day of highly treated sewage is being piped into the drinking-water reservoir. It’s the first large direct potable- water reuse system in a developed country.  Wait, he just talked about Orange Co. doing this.  It is also done in the Central Valley down near Bakersfield.  A good technology and underground storage is preferable to surface in terms of reducing water loss and adding a polish treatment but is somewhat expensive for pumping costs.

A water-reuse project in San Diego that died over 15 years ago came back to life a few years ago, well before the current drought. Experience has made us more comfortable with the idea of water recycling. The professional community sees it as less of a big deal. It seems like the public feels more comfortable when its professionals feel better.  It is safe and useful when run correctly.

Technologies are also developing that will someday allow us to recycle water within our homes. This approach will likely be even more readily accepted by the public because it ties into their enthusiasm for use of gray water, which includes the water from sinks and washing machines.  This is the huge investment item.  Doubling up home systems to allow use of potable and gray water means doubling the cost of water systems in a house, plus distribution systems outside.  This will require building code changes and will inevitably prie many new homeowners out of the market for a decade or two.

Systems exist now for efficiently reusing water at the household scale, but they are still quite expensive and probably 20 to 30 years away. But that’s exactly why we need research and development now.  True.

And what are the prospects for desalinating our seawater?

For desalination in California, there are specific concerns about coastal development that have slowed construction. One of the largest seawater-desalination plants slated to be built in our state is being led by a private company. As a result, many people have been suspicious about the project’s financing and costs. But other projects are being led by public agencies. I see the current controversies as a temporary setback.  Desal projects are extremely expensive.  The biggest cost is the operating cost of power (from coal, nuclear, or gas) to run the pumps needed to produe the 3000 psi required by RO systems.  The plants themselves are getting cheaper but are still multi-billion dollar projects.  The biggest hurdles in coastal communities are the Coastal Commission and the environmentalists.  Remember my LNG project?  One location we looked at was the former power plant in Carlsbad, because there already existed water intake structures from the ocean.  The City of Carlsbad and a private company are about 80% finished with a large RO plant at that site, using those structures.  They began planning even before Chevron looked at the site in 2004.  And the enviros alomost stopped the project.  The cost overruns and the operating costs may yet stop it. 

But seawater desalination is no longer restricted to rich Middle East countries. We see desalination becoming increasingly popular worldwide, with massive plants being built in Australia, Israel and Spain.  I heard last week from an engineer who works at new desal plant in Firebaugh:  The Panoche Water District (a private company) is working with WaterFX on their Aqua4 technology, which is a concentrated solar still process.  See: Solar-desalination-gives-california-water-district-freshwater and WaterFX and Aqua4 Process  They are using innovative solar desalination technologies to treat agricultural land runoff.  This allows them to recover the fertilizer salts and other elements, the sale of which can form a significant part of their income stream.  The efficiency sounds quite high, at 200 acre-feet of water produced per acre of solar collector, but practically I think it means a lot of small plants scattered around the countryside, producing water for small areas - somewhat similar to distributed power generation using gas turbines. This can work in the CV in some locales and could be a part of the solution. 

Seawater desalination is one of our more expensive options, but it is a mature and reliable technology. It is here to stay.  I believe, so far, that it is too expensive and the carbon-control folks will object to the natural gas burned to power it.

So, as we face a future of severe drought, how is Water 4.0 shaping up?

Revolutions always have frontlines, and the frontlines of the water revolution are the places where the water problems are most severe. California has been on the frontlines for water recycling and is poised to take a lead on stormwater capture and use. In the case of seawater desalination, Australia, Israel and Spain are the new frontlines of the revolution.

The revolution has begun, but we need public policies and investments, like those described by the president, to support its growth. I think it’s just a matter of time, especially in light of current predictions that suggest that this will not be our last severe drought.  The proposals by President Obama last week mainly mirror Sen Feinstein's Senate water bill, which many have called water welfare.  No mention of storage. 

So, as a pitch piece for changing minds, this article is pretty good.  But, as written by this reporter, it appears Sedlak steers clear of some hard questions and hard realities.  He comes down on the demand side and not on the supply side.

Back to storage:  All of these technologies and more will be great for reducing water used and improving re-use.  But without initial water to prime the cycle, they are dry holes.  The California Water Project and the Central Valley Project designed a system of reservoirs and canals 30 years ago that would let California survive 3-5 years of drought.  However, here we are barely into year 3 and we are almost out of water.  What happened?  Some of the storage was not built.  Shasta dam was designed to be 200 feet higher (9 million acre-feet more) but it wasn’t built that high.  Temperance Flat has been stopped by many forces and prevent the Millerton reservoir from operating to it max potential.  (A new feasibility study report released today by Bureau of Reclamation shows that the Temperance Flat reservoir is viable.)  There are many opportunities for more water injection into the CV aquifers that are not being done because the initial water is running  out to the sea.  The delta smelt crusade by EPA and Boxer/Feinstein has diverted more than 1 million acre-feet per year for 5 years.  That amount is the difference between how the CVP should be and how it is today, with ZERO water allotment for most of the CV water contractors and agencies that contract with the CVP.  

In summary, we get enough rain over multi-year periods to supply most of our needs, but it is not managed correctly or enough of it captured to smooth over the dry periods.  And the original agreements between government and farmers have been broken by the government side.

Water is California’s most complicated issue.  But, for me, some of the solutions are actually pretty simple.  And they are mostly political.

Categories: Environment, News, Politics & public policy, Technology & engineering
Tags: drought, urban water, water infrastructure, water supply