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.
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.
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.
