Poseidon Town: Desal Water in the Ground is Money Down the Drain-Not Reasonable Use
OCWD's plans for desal-water distribution further violate California's constitution on top of building an environmentally harmful project with no established need
Whether it’s a reasonable use of water or not will be the big question underlying the proposed Huntington Beach Poseidon ocean desalination project when it comes before the California Coastal Commission on May 12 for a pivotal but still less than determinative thumbs up or down vote.
The Commission’s staff of experts recommends project denial due to unmitigated environmental effects and “likely significant burdens on environmental justice communities” due to higher water bills.
If the $1.4 billion project is approved, the Orange County Water District (OCWD), the project’s lead agency and manager of the 60 million acre-foot local groundwater basin in north county, would buy 56,000 acre-feet of desalinated water a year for 30-35 years, regardless of need.
The desalinated water would cost about 3 times what OCWD now pays the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MET) for imported water to replenish the basin.
Poseidon’s water would not increase OCWD’s water supply but offset an equal amount of MET water due to terms of a $400 million subsidy the company needs to attract private financing.
Reasonable Use Doctrine
The Reasonable Use Doctrine guides all the State’s environmental protection laws and policies at all levels of government, per Article 10, Section 2 of the California Constitution.
Recognizing the need for conservation, the Constitution states that “the waste or unreasonable use or unreasonable method of use of water be prevented.”
Accordingly, California law “seeks to encourage relatively efficient, economically and socially beneficial uses of the state’s water resources,” according to water-law expert Brian E. Gray in the book, Sustainable Water.
The question of “need” is implicitly stated in the doctrine, explicitly stated in law, and applies directly to the Poseidon project.
In Poseidon’s case, there must be a demonstrated need for the project. Less environmentally-lethal water supply sources, including conservation, must be used unless unfeasible by legal definition.
But the OCWD has so far refused to study any other potentially more efficient and less costly water-supply alternatives.
And it ignored a major 2018 water-reliability study by the Municipal Water District of Orange County (MWDOC), that puts the Poseidon project highest for cost and lowest for reliability on a list of seven supply alternatives.
“There are a variety of recycled water, reclamation, and groundwater storage projects in various stages of planning and permitting that appear to be able to address Orange County’s modest projected increases in water demand over the coming decades,” the Commission’s staff report concludes.
Who Will Take Poseidon’s Desal Water?
After 20 years in the making, Poseidon still has no buyers for its water. Most of OCWD’s 19 member agencies, led by the Irvine Water District (OCWD’s largest member) have turned a cold shoulder to the project.
OCWD “had not identified an immediate need for much of the water” and has no idea where the water would be delivered, the staff report says.
Basin replenishment creates storage and a seawater intrusion barrier.
But OCWD already replenishes the basin with 100 million gallons per day of recycled wastewater (a 30/mgd expansion is currently under construction) as part of its Groundwater Replenishment System (GWRS).
GWRS treated water is immediately potable, but must undergo redundant treatment, including ground filtration, before it’s sold.
But desalinated water can be distributed to ratepayers immediately after production.
Unreasonable Use
Why would the OCWD put expensive desalinated water into the groundwater basin instead of selling it directly?
The short answer is that OCWD wouldn’t do that because it would be a costly and unreasonable use.
That was the answer in 2014 at a joint planning meeting of MWDOC and OCWD after Director Stephen Sheldon, a former Poseidon consultant, wondered if Poseidon’s water “in the overall system,” would be “increasing the general amount of water.”
OCWD’s chief engineer, John Kennedy, answered that regional supply would increase but the amount of basin groundwater would not. “We’re not increasing the BPP (basin pumping percentage), we’re just really replacing the amount of imported water we need to bring into the region.”
General Manager Mike Markus elaborated: “The thought is that the [desal] water will be put into the retail water [distribution] system. So…we’d have to look for purchasers of the water.”
OCWD director Cathy Green, Poseidon’s most loyal supporter, added a new confusion: “But, if we were to put it in the basin, wouldn’t it increase the water quality,” she asked.
“Right now, I don’t believe we’ve been looking at options to put it into the ground. If we were, it probably would require a significant amount of infrastructure to be able to get the water into the ground,” Markus explained.
A new pipeline would have to be built because existing pipelines couldn’t handle the desalinated water due to the required pipe-size difference, he said. And the water would have to be pumped about 10 miles to Anaheim for direct recharge into the basin or a series of [costly] injection wells would have to be built.
Director Harry Sidhu, now the mayor of Anaheim, questioned the practicality of pumping already treated water into the ground.
“You would absolutely never do that, right?”
“Yes [that’s right]”, Markus answered.
“I don’t think it makes sense,” Sidhu said.
But it made a lot of sense to Director Green. “I was talking about water quality vs. Anything else,” she answered.
No, it would not improve the basin water quality but would significantly decrease it, Markus explained, because desalinated ocean water contains about 300 parts per million of total dissolved solids compared to 80 for GWRS water.
To Director Peer Swan of the Irvine Ranch Water District, the largest retail water agency in Orange County, the Poseidon project was an absurd use of water and ratepayer dollars in the first place.
“By freeing up MET’s supply, you are essentially buying the new supply from MET because you’re creating…50,000 acre feet of new water for MET that they can serve other people at considerably lower cost than the [Poseidon] water here. So, you’re essentially financing MET’s system for 50,000 acre feet [in other words, getting the same amount of water as before but for 3 times the cost while subsidizing outside agencies].”
Why Now?
But five months later, Dec. 3, 2014, OCWD’s legal counsel issued a memorandum that laid out serious legal obstacles to overcome before the district can sell desal water to any water agency inside or outside of its service area.
The analysis concluded that the best way to avoid those obstacles is to sign an agreement with MWDOC to sell its desal water through that agency after placing it into the groundwater basin.
At about that same time OCWD staff came back to the board of directors with various distribution options, most of which involve injecting Poseidon’s desalinated water into the basin for hundreds of millions of dollars.
The chances of OCWD getting an agreement with MWDOC, the agency that released the reliability study that puts the Poseidon project in last place, are presently unknown.
But for over a decade south county agencies (who get their water from the MET through MWDOC) have been considering their own much smaller ocean desalination plant and MWDOC’s previous attempts to persuade them to buy into the Huntington Beach project failed, hence its migration to OCWD.
And there are currently no willing buyers of record for Poseidon’s water among OCWD’s 19 member agencies or anywhere else in Orange County.*
Note: “or anywhere else in Orange County” was added May 16, 2022 for complete accuracy.