Taxpayers created the desalination industry and got conned by it

Despite predictions, cost-effective ocean desalination remains elusive to ratepayers. Another in a series of stories about desal unicorns.

From the early 2000s until 2022, Poseidon Resources sought to persuade the public that its proposed Carlsbad and Huntington Beach ocean desalination plants would collectively provide over 100,000 acre-feet of affordable drinking water for San Diego and Orange counties

That water, Poseidon officials said, would cost the same as or less than imported water sold by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD) and depended on by 19 million people.

In the past, ocean desalination was too expensive for practical use. But rising costs for dwindling MWD supplies and technological advances would make it an affordable option within 10-15 years, Poseidon predicted.

History

In a 2004 article published in a trade journal, Nicolay Voutchkov, Poseidon’s senior vice president of technical services, wrote about “major breakthroughs” in membrane technology that he said made desalination affordable.

Courtesy of Poseidon Resources

“Membrane productivity—the amount of water that can be produced by one membrane element—has more than doubled in the past 20 years,” he claimed.

Poseidon’s website at the time promised that desalinated water from its Huntington Beach plant would be “competitive with other new sources of high quality drinking water” and will be “the lowest-cost desalinated water on the west coast.”

And Poseidon VP Peter MacLaggan wrote in a Los Angeles Times op-ed piece that seawater desalination was no longer cost prohibitive “due in large part to technological advances and the escalating scarcity of traditional water sources.”

Voutchkov hinted in another article in 2005 that no dramatic cost-reduction breakthroughs were expected in the near future for ocean desalination. But he predicted that reduced production costs coupled with rising regulatory costs for traditional water sources would accelerate “reliance on the ocean as an attractive and competitive water source.”

Carlsbad’s desal unicorn

The Coastal Commission stopped the Huntington Beach project in 2022, in part because of its high price for ratepayers and a lack of willing customers in Orange County.

The identical Carlsbad plant was approved and has been operating since 2015, but it led San Diego County Water Authority, the county’s water wholesaler, which has a 30 year take or pay contract with Poseidon, into a financial quagmire.