Panel to Consider Desal Permit: Approval Recommended for Cal Am’s Moss Landing Project
By Kevin Howe, The Monterey County Herald, Calif.
Aug. 1–The use of Moss Landing Power Plant’s cooling water intake system to feed an experimental desalination plant will be reviewed today by the California Energy Commission in Sacramento.
The commission will consider a permit allowing power plant owner Dynegy to alter the plant’s cooling water intake system to feed an experimental desalination plant to be operated for a year by California American Water to see if turning seawater to fresh water to solve the area’s water shortage is feasible.
The power plant’s intake pipes would be modified to divert cooling water to the desalination plant, where it will be treated by reverse osmosis to filter salt and other minerals.
The resulting fresh water, along with the concentrated salty brine left over from the process, would be fed back into the power plant’s outfall to Monterey Bay.
The pilot plant has been approved by Monterey County and the California Coastal Commission, said Cal Am spokeswoman Catherine Bowie.
The Energy Commission staff has recommended approval of the permit, she said, and “their findings are in line with the state Regional Water Quality Control Board, the Coastal Commission and Monterey County, which all found that the pilot plant will have no significant environmental impact.”
Madeleine Clark, director of the Elkhorn Slough Coalition, disagrees.
In addition to Cal Am’s pilot plant, she said, Pajaro-Sunny Mesa Community Services District is contemplating installation of a similar plant in Moss Landing, and a third pilot desalination plant there may be in the works.
“This decision should not be made in a vacuum,” she said. “The cumulative effects of all three pilot plants need to be considered.”
The Elkhorn Slough Coalition has voiced concern about the destruction of marine organisms sucked into the intake pipes and the increased in temperature, mineral and chemical content of the water that is discharged back into the bay.
“We ask that the commission deny Dynegy’s petition and put an end to these continual delays by Cal Am to provide viable water supply to the Monterey Peninsula,” Clark said.
The 6,500-square-foot pilot desalination plant will cost approximately $3 million and divert up to 288,000 gallons of seawater per day from the power plant’s once-through cooling water intake system, which draws 180 million to 1 billion gallons a day.
The sea water will go through two parallel pretreatment processes and reverse osmosis systems, and the desalinated water — as well as the brine discharge produced by the pilot plant — will be mixed back into the power plant’s outfall before being discharged into Monterey Bay. None of the desalinated water produced will be used for human consumption.
On the way through the plant, the water will be treated with or come in contact with various treatment chemicals, including chlorine, acids, coagulants, polymers and cleaning agents applied at various times to the plant machinery.
Discharge of such chemicals is expected to amount to less than 100 gallons a day, along with about 100 pounds of residual solids per day. The heaviest concentrations will go into a sewer system, not the outfall.
The facility will be used to test for water quality as required by the state Department of Health Services before that agency can issue a permit for the full-scale facility proposed by the company.
The pilot desalination plant is a precursor to development of a $200 million regional seawater desalination plant and distribution system by Cal Am at or near Moss Landing that would produce 11,730 acre-feet of fresh, potable water a year.
The water company’s Coastal Water Project is its attempt to comply with a 1995 order by the state Water Resources Control Board to stop overpumping in the Carmel River.
That year the water board advised Cal Am that it was taking 14,106 acre-feet per year from the Carmel River aquifer, 10,730 acre-feet more than the state allows. The company has rights to only 3,376 acre-feet from that aquifer, but the state allowed Cal Am to continue drawing water over that amount to meet public needs until it can find a new source.
A court has ordered that producers of water from the Seaside basin aquifer — Sand City, Seaside, Cal Am and others — reduce their pumping from the aquifer’s coastal subareas by 2,219 acre-feet and their pumping from the Laguna Seca subarea by 381 acre-feet, for a total reduction for the entire Seaside basin of 2,600 acre-feet by October 2027.
In 2004, the company proposed its Coastal Water Project, a desalination and aquifer and storage and recovery system to meet the state requirement.
The commission meeting begins at 10 a.m. in Hearing Room A, 1516 Ninth St. Audio from this meeting will be broadcast over the Internet.
For information, see www.energy.ca.gov/webcast/.
Kevin Howe can be reached at 646-4416 or
khowe@montereyherald.com.
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Copyright (c) 2007, The Monterey County Herald, Calif.
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