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Spain's Acuamed taps sea for clean water

Posted on: Tuesday, 25 April 2006, 11:09 CDT

By Julia Hayley

MADRID (Reuters) - Adrian Baltanas's job is to find 850 cubic hectometres of clean water -- and he has four years to do it.

As director general of Acuamed, a state company set up by Spain's Socialist government, he has to find an alternative to the previous conservative government's plan to divert water from the Ebro river to Spain's parched southeast.

Acuamed has a budget of 3 billion euros ($3.7 billion) and instructions to carry out most of its program by 2009, Baltanas told Reuters on Tuesday.

Half the water will come from desalination plants, and the rest from recycling waste water and from savings achieved by modernizing irrigation systems.

Spain's Mediterranean coast, which stretches from the French border in the northeast to the Strait of Gibraltar in the south, is naturally dry in contrast to the wet, fertile north.

It is also the home of much of the population, the destination of many of the country's 50 million tourists and where there is most sunshine for growing fruit and vegetables.

All that adds up to a big water shortage.

The previous government's water plan included many of the modernization and recycling projects that Acuamed has taken on, but centered on a controversial transfer of 1,000 cubic hectometres of water from the Ebro, which flows into the sea below Barcelona, via 900 km of pipeline.

DESALINATION PLANTS

The Socialist government scrapped the transfer and is relying heavily instead on 26 new desalination plants.

Since it was set up last year, Acuamed has opened three plants and local water boards in Murcia and Alicante have contributed one and the extension of another, which are included in Acuamed's plan.

Four more plants are under construction, one is out to tender and nine are due to go to tender by the end of June. A further seven are still in their planning stages and Spain's big construction companies are positioning themselves to compete.

"In general the plan is going down well in Brussels," Baltanas said. European Union approval is needed for the bigger plants before releasing funds, which Baltanas said should total 550 million euros for the water plan as a whole.

ENVIRONMENT

An engineer with a long career specializing in water resources, Baltanas is quick to counter potential environmental and energy objections to desalination.

"The brine discharge is the key to a project's environmental impact and there are various solutions," he said.

For example, where there are meadows of Posidonia grass, which provide homes for numerous species of fish in the Mediterranean, the plant will divert its salty water further out to sea, or dilute it first by adding more seawater.

The amount of electricity required for the process is falling as technology improves and the Environment Ministry is planning to build a number of extra renewable energy plants to cover what is used in desalination, Baltanas said.

"modernization of irrigation will also contribute by reducing the amount of electricity used in pumping."

Longer term, he says the days of water-intensive types of agriculture are numbered, while for the fruit and vegetable greenhouses that have spread across the southeastern region of Almeria, water at 30 cents a cubic meter is a marginal cost.

The cost of producing desalinated water is 50 cents a cubic meter and Acuamed is offering to sell it to farmers at 30 cents, plus whatever it costs to transport it to where they need it.

"Water for golf courses or for human consumption will not be subsidized," he said.

In the coming decades the pressure on Spain's water resources should ease, he said.

"The demands of urbanization and tourism will keep rising but lower demand from agriculture, which is far greater, will offset this."

Agriculture accounts for 68 percent of all the water used in Spain, while human and industrial consumption makes up another 18 percent and power stations the rest.

Source: REUTERS

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