FREEPORT — Saltless seawater might be available for taste-testing by summer as part of a pilot project to tap a drought-proof water supply.
Poseidon Resources Corp., a Stamford, Conn.-based company, is preparing to launch a pilot program in the spring for a regional desalination plant at Dow Chemical Co.’s complex, said Andrew Kingman, Poseidon’s chief executive officer.
The plan is to start construction in the spring for a scaled-down version of a full operating plant. If all goes well, Poseidon could be bottling the brineless seawater and giving tours by the summer, Kingman said.
“It’s a good way to make sure that people get to understand it’s good-tasting,” Kingman said.
The pilot plant will use a technique called reverse osmosis, where saltwater is pushed through a screen at 1,000 pounds per square inch — 20 times more than household water pressure — to remove the salt. Half the end product is saltless seawater; the other half is doubly salty.
The project comes as part of a private-public partnership between Poseidon and the Brazos River Authority, the public agency charged with managing the Brazos River basin that provides 6.75 billion gallons of water annually to cities, agriculture, industry and mining.
The ultimate vision is a 10 million-gallon-a-day plant that would be built, operated and financed by Poseidon by 2010, according to a 2004 study by the Texas Water Development Board. That would be enough to provide water to 100,000 customers.
The Brazos River Authority would purchase the water from Poseidon through a wholesale contract and would be responsible for delivering it to customers in Brazoria County and parts of southeastern Fort Bend County.
Water will become a more valuable commodity in the next 50 years. As population swells and groundwater use restrictions take effect, Brazoria County and southeastern Fort Bend County are expected to have a 35-million-gallon-a-day deficit by 2060, according to the state water board’s 2004 study. The area’s population is predicted to grow from 450,000 in 2000 to 1.2 million in 2060.
Texas has a limited availability of fresh surface water and groundwater, but the Gulf of Mexico will still be there if it stops raining.
A desal plant in the lower Brazos River basin could ease the pinch, said Jorge Arroyo, the Texas Water Development Board’s director of special projects.
“Texas is highly vulnerable to drought,” he said. “And although on a good year, we have plentiful supplies in the Brazos River basin, if there was a drought, given the increased demand, we don’t have much of a cushion.”
The Freeport pilot program is one of three in the state selected as part of a $2.5 million project funded in the 2005 legislative session, said Bill Mullican, deputy executive administrator for the Texas Water Development Board.
The other two sites are in Brownsville and Corpus Christi.
For a year, the pilot program will extract brine from saltwater using different techniques, Mullican said. Armed with a year’s worth of data, such as water quality, temperature and salinity, the Texas Water Development Board can provide a more accurate cost estimate to the Legislature in 2007 for large-scale desalination plants, Mullican said.
“This is really the last step before the final decision has to be made as to whether they will be built or not,” Mullican said.
Dow’s facilities make the Freeport site a strong candidate for a large-scale facility, Mullican said. Dow already has an existing permit to take water in from the Gulf and discharge it, and also, Poseidon could buy power from Dow instead of a local utility company.
“That is unique,” Mullican said. “There’s nobody else that has those permits or facilities in place.”
Additionally, the higher concentrated saltwater will be diluted with Dow’s high volume of water and shoot directly into the Gulf without having to channel through any bays or estuaries, which could pose an environmental impact, Mullican said.
Once something out of science fiction, desalinated seawater is becoming a more cost-competitive alternative.
Water treatment will become costlier for municipalities struggling to keep their aging infrastructure up to pace with more stringent regulations from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, Mullican said.
“There will be new drinking water standards that will go into effect in January,” he said. “The TCEQ has estimated it will cost small communities around $400 million … to put in place the treatment required to meet these new drinking water standards.”
Those ingredients, plus escalating energy costs, will make desalinated water an attractive alternative to treated groundwater and surface water. It is estimated the cost of Brazosport Water Authority’s treated water will increase 4 cents to $1.62 per 1,000 gallons by 2010, according to the 2004 study. Desalinated water might cost about $2 to $3 per 1,000 gallons, plus costs to deliver it to its customers, Mullican said.
The 2004 feasibility study calls for utilities in northern Brazoria and Fort Bend counties to use their surface and groundwater until 2025, when a pipe will be built to carry desalinated water to them. Then, the desal plant would expand to 50 million gallons a day to meet growing demands.
Desalination plants are nothing new. They’re dotted throughout the United States, the Mediterranean and the Caribbean, Kingman said. Trinidad has one desalination plant with a 28 million gallon-a-day capacity, he said.
In the United States, desalination plants are typically built on a smaller scale, about 3 to 5 million gallons a day, but Poseidon is making a foray into larger ones.
The company has a pilot project for a 40,000-gallon-a-day facility in Carlsbad, Calif., and was involved in a venture in Tampa Bay, Fla., Kingman said.
The Tampa Bay plant had problems after it went online because a contractor went bankrupt and the plant was not built according to design, Kingman said.
The Tampa Bay Water Authority bought Poseidon out of the project, he said.
Source: TheFacts.com, Written By: Bridie Isensee