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Science

First U.S. Desalination Plant Goes Online 41

Posted by timothy from the come-on-in-the-water's-great dept.
DrEnter writes "According to this AP article on Yahoo!, the first full-time desalination plant has gone online in the U.S. to provide fresh water for the Tampa Bay, Florida area (from Tampa Bay itself). While common in the mideast and other parts of the world, this is the first in the U.S. to be used as a regular source of fresh water (there are a couple others in the U.S. that are only for emergency use). It will also (arguably) be one of the least expensive to operate, producing 1000 gallons selling for about $2. There is some more information at Tampa Bay Water's web site."
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First U.S. Desalination Plant Goes Online More

First U.S. Desalination Plant Goes Online

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  • Other southern states should look into this... Much of coastal Texas and Louisianna is sinking due to all the ground water being pumped out. Some places have sea water filtering in, replacing the pumped out ground water. If these areas could get their fresh water supply from the ocean, these problems could be abated.

    In regards to the Tampa area project, I didn't see anything on their page about the salinity of the waste water from the desalination process. Could this create problems? That salt has t

    • In regards to the Tampa area project, I didn't see anything on their page about the salinity of the waste water from the desalination process. Could this create problems? ...

      There is some reference to this in the Yahoo! article. Apparently, they are directing the "brine" into a river or the like. This plant won't cause any problems, but if they build too many more dumping into the same place it might, so they are spending some money on long-term monitoring of the waste effects.

      • Lets see:

        A total of 44 million gallons of salt water a day is processed and all the salt is rejected to 19 million gallons of brine. Therefore the rejected brine has about 2.3 times as much salt as normal sea water. Since sea water is about 3% salt the brine would be about 7% salt. For reference the dead sea is about 32% salt.
    • I wonder if its possible to take the salt and sell it to salt companies, like a benefical byproduct?
  • Are nothing. Just wait until we start seeing wars over water.

    The nice thing is that those wars can be prevented with the right technology. Desalination plants might be more useful than we think.

  • USVIs (Score:3, Informative)

    by mjpaci ( 33725 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @01:56PM (#5592264) Homepage Journal
    There's a full-time desal plant on St. Croix, USVI. I guess they meant the 50 states and not the United States and All of its territories.

    --Mike
    • Or it could just be that whoever reported this doesn't know that the US has possessions in the Caribbean. That sort of geographic ignorance is rampant in the U.S. Ever wonder why New Mexico issues license plates that say, "New Mexico USA"? So New Mexicans can drive outside their state without being asked for their passports! No, I'm not making that up.
  • --hey, this is pretty slick! If you had a group of investor/owners/users, you could build an entire planned community based around one of these plants. Think a total alternate energy, live someplace that is now just salty marsh/desert area, have hydroponics farms and industries, etc. I also like that membrane filters can create really CLEAN water, too, and that's the only beef I got with this plant, they are going to use tired old fashioned chlorine tech to "treat" the water. but besides that, pretty spiffy
    • Two words: Protected Wetlands.

      The desert idea would work, but anything marshy is likely to fall under lefty liberal big brother control.
      • We Brits already had a civil war concerning that one.

        Our revolutionary hero, Oliver Cromwell, became radicalised through the struggle to keep the Fens of East Anglia flooded. A grand scheme to clear, drain and develop on them was resisted by the communities that lived and worked there.

        Ironincally once in power Cromwell oversaw the clearing, draining and development of the very same Fens.

        There is talk today of reflooding much of then Fens and bringing the native flora and fauna back.
      • ....in the US this is correct,for now at least, (I think we will be seeing a readjustment and a common sense averaging of the two environmental extremes soon), but that still leaves most of the rest of the world for such a project. Might be some poor nation someplace that would appreciate it, food and freshwater, and the skilled workers to come in and live there and work it as a co-op with the people already there. One project like this is what? One hour of war in cost? Something like that, probably way of
    • Oh, boring old chlorine. Too bad it "works", as those boring old engineers like to say. They should invest in an unproven, tricky technique to treat the water. That way, you could have "total" alternate energy, instead of just "partial". Totally tubular, dude!
      • ..yes it works, it just leaves a more or less permanent toxic residue. There are alternatives to that now. I see no reason to not keep advancing and finding better alternatives for various practices. It's no different a concept than moving on to a faster computer, I mean your old 286 "worked" didn't it? Mine did, I choose to not use it any longer. Same with any discipline, yes?

        Some older techniques are so good, that it's cool to keep them, others if viable alternatives exist, making them better/faster/chea

  • This is not the first operational US desal plant (Score:3, Informative)

    by dacarr ( 562277 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @02:22PM (#5592494) Homepage Journal
    There is a small desalination plant on Santa Catalina Island, which provides a significant amount of the island's water requirements without having to have it tanked in from Long Beach. (More of it is from inland reservoirs scattered about the island.) Granted it's an RO plant, but let's get the facts right, shall we?

    Read here [ca.gov] for details provided by the California coastal commission. You'll have to page down a bit.

    • I heard about this desalination plant a while ago, that's why I launched google as soon as I read the headline. What is a "RO" plant?

      The Santa Catalina desalination plant was built because a condominium project would not get a construction permit unless the developers made the development self-sufficient with regards to their water needs. The developers agreed to build a desalination plant and the excess water not used by the condominiums is sold to the rest of the island.
      • Guess I should explain, an "RO" plant is a Reverse Osmosis facility. A little less expensive on various angles than a still plant (where they distill water rather than filter it), but I wonder if you could run still off of the heat generated at a power plant. San Onofre comes to mind there.

    • There are other commercial plants too, such as in Cape Coral, FL. Google gave me this (I'm sure there are more, this was the first site listed) article [edwardwillett.com] which says:

      But the "technology of choice" these days is reverse osmosis, a process used in home water purification systems as well as in large commercial plants like the one serving Cape Coral, Florida, which produces 15 million gallons of desalinated ocean water a day.

      The funny things is that the Tampa people should know better since Cape Coral is only

  • Cost analysis is important (Score:3, Interesting)

    by GuyMannDude ( 574364 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @02:30PM (#5592566) Journal

    I sure hope they've done to cost calculations correctly. The Santa Barbara desalination plant is an example of jumping before thinking. During the drought years of the late 80s and early 90s, Santa Barbara undertook the expensive proposition of building a desalination plant. A few months after it went online, rainfall boosted water reserves to a high enough level that drought conditions were no longer in effect. Because it's darn expensive to run and maintain a plant like this, Santa Barbara shut down its plant indefinitely. All that money spent and the city doesn't even use it. Click for more details. [ca.gov]

    Bottom line: make sure you really need something before you go building it. I hope the Tampa Bay people have done their math right.

    GMD

    • Re:Cost analysis is important (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The $2/1,000 figure is definitely pie-in-the-sky. It will be lucky to be twice that. One of the wild cards is energy cost. This plant (when fully built out) will use a tremendous amount of energy. Trading one impact on the environment (pumping hundreds of millions of gallons of groundwater per year) for another (an increase of hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil per year equivalent in electricity). The real amazing fact is that over half of the water produced by this utility (Tampa Bay Water) is u
  • Was I the only one to read the title
    as desALIENation plant? (As in desinfection,
    but cleaning up aliens and their remains
    from crashed UFOs) ;-)

    Anyway...

    Paul B.
  • Think: first plant in the mainland US.
  • ...someone started playing SimCity 2000 with the real world. I remember having to build those when you have a city on the coast.
  • Tampa Bay, Florida

    That's Tampa, Florida. "Tampa Bay" refers to a body of water.

    • No, they just need to keep it clear. After all, we know that it's easy to confuse Tampa Bay, Florida with the other (albeit fictional) Tampa Bays that are located in California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada (No, really! Off of Lake Mead!), Kansas (for those who need their floating seat cushions when crashing over the midwest), Texas, Georgia, Maine, and Massachusetts.
  • and myself.

    I say water is plentiful (70% of the earths surface seems to be covered with it). She says it's a finite resource (I always thought it was recyclable).

    I guess the true answer lies in the ability to process said water to an acceptable clean level.
  • Maybe on the continential US, but I'm sure they have been using these in Hawaii and other small Pacific islands for years.

  • Uh, there are some in the US already. (Score:3, Informative)

    by Above ( 100351 ) on Tuesday March 25, 2003 @04:24PM (#5593666)
    Dare County (outer banks, NC) has done desal since 1989, some links:

    http://darenc.com/Water/papers/desalcmg.htm
    htt p://www.membranes-amta.org/media/pdf/reliable.p df
  • to see how many delicate ecosystems this desal plant will fuck up. I guess people don't understand the balance that is required in the oceans. Here's a link to the negatives of desal: http://duck2.oc.ntu.edu.tw/iris/apecmrc2/a32.html
  • Key West, FL used to get a substantial amount of its water from full-time operational desal plants (two, at one point; the first starting in '67) so this isn't even the first in the continental U.S.

    http://www.edwardwillett.com/Columns/desalination . htm [edwardwillett.com]

    Now, the plants in Key West may no longer be in use (I don't know if that is true or not), but "the first full-time desalination plant ... in the U.S." is certainly not in Tampa. You might get by with "the only" (and I doubt that is even the case), but "

  • This is absolutely fantastic news.

    This should bring down the cost of salt!!! There will be more salt than the US can ever use! Salt for everyone!!!!! They ought to build one of these in costal Africa! More Salt than the third world can ever use!!!

    • Salt (Score:1)

      by bagsc ( 254194 )
      As many economists already know, salt is one of the strangest goods in the world, in that its price elasticity is almost perfectly inelastic. The demand of salt is always the same, regardless of price. You can never make a profit by selling in bulk.
  • My city has dozens of those things. It's cheaper than building a ton of waterpumps and my advisors say that I'm a more popular mayor because of it.
  • I can't possibly see how this desalination plant will have an impact on salt levels in the long term. We follow a simple reasoning that only the water contained in the current water cycle will be desalinated. Any used desalinated water will end up back in the bay and dilute any increase in salt concentration back to previous levels. OK so there will be a tiny increase but it will not be noticable and will not be a cumulative effect.

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