Located in Carlsbad, in the San Diego area, the plant has raised hopes for drought relief — but has brought elevated stakes along with it. “The billion-dollar project is only the nation’s second major seawater plant,” noted the Associated Press. “The first U.S. foray in Tampa Bay is widely considered a flop.” That plant, a decade in the making, lost financing and couldn’t pass performance tests, the AP added. Its capacity was only half that of the Carlsbad plant, expected to churn out 50 million gallons of drinking water every day.

To avoid a Tampa-style debacle, the San Diego County Water Authority brought in Poseidon Resources, a premier developer that agreed to shoulder some financial risk in exchange for a sizable investment return, including performance-based incentives. But Poseidon’s labors have so far come at a substantial cost. The plant “will cost $1 billion to construct over the course of the next few years and operational costs will remain high due to its energy consumption,” wrote Morgan Stanley advisor Larry Palmer in the San Gabriel Valley Tribune.

“Indeed, despite fears that Wall Street is making money off the drought, so far it has mainly been Poseidon’s investors who have been on the losing end,” the New York Times recently said of Poseidon. “The company’s first return on its investment is not expected until next year, after years on the drawing board.”

Beach backlash

And Poseidon has already faced major obstacles to building on its success in Carlsbad. For over a decade, the company has labored to secure permission to construct a plant in Huntington Beach, where surfers, beachgoers and environmentalists have pushed hard to fend off desalination. “After nine hours’ worth of public comments, many of which came from supporters of environmental groups Surfrider Foundation and Orange County Coastkeeper, and facing an obviously un-winnable vote, Poseidon withdrew its coastal development permit application” in November 2013, as the OC Weekly noted.

Clashes have repeatedly broken out around the significant alterations to marine life that the Huntington Beach plant would impose. But the debate over the right approach has been mired in uncertainty. It’s “unclear which method of bringing in seawater — open-ocean through an existing pipe or subsurface intake — is actually more environmentally friendly,” the Orange County Register recently observed.

While a “subsurface intake would assuredly kill fewer fish and fish larvae that otherwise would get sucked into an open ocean pipe, even if the pipe had screens,” building the intake “would last five to seven years, depending on the construction method, and disturb 25 acres of ocean floor habitat. Plus, the subsurface intake would have to be cleaned — sand and sediment scraped off — every few years, re-disturbing the habitat for decades after construction was done,” the paper added.

Innovating desalination

Although the biggest industry players have made the biggest headlines in desalination, several startups have also sought to make headway. Manoj Bhargava, famous for his 5-Hour Energy drink, has hatched plans to sell California cities “a desalination unit roughly the size of a flatbed truck that relies on a conventional power source to distill seawater into freshwater well beyond Environmental Protection Agency guidelines,” as Fortune reported.

“A single Rain Maker can be placed in a town with a wastewater plant. In a crisis, hundreds could be stacked on an ocean barge to process seawater. Coastal desalination facilities typically cost billions to construct and require massive amounts of energy. […] Regulators at the Brackish Groundwater National Desalination Research Facility, a testing facility administered in New Mexico by the Department of the Interior, have given it a stamp of approval.”

California startup WaterFX, meanwhile, has begun crowdfunding $10 million of the cost of its new solar-powered desalination plant, which “will likely reach the construction phase early next year in Fresno County and will make enough water to be used across 2,000 acres of cropland a year, or to run through 10,000 homes,” according to Edie.net. “WaterFX’s design will run fully on solar power, helping minimise the plant’s carbon footprint. The plant removes the salt from the water and turns it into usable products, unlike traditional desalination, which dumps salt and brine back into the sea, which can hurt ecosystems.”

“No water resources program,” said Kennedy, “is of greater long-range importance than our efforts to convert water from the world’s greatest cheapest natural resources – our oceans – into water fit for our homes and industries.”

JFK’s pronouncement of more than a half century ago comes to mind in the wake of Gov. Jerry Brown’s proclamation last week of a drought-related State of Emergency. “I’m calling on all Californians to conserve water in every possible way,” the governor said.

And he pointed California residents to saveourh20.org, a web site maintained by the Association of California Water Agencies, which offers a half-dozen “water-saving ideas.” It urges one and all, among other suggestions:

• “Update your toilets and showerheads;
• “Fix your leaks;
• “Take shorter showers;
• “Only run your washing machine & your dishwasher when they are full.” 

But while water conservation can slow the increase in demand for water here in the Golden State, there has to be an increase in California’s water supply if the state is going to meet the needs of a growing population and growing economy.

And the most promising option in 2014, with Jerry Brown as governor, with Barack Obama in the White House, is the same as it was in 1961, with Pat Brown as governor, with JFK in the Oval Office: Desalination. 

Indeed, while California has 840 miles of coastline along the Pacific Ocean, there is only one facility currently in operation that converts seawater into fresh water – Sand City Desalination Plant in Monterey County, which came online in 2010 and produces about 300,000 gallons a day of drinkable water.

Lone Star desalination

Contrast that with Texas, which has less than half the coastline of California, but boasts nearly 100 desalination facilities, producing 138 million gallons of water per day fit for the Lone Star State’s homes and industries.

The reason Texas has found it much easier than drought-ridden California to bring desalination plants online is that environmental groups are less extreme in Texas than they are here in the Golden State.

Indeed, the Sierra Club’s Lone Star Chapter published a report this past November that recognizes the promise desalination represents. It “offers the potential,” said Ken Kramer, the chapter’s Water Resources Chair, “for taking pressure off freshwater resources that are vital to environment.”

Meanwhile, here in California, environmental groups are dead set against desal.

Indeed, the Carlsbad Desalination Project, a $900 million, 50-million-gallons-a-day facility developed by Poseidon Water, faced more than a dozen separate legal challenges before finally securing state and local approval to start building.

And one of the environmental groups that went to court to kill Poseidon’s Carlsbad plant – the Surfrider Foundation, based in San Clemente – is now seeking to kill Poseidon’s proposed $900 million, 50-million-gallons-a-day Huntington Beach Desalination Project.

The environmental group doesn’t care that desalination can provide California a new drought-resistant supply of freshwater. Instead, it maintains that water conservation will provide “a secure and reliable water future.”