We all know water is getting scarce around the world. The population is growing by more than 75 million persons a year. Demand for water is growing twice as fast.
Global fresh water is decreasing because of pollution and climate change. Aquifers are being over-pumped. Water shortages are creating food shortages. And all this is leading to big trouble.
While we in Hawaii fret over the budget, we have avoided difficult infrastructure issues like water. Given all the cans we’ve been kicking down the road, getting traction for water won’t be easy.
We take it for granted. We resist increases even to pay for renewal of the Board of Water Supply’s aging water system, and we make the board sell off its properties to defer those increases.
Are we setting something aside for a not-so-rainy day, or are we setting ourselves up to get caught short? Soon enough, water could grow scarce here, too. It’s time to look into the well.
There are more than 15,000 desalination plants in the world today. The U.S. has the largest number of them, mainly in Florida, California and Arizona. But what has Hawaii been doing?
The state built a pilot project in Kalaeloa in the 1990s, but it was closed soon after. The city later designed a $40 million plant for Kalaeloa, but in 2008 that project was also shelved.
The Deep Ocean Hawaii plant on a ship off Oahu is gone. The bottling companies at the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority, or NELHA, sell desalinated water only in Japan. Larry Ellison is looking into a plant for Lanai. That’s about it.
The neighbor islands get water from surface sources more than aquifers, and have water quality issues. Maui, which was once rich in plantation irrigation, is expected to reach 98 percent of its water capacity by 2020.
Wastewater recycling, conservation and leak protection are not enough to ensure long-term water security. Telling us future demand is hard to predict does not justify failing to plan ahead.
Water needs energy for pumping, distribution and, for that matter, desalination. As the cost of energy goes up, whether for increases in oil or clean energy infrastructure, water also goes up.
Adding desalination plants will cost hundreds of millions, but political risk is part of leadership, and we need to take that risk for both energy and water, especially in the post-Inouye era.
We can learn from other places. The largest desalination plant in the U.S. is being built by Poseidon Resources to serve San Diego. It will cost $922 million and will open in 2016.
Although the water will cost twice what San Diego pays the Metropolitan Water District, the Water Authority chairman says it’s worth it. "I’d rather be apologizing to people in 10 years for the rate than the fact that they have no water."
The prevailing technology today is reverse osmosis, by which the water is forced through a membrane at high pressure, removing the salt from the water. It’s used around the world.
Reverse osmosis is benign on environmental impact. Putting the same salt back into the ocean that surrounds us is not threatening.
Reverse osmosis can run on wind and solar since you don’t have to run the system all the time. Geothermal and OTEC are even better.
Hawaii engineers Hans Krock and Al Yee are building a plant in the Marshall Islands using OTEC with reverse osmosis technology, yielding three products: electricity, water and hydrogen.
Weilin Qu and Riley McGivern of the College of Engineering at UH-Manoa are working on a new desalination process that will use less energy. Their process uses solar thermal collectors and condensation to remove the salt from the water.
There are other new membranes, processes and energy-saving innovations. Worldwide demand for desalination is huge, and lots of research is being done. Let’s be a laboratory and get in on it.
The prudent approach is to follow the technology and garner the funding and support to be ready. In Hawaii big projects like this take a decade or more, so we should already be working on them.
It’s not too early to develop detailed plans and be prepared to implement them before any scarcity. We should not compromise our long-term water security for short-term political considerations.
The worst result is not that we will have to pay too much for water, but that we will run short of it. Without oil we can’t drive, but without water we can’t live. Energy and water are joined at the hip, and we can’t be complacent about either.
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Jay Fidell, a longtime business lawyer, founded ThinkTech Hawaii, a digital media company that reports on Hawaii’s tech and energy sectors of the economy. Reach him at fidell@lava.net.
