The Dirty Side of Desalination

It seems the list of potential threats to the future health and productivity of Texas bays and estuaries is endless. If it’s not some unfortunate situation created by the hand of man, it’s the wrath of Mother Nature in the form of flood, drought, algal bloom, or freeze. The latest I have learned about is the rush toward desalination of seawater and brackish groundwater in coastal communities to satisfy the growing needs of industry, agriculture, and humans.

Surface water has long been the primary source of water supply here in Texas. In fact, most municipal water supplies have depended entirely upon it ever since municipal water supply corporations were created. And, up until about the present decade, everything has worked pretty well. Well, sort of.

Enter increased water needs from a growing population, along with ever-increasing needs from bourgeoning industries and agriculture. A growing human population must have good-paying jobs and reliable food supplies if we are to continue enjoying our current quality of life. Alas, under the current supply strategies, we are pumping our wells, rivers and reservoirs dry.

Now, I’m not here to condemn desal. In fact, I have been a proponent of the process since having served on the Guadalupe-Blanco River Bay Basin Area Stakeholder Committee back in 2009-2012. Our charge as a committee was to seek the best science available to recommend minimum freshwater inflows necessary to sustain the Guadalupe Estuary and San Antonio Bay.

Two things became readily evident after sitting through three years of meetings. First – In the eyes of GBRA, any water that flowed into San Antonio Bay had been wasted. Second – Their best strategy for supplying future water needs to the people, farmers, and industries in the Lower Guadalupe Basin was to build more on-channel reservoirs for capturing and storing water during times of plenty, that could be used later when other sources had dried up.

The third prong of GBRA’s (and other river authorities) plan for solving the water supply problem for central and south Texas was a program called Inter-Basin Transfer. Simply put, surplus water from the Sabine-Neches, Trinity, and San Jacinto rivers would be piped west and south to communities that were running out.

Nowhere and at no time during my tenure on the BBASC was there any meaningful discussion about plans for desalination. Too expensive, they said.

Well, here we are a short fifteen years later and desal projects are springing up like weeds in your flower beds. The problem here is that desalination has a nasty side nobody wants to own or plan for – brine water disposal. The plan so far is to pump highly-concentrated brine into nearby bays and estuaries. And this is a very bad plan!