Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/659479
e challenge with conservation is, however, having something to conserve. Despite ambitious initiatives and innovative conservation e orts, such as the Storm- Catcher Project, a public-private collaboration designed to capture and reuse storm rainfall, L.A.'s projected 2016 population of 3.947 million will be a strain if we continue to have dwindling supplies. Steady rains have been a welcome relief, but by no means indicate our water challenges are receding. A colleague of Spivy-Weber colleague explained: "It's like someone who's been out of work for four years who [ - nally] lands a job and gets a paycheck, and it's fabulous, but it doesn't make the person nancially healthy for sev- eral more years. at's really the situation in California. We need several years of rain and snow, and particularly important for southern California, snow in Colorado, in the mountain systems that feed the Colorado River." TECH HYBRID One local company has been making waves with its pat- ented desalination technology. E uent Free Desalination Corp (EFD), a start-up based in North Highlands, Calif., has devised a way of producing more drinkable water that they say is less disruptive of the ocean and consumes less energy. Mike Lord, vice president of engineering at EFD, claims his company's technology can separate salt from ocean water through super heating to produce fresh water steam, distilled water and crystalized sea salt. e energy cost from this process is o set by the sale of the dry salt, which can be shipped and sold at market, as well as the use of natural gas for energy. Any le over brine (which con- tains twice the amount of ocean salt and does not contain oxygen) is re-circulated back through the system, with no brine returned to the ocean to su ocate marine life on the ocean oor (creating a "kill zone") or a ect climate change. (Standard desalination plants discharge brine un- der a range of conditions, o en including ocean outfall.) "Typical desalination technologies convert about 40 percent of the water into drinking water, and 60 percent of the water is returned as toxic brine," Lord said. "Our technology converts 100 percent of the water taken out of the ocean into drinking water. One of the bene ts of that is we reduce the amount of water that has to be tak- en from the ocean by 60 percent, because the very act of taking the water out of the ocean can damage the ocean. If you put a big pipe out in the middle of the ocean and suck in 50 million gallons of water a day, or in the case of Carlsbad, you pull in 120 million gallons of water a day, you get sh eggs, sh, larva and everything else. Even if you put a big screen over it, you still pull in small animals, and they all die. So not only do we impact the ocean from the water going out, but we also impact it by lessening the damage on the intake." Lessened damage is still damage. Lord notes there are more environmentally friendly techniques for collecting seawater, such as using subsurface slant wells instead of open sea intakes, but these are more expensive. EFD has also devised a way to reduce energy use. Lord notes that by comparison, " e Carlsbad plant consumes so much electricity that they actually a ect the balance of power on the power grid. Our power grid has reached a fragile state as it is, so when you put these huge users of electricity on it, it has large impacts on the grid's ability to support itself. When you build a desalination plant, you need to build an additional power plant. "Our technology runs on natural gas; we don't use any electricity. When we install our machine, we don't im- pact the power grid by taking any power from it." Desalination is thriving in the Middle East, where options are fewer—it generates 70 percent of Saudi Ara- bia's drinking water and 25 percent of Israel's—but un- til now has been thwarted stateside by steep costs and environmental impact challenges. However, the 2014 California voter approval of a $7.5 billion water bond measure, along with hybrid solutions in the works to supplement enhanced watershed management, is bring- ing us closer to Mayor Eric Garcetti's water conservation goals. Whether or not we're closer to resolving our state's long-term water requirements for survival and growth remains to be seen. Photos: Carlos Sanchez Water source unknown Carlsbad desalination, photo by Claude "Bud" Lewis Carlsbad desalination plant april/may 2016 27