From the Los Angeles Times, March 21:
- A new deep-sea desalination technology is undergoing testing in Southern California. Water managers hope it will offer an economical and environmentally friendly way of tapping the Pacific Ocean for fresh water.
- The CEO of the company that developed the technology calls it a moonshot to revolutionize how California — and the world — can transform seawater into drinking water.
- If the system proves viable, the company plans to build what it calls a water farm anchored to the ocean floor several miles off the coast of Malibu.
Californians could be drinking water tapped from the Pacific Ocean off Malibu several years from now — that is, if a company’s new desalination technology proves viable.
OceanWell Co. plans to anchor about two dozen 40-foot-long devices, called pods, to the seafloor several miles offshore and use them to take in saltwater and pump purified fresh water to shore in a pipeline. The company calls the concept a water “farm” and is testing a prototype of its pod at a reservoir in the foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains.
The pilot study, supported by Las Virgenes Municipal Water District, is being closely watched by managers of several large water agencies in Southern California. They hope that if the new technology proves economical, it could supply more water for cities and suburbs that are vulnerable to shortages during droughts, while avoiding the environmental drawbacks of large coastal desalination plants.
“It can potentially provide us Californians with a reliable water supply that doesn’t create toxic brine that impacts marine life, nor does it have intakes that suck the life out of the ocean,” said Mark Gold, director of water scarcity solutions for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “If this technology is proven to be viable, scalable and cost-effective, it would greatly enhance our climate resilience.”
During a recent demonstration at Las Virgenes Reservoir, Tim Quinn, the company’s water policy strategist, watched as the 12-foot-long cylindrical prototype was lowered underwater on a cable.
“We pull fresh water only up out of the ocean, and the salt stays down there in low concentrations, where it’s not an environmental problem,” Quinn said.
The testing at Las Virgenes Reservoir will help the company’s engineers check how the system works in filtering out plankton and discharging it back into the water. When the pod was nearly 50 feet underwater, Mark Golay, the company’s director of engineering projects, turned on the pumps and water flowed from a spigot.
The next step, expected later this year, will involve conducting trials in the ocean by lowering a pod from an anchored boat into the depths about 5 miles offshore.
“We hope to be building water farms under the ocean in 2028,” Quinn said.
Quinn previously worked for California water agencies for four decades, and he joined Menlo Park-based OceanWell two years ago believing the new technology holds promise to ease the state’s conflicts over water.
“Ocean desal has never played a prominent role in California’s water future,” he said, “and this technology allows us to look to the ocean as a place where we can get significant sources of supply with minimal, if any, environmental conflict.”....
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