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WATER DESALINATION AND REUSE STRATEGIES FOR NEW MEXICOSEPTEMBER NEW MEXICO WATER RESOURCES RESEARCH INSTITUTE 2004

NATIONAL DESALINATION EFFORTS

Frank LeitzU.S. Bureau of Reclamation

P.O. Box 25007 (D-8230)Denver, CO 80225

Frank Leitz has 42 years of experience in the fieldof desalination and water treatment. This comprisesperformance, supervision and monitoring ofresearch; proposal evaluation and selection ofresearch projects; equipment and componentdesign; field testing; economic application studies;procurement; and equipment shakedown. Itincludes specialized experience with the processesof reverse osmosis and electrodialysis. Frank’sexperience includes 13 years in private industrywith a major manufacturer of desalinationequipment; 29 years with the federal governmentworking on all aspects of desalination plants, andtreatment of acid mine drainage; three years inSaudi Arabia working with the US-Saudi JointCommission, located in Riyadh, as ResearchCoordinator and as Team Leader working primarilyon establishment of the desalination Research,Development and Training Center in Al Jubail; and10 years as member of the Editorial Board ofDesalination Journal. Frank received B.S., M.S.,and The Chemical Engineer degrees from M.I.T. He has more than 60 publications in desalination, watertreatment, mass transfer, electrochemical processes, and computer simulations. Frank also has four patentson membranes and electrochemical cells.

Thank you, Bobby, for that introduction. The titleof my presentation is a little grander than my talk. Thetalk really is about the national desalination effortviewed from a Reclamation perspective. There areother agencies in the government that work ondifferent aspects of desalination and I am not going tocover their efforts. On a biographical note, I spent anumber of years working for a desalination companybefore I came to the government and I suspect that Iwas working on desalination before some of themembers of this audience were born.

To begin, I’ll give you an outline of my talk: I willstart with a few comments on national needs, providethe status of the desalination effort as we see it,

describe some of Reclamation’s current activities and,finally, list some places where you can get information.

National Needs

A number of people at this meeting have alreadymentioned drought. Figure 1 shows drought conditionsas of January this year. The darker colors, the red andthe browns, represent the really bad areas and theyseem to cover most of New Mexico. Personally, Ihad not appreciated how bad things were until I drovedown here and noticed by the side of the road a coupleof yellow and black diamond shaped signs that said

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D0 Abnormally DryD1 Drought - ModerateD2 Drought - SevereD3 Drought - ExtremeD4 Drought - Exceptional

U.S. Drought MonitorU.S. Drought Monitor

Source: D. Le Comte, NOAA/NWS/NCEP/CPCSource: D. Le Comte, NOAA/NWS/NCEP/CPC

Drought Conditionsas of January 2004

Http://drought.unl.edu/dm

Figure 1.

Worldwide Capacity of MSF and ROWorldwide Capacity of MSF and RO

Source: Dave Furukawa, 20031966 1968 1970 1972 1974 1976 1978 1980 1982 1984 1986 1988 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000

Millions of Gallons Per Day

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Figure 2.

Seawater RO in Tampa Bay, FloridaSeawater RO in Tampa Bay, Florida

Figure 3.

“Watch for water.” Now, I did not see any but Ipresume that if I had I was supposed to dial 911 orsomething.

Along with the drought, which hopefully will beover one of these days, we have long-term trends.One of those is population growth and the resultingincreased need for water. The population of the 17western states in 1902 was 11 million. I am not surewhy someone picked 1902 except that that was theyear that the U.S. Reclamation Service was founded.The 17 western states are basically Reclamation’s areaof concern. In 1990, those states had a population of76 million, and in 2000, 91 million. It’s no surprise thatin the future, it is going to get more crowded here.

Between the years 2000 and 2025, the populationof this area is expected to increase from 91 million to126 million persons. Water withdrawals are predictedto increase from 91 million acre-feet to 284 millionacre-feet. This represents an increase of 89 millionacre-feet that must come from somewhere.

Where is this water going to come from? We haveidentified five possibilities that we are looking at, oneof which, desalination, is what I will talk about today.The other possibilities are reuse, transfers, waterconservation, and other new sources of water.

Status of Desalination

If I could only get two points across to you today,the first one would be that desalination is here andnow. Figure 2 is a picture of the worldwide growth ofthe use of desalination, both curves of which are atabout 3,000 million gallons per day. Don’t ask whydesalination plant capacities are expressed in millionsof gallons instead of acre-feet; it’s just that way. Water

people generate this state of confusion to keepeveryone on their toes.

Both thermal processes and membrane processesin the year 2000 were running about 3,000 millions ofgallons a day cumulative capacity. This is probablydivided among something like 10,000 differentdesalination facilities of one sort or another.

For those of you who have not seen a picture of abig desalination plant, Figure 3 is a shot of the TampaBay, Florida plant. To give you some scale, note theordinary-sized automobiles toward the bottom left;you’ll get the idea that this is a fairly large facility.

Figure 4 shows where desalination plants arelocated in the United States. According to the IDA2002 Worldwide Desalination Plants Inventory ReportNo. 17, about 2000 plants with a product capacity ofover 150,000 gallons per day were scattered around

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Figure 4.

Number of Desalting Plants by StateNumber of Desalting Plants by State

0 Plants1-56-1920-99> 100

Plants Plants

Plants Plants

Plants Proposed for the U.S.Plants Proposed for the U.S.

BrackishSeawater

Source: U.S. Desalination Coalition, 2003Source: U.S. Desalination Coalition, 2003

Figure 5.

0

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1991 Santa

Barbara, CA

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Israel

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Decline in Seawater Desalination CostsResulting from Evolution in Technology

and Increase in Facility Size

Decline in Seawater Desalination CostsResulting from Evolution in Technology

and Increase in Facility Size

Figure 6.

the U.S., representing municipal, industrial, and purewater plants. Notice that the states with the largestaccumulation are California, Texas, and Florida withover 100 plants per state. Only a couple of states inthe U.S. do not have an identified desalination plant inthis list. This report lists 20 plants in New Mexico.

Figure 5 shows locations for proposed desalinationplants in the United States. One cannot miss the factthat the largest single cluster is around Los Angeles.

The second point I want to get across is thatdesalination prices have gotten to the point where theyare reasonable – not cheap, but reasonable. On Figure6, I have used figures for seawater desalinationalthough I recognize that New Mexico is not going tobenefit from that in a big hurry, but these are a goodrepresentation of the cost trend. Please notice these

are specific plants. They are fairly large seawaterplants starting with the 1991 Santa Barbara plant. Atthat time, the cost of desalinating 1,000 gallons ofseawater was almost $6.00. Over the next decade,cost has gone down to about $2.00 per 1000 gallons inAshkelon, Israel. In case you wondering about thevalidity of these costs, most of these are plants built,owned, and operated not by a municipality, but by aprivate entity that runs the plant. These figuresrepresent transfer costs to the water utility. So theseare very definite, real costs. Whether the companymakes money on the deal or not is something elseagain. At any rate, these are probably the best valueswe have for real costs and they show a very significantdecrease over time. The source of these data is“Desalination Market Analysis 2001 – Today andTomorrow” by Aqua Resources International,prepared for the Bureau of Reclamation, October2001.

With this in mind, let’s look at a comparison ofwater costs. Sea water desalination costs $2.00 to3.00/ 1000 gallons. This represents desalination costsand does not include distribution costs.Characteristically, brackish water desalination costs$1.00 to 2.00/1000 gallons, keeping in mind that costsare highly dependent on the chemical makeup of thebrackish water. These again represent productioncosts.

Now what does water sell for? I looked up mylocal water utility in Evergreen, Colorado, and I ampaying (in addition to connect charges) $2.50/1000gallons for the first 9000 gallons used. Our watercomes from a mountain lake. It is put through a micro-

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filtration plant, stabilized and delivered. The costincreases with the next 5000 gallons used to $3.00/1000 gallons, and above 14,000 gallons, we pay $7.00/1000 gallons. A surtax in added when we are in adrought period. Thus, the production costs associatedwith desalination are not to far off from what somepeople currently are paying.

As for bottled water, I did a survey at myneighborhood market. The highest cost water I sawat the Kroger store near where I live was $8.56/gallon—note this is per gallon, not per 1000 gallons.The cheapest bottled water they had sold for just undera dollar per gallon.

Current Reclamation Activities

The Bureau of Reclamation partners with manyother entities and organizations including theWaterReuse Foundation, American Water WorksAssociation Research Foundation, National WaterResearch Institute, Membrane Applied Science &Technology Center, Center for Biofilm Engineering,Middle East Desalination Research Center, SandiaNational Laboratories, and the Interagency Consortiumfor Desalination and Membrane Separation Research.You can see that many folks are working on differentaspects related to water desalination and we try tobring groups together to share problems and to avoidduplication of effort. Our research program at this pointis largely guided by the desalination roadmap that youwill hear about in the next presentation by TomHinkebein of Sandia National Laboratories.

One of our major efforts right now is getting theTularosa Basin National Desalination Research Facilitystarted. Your program cover has an architect’srendering of the facility.

It is reasonable to ask why we do research indesalination. We want to create options for waterplanners and water supply agencies. It seemsappropriate for the government to share in the risk insome of the R&D investments. You heard ProfessorTarquin talk earlier about the work he is doing on limetreatment. Some of the avenues he’s gone up makesense and some efforts work very well. We are willingto share some of the risk inherent in research. Wewant to show how new technologies and practicescan be made sustainable. We need to provideinformation on how these things work. And we wantto create confidence so that a design engineer can goin, design a plan, and expect it to work reasonablywell.

Our Desalination and Water Purification R&DProgram is authorized by Public Law 104-298. Youcan look it up on the internet. It is the so-called “SimonAct.” Senator Simon was a fairly far-sighted personwhom, unfortunately, we no longer have with us. TheProgram’s primary goals are to increase the nation’susable water supply; to develop and demonstrate theeffective desalination and water treatmenttechnologies; and to lower the costs of desalinationtechnologies and related systems. We do not makeany water with desalination, we make water that wasunusable into usable water.

This Program is national in scope, unlikeReclamation’s other efforts that are limited to the 17western states. This is a national program with a strongnationwide constituency and we do applied research.The “applied” probably should be underlined. We arenot really into basic research that somebody might use20 years from now. We want to support research thatsomebody can take out into the street in a few years.The projects are cost shared, they are competitive,merit reviewed, and we constantly look at the “value”of the project.

I want to go quickly through some of the programson which we are currently working. A gentlemanearlier asked about oil fouling. Yale University isstudying cleaning of fouled membranes. A foulant is amaterial that collects on a membrane surface and slowsdown passage of water through the membrane.Colloidal material is very finely divided particles thatmake water turbid or cloudy. Organic foulants comefrom decay of vegetative matter and frequently givecolor to natural waters. Scaling results from exceedingthe solubility of salts like calcium carbonate and calciumsulfate. Biofouling results when bacteria settle on asurface and make themselves at home. All of thesehave affected membrane plants at one time or anotherand each may require a different method of removal.

Montgomery-Watson-Harza is a company workingon removing perchlorate. This is a relatively newcontaminant that people have started to worry about.It presumably has some undesirable health effects.

The Dow Chemical Company is looking at thepossibility of using large diameter membranes. Thestandard conventional size for big plants is an 8-inchdiameter element that is 40 inches long. A consortiumunder the leadership of Dow is looking at much largermembranes, 16-18 inches. They are looking ahead atwhat process simplification we have if we go to muchbigger elements instead of the relatively small ones.

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The Texas Water Development Board is justcompleting a study on using oil fields for concentratedisposal. A number of non-technical, institutional andpermitting problems will need to be resolved.

Finally, a Professor at the University of Coloradois looking at taking pilot plant information or smallerbench-scale information and conducting plant-scaleengineering with it. It will be interesting to see hisresults.

Our FY-03 pilot projects include dewvaporation,a process we are testing in Phoenix. It is a distillationprocess but it is a low temperature process andhopefully it will be able to use waste heat to furtherconcentrate and come up with possibly either dry orsolid material. Corollo Engineers is investigating riverbank filtration as a pretreatment process. Another pilotproject is being conducted by Novaflux Technologies.In the Novaflux process of cleaning membranes, aspray of fine water droplets shoots through a membraneelement. The droplets may contain a detergent to aidcleaning. By dispersing water in air, a much highershear force can be applied to the membrane surfacethan can be obtained with the conventional flowing ofa stream of water through the element. They use aspray containing very small amounts of cleaningsolution and the technique gets much higher shear forceright at the membrane where you want to do yourcleaning. Their preliminary investigations have beenvery successful.

FY-04 new research studies are in the process ofbeing approved and are being processed through ouracquisitions department so I can’t name any names.However, the projects will include: membrane processwork on produced waters; adding thermal processesto water treatment cost model; a study of the presenceand removal of boron from water; a study of biofilmattachment to membranes; and a study to increasewater recovery from high silica waters.

Produced waters are the great flushes of salinewater that come out of gas wells when they are firstdeveloped. It is very expensive to get rid of this waterbecause it usually contains a lot of salt and othercontaminants. Right now the technique is to re-injectit. If we could treat this water at a reasonable cost,there is a chance of being able to put some of thiswater to useful purposes and to limit the amount ofwater we have to reinject.

We have a cost model that has been published. Itis quite effective, however, it does not include thermalprocesses and that is something that we are workingon right now.

The latest contaminant to come down the pikethat people are worried about is boron. We have agroup that will study not only the current distributionof boron in potential source waters but how effectivesome of our desalination processes are in removal ofboron.

I mentioned biofilms earlier in terms of foulants.We are funding a study where we look at how biofilmsattach themselves onto membranes with the intent ofdetermining possible prevention and removal.

Finally, we are looking at increasing the waterrecovery from high silica waters. I am sure nobodywho was here this morning could possibly guess whenwe would be doing that.

Figure 7 shows one of the new processes, DirectContact Membrane Distillation (DCMD). This is areal quirky process, but it may turn out to be veryuseful. The diagram depicts the sides of a very narrowplastic tube; brine is put on one side and cold water onthe other side. The water distills through the pores ofthe membrane. The appealing part of this process isthat the path the water has to move along is in theorder of a few microns.

We are also going to have a pilot plant on a zerodischarge seawater concentrate disposal system. Ialways have reservations about “zero discharge”because zero is never quite zero. This project looks athow we can recover useful materials. A chemicalengineering professor is working on the project andhas come as close as I know of anybody to what reallyis important or possible from this sort of standard.

Figure 7.

FY04 Pilot ProjectsFY04 Pilot Projectso Direct Contact Membrane

Distillation (DCMD)

o Zero Discharge Seawater Concentrate Disposal Plant

o Direct Contact Membrane Distillation (DCMD)

o Zero Discharge Seawater Concentrate Disposal Plant

DCMD Membrane UnitsDCMD Membrane UnitsDCMD Process DiagramDCMD Process Diagram

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Available Information

Technology transfer is an important part of ourprogram. It does not do us any good to have informationand final reports if we cannot get them out to thosewho need the information. We have an active groupthat has developed and published a handbook forplanners, Desalination Handbook for Planners. Ourcost model, WTCost©, is a water treatment costestimation program sponsored by AMTA. Desalnet isbeing marketed through the American Water WorksAssociation and contains 50 years of a full-textdesalination literature database. This represents some1200 reports that were originally generated by theOffice of Saline Water and are very difficult to findnow. We have the databases on CD and they are allword searchable. Anybody who is trying to look througha bunch of reports for information can appreciate thevirtue of the keyword search.

Finally, here are three websites that will give youaccess to our information: • Program Homepage – www.usbr.gov/pmts/

water/ desal.html • Newsletter – www.usbr.gov/pmts/water/

wfw.html • Research Reports – www.usbr.gov/pmts/water/

reports.htmlMy parting thought for today comes from Senator

Simon: “If we spent five percent as much each yearon desalination research as we spend on weaponsresearch, we could enrich the lives of all humanity farbeyond anything anyone has conceived.”

To which I say, Amen.