Pouring Cold Water On Desalination Plants  

In a rare role reversal, nominally green friendly premier Bob Carr is getting hammered over his desalination plant proposal by everyone, even the totally ungreen Rodent (who is probably just taking the opportunity to do some political points scoring).

The Premier, Bob Carr, visiting a desalination plant in Dubai yesterday, announced three sites at Kurnell, near the Caltex oil refinery, had been identified as suitable - because they had fewer residents than other prospective locations such as Bondi, they already had large industrial areas, and because construction could proceed with little delay.

The project could ultimately produce a third of Sydney's water needs by removing the salt from seawater. But the state opposition parties, environmentalists, academics, Sutherland Shire Council and John Howard all criticised the high energy consumption and greenhouse gases associated with a desalination plant. They also said it would discourage Sydney's residents from treating water as a scarce resource.

"Desalination is expensive," Mr Howard told reporters in Sydney. "It's also energy intensive. I do worry that the NSW Government has been a little too ready to dismiss, almost out of hand, the options of recycling, and I'm not convinced that the case for preferring desalination has been strongly enough made."

Opposition spokesman on energy and utilities, Andrew Stoner, said: "The water produced by a desalination plant is up to twice as expensive as recycling and up to four times as expensive as stormwater harvesting. It doesn't make sense to allow hundreds of billions of litres of water to flow out to sea and to then draw in seawater to turn it into fresh drinking water at huge expense." Greens MP Sylvia Hale said recent changes to state environmental planning laws would allow the Government to push the plant through without thoroughly assessing environmental damage.

Associate Professor Greg Leslie of the University of NSW said it could be disastrous for aquatic life because its giant intake pipe would be like that of a vacuum cleaner. He belongs to a group of academics specialising in sustainability, and has worked on water treatment and reuse projects in Australia and overseas. The scientists questioned the "extreme" proposal to build a plant normally reserved for arid zones, without doing any testing or piloting of the operations. "And why are we doing this when Sydney gets 1200 millimetres of rainfall and recycles less than 3 per cent of its waste water?" Associate Professor Leslie said.

The amount of power required to run desalination plants is the major objection to them being constructed (WA Premier Geoff Gallop was on TV tonight defending Perth's plant by saying it was fully powered by renewable energy sources, mostly wind power), the danger to sea life is also a problem, with a small population of sea dragons living down near Kurnell, if I recall correctly.



While the desalination plant is getting a cool reception, it appears that the oceans themselves are rapidly getting warmer according to these Canadian reports.

It's not just the days that are getting hotter, but also the planet's waters, according to a new Fisheries and Oceans report. In the sixth annual DFO State of the Oceans report, researchers note that since the 1970s land temperatures have increased a full degree, representing a greater increase (0.7 degrees) than the temperature difference between The Little Ice Age (circa 1600 B.C.) and the Medieval Warm Period (circa 1050 A.D.), a period of more than 2000 years.

Researchers also found that last year ocean temperatures fluctuated in some places to as much as a full degree higher than normal. "Although short term changes like this can be viewed as noise on a long-term record, the size of the change is extraordinary. If the ocean continues to warm as the land has, we can expect to see invasions of warm water species, coral reef damage and loss of habitat for cold water species such as salmon," reads the report.

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