Sydney Water has met anti-environment accusations with a report entailing a detailed and expensive list of conservation measures to be employed through construction and operation of the Desalination plant in Kurnell.

Artists impression of Kurnell Desalination Plant Photo:sydneywater

Controversy is not a stranger to the Desalination Plant, with its predicted adverse impact to the environment causing uproar throughout the community and differing levels of government.

However, the conservation strategies has shown an increased effort by Sydney Water to convince the public that they are doing all they can to minimize the impact the Plant will have on the environment.

Martha Halliday, the Community Relations Manager at the Desalination Plant, spoke about the importance placed on conservation; “Not only do we have environmental assessments and plans to make sure the impact is minimal, we also have a team of experts in a variety of different fields overseeing all of the workings at the plant while it’s in operation.”

15 hectares of land on the site has been set aside for a conservation area, where native plants and animal species are hoped to thrive. A community of Grey-Headed Flying Foxes spent one season in a corner of the reserve before relocating to an unknown area, leaving their home for the last 100 years.

A green mesh fence has been erected around the construction site, designed specifically to keep frogs out in an attempt to protect them from drilling and heavy machinery. The fence was designed especially for the Green and Golden Bell Frog and the Wallum Froglet species, although they have never been sighted around this area.

Sydney Water will conduct frequent surveys into the impact the Plant has on the surrounding marine and estuaries environment. The latest survey has shown an increase in the Weedy Sea Dragon populations, but the effects this will have on the ecosystems and lifecycles has not yet been recorded.

Researchers have been employed to investigate the impacts the drilling sounds will have on the Whales visiting Botany Bay. The predicted effects are published as minimal, even though no research has actually been conducted into this topic.

“The site here when we first took it on was really in a very bad way,” Halliday said about the Desalination Plant site. “People [were] using it as a dumping ground.”

Sydney Water’s conservation strategies have been in effect from June 2007. The Kurnell community has promised to keep a close eye on any adverse changes that may occur to the natural environment surrounding their homes and beaches.

Kurnell Desalination Plant pipe location Photo:Ella Wiseman

Desalination of seawater has become a necessity, but it has to be done right.

As any globe will reveal, there’s no shortage of water on Earth. Unfortunately, over 97 percent of it is too salty for us humans to drink, and only a tiny fraction of what remains is in the rivers, lakes, and groundwater that we’re able to easily access.

In much of the world, these freshwater supplies are growing scarce, and competition for these resources promises to be one of the hot-button geopolitical challenges of the next 50 years and beyond. As climate change worsens droughts, accelerates desertification, and whittles away glaciers (the water towers providing life to so much of the world), it’s no wonder that some experts are looking towards that enormous pool of salty water for a drink.

It’s not a novel idea. Nearly 50 years ago President John F. Kennedy noted, “If we could ever competitively, at a cheap rate, get fresh water from salt water, that it would be in the long-range interests of humanity which would really dwarf any other scientific accomplishment.”

About 2,300 years before Kennedy said that, Aristotle was already experimenting with the idea. Since then, desalination—or the process of removing salts from ocean or brackish water—has been proven possible, and employed in some form for ages. Around 200 AD, sailors boiled seawater and captured the salt-free evaporation when they ran out of drinking water supplies. This “thermal desalination” process can be scaled, but the costs are, for most, prohibitively high; most of the larger-scaled projects that took root were in the oil-rich and water-poor Middle East.

In the past couple of decades, though, a more promising, scalable solution has surfaced—reverse osmosis. Bear with me as I revisit high school chemistry. Take a semi-permeable membrane that water molecules can travel through, but not larger sediments like salt. Put very salty water on one side and less salty water on the other, and water will travel through towards the salty side until the concentrations are even. That’s osmosis. Alternately, apply pressure to the saltier side, and water flows through the membrane, but the salt gets stuck.  That’s reverse osmosis, and the result is fresh water. And that’s how most modern day desalination plants work.

Today, there are over 13,000 desalination plants around the world, with a collective capacity to produce about 14 trillion gallons of drinkable water every day. Sounds like a lot, but it’s only about 0.5 percent of global demand. There are, however, many more in the works, particularly around large coastal cities in areas more vulnerable to drought or desertification. Parched Australia is a global leader, and an increasingly desperate California is getting serious about the technology. One plant planned for the San Diego area, for example, would churn out 50 million gallons per day, a drought-proof freshwater supply for about 300,000 people.

The upfront costs of building the plants are considerable—San Diego’s Poseidon Plant is budgeted at $300 million; Melbourne is fixing to spend $2.9 billion on one that’d be amongst the world’s largest—but after they’re built, the chief expense is the energy it takes to push the seawater through the membranes.

Then there are the environmental costs, which are slowing down the approval processes in regulation-heavy places like California. As ocean water gets sucked into the system, aquatic organisms can get sucked up with it. Then, besides drinking water, there’s the other byproduct of the process—very salty, and often hot, brine, which if released straight back into the ocean can create dead zones, worsening a problem already plaguing many coastal cities.

Both these problems can be addressed, albeit at some added expense. Sucking up seawater from beneath the sandy ocean floor avoids capturing unlucky creatures, and letting the brine mix with ocean water for awhile—as the Poseidon project is promising—before discharging it will prevent the dead zones.

But the chief environmental concern is certainly the energy it takes to run the system. There’s a perverse logic in burning fossil fuels to make up for a shortage of freshwater—essentially worsening the problem you’re trying to solve.

Of course, we can look to the wind and sun to power the desalination process. Offshore wind turbines make a lot of sense for plants that need to be located on the coast. Concentrated solar power could also do the trick. (Here’s a study (pdf) that makes a very strong case for CSP powering desalination.)

The tough reality of the world’s increasingly dire water crisis means that desalination isn’t merely an option, but a necessity. The only sensible way to power these processes—without further contributing to one of the main causes of the freshwater shortages—is to do it without greenhouse gas emissions. Without exception, desalination needs to be coupled with clean energy.

Posted by Ben Jervey for Good.is

Desalination of seawater has become a necessity, but it has to be done right.

As any globe will reveal, there’s no shortage of water on Earth. Unfortunately, over 97 percent of it is too salty for us humans to drink, and only a tiny fraction of what remains is in the rivers, lakes, and groundwater that we’re able to easily access.

In much of the world, these freshwater supplies are growing scarce, and competition for these resources promises to be one of the hot-button geopolitical challenges of the next 50 years and beyond. As climate change worsens droughts, accelerates desertification, and whittles away glaciers (the water towers providing life to so much of the world), it’s no wonder that some experts are looking towards that enormous pool of salty water for a drink.

It’s not a novel idea. Nearly 50 years ago President John F. Kennedy noted, “If we could ever competitively, at a cheap rate, get fresh water from salt water, that it would be in the long-range interests of humanity which would really dwarf any other scientific accomplishment.”

About 2,300 years before Kennedy said that, Aristotle was already experimenting with the idea. Since then, desalination—or the process of removing salts from ocean or brackish water—has been proven possible, and employed in some form for ages. Around 200 AD, sailors boiled seawater and captured the salt-free evaporation when they ran out of drinking water supplies. This “thermal desalination” process can be scaled, but the costs are, for most, prohibitively high; most of the larger-scaled projects that took root were in the oil-rich and water-poor Middle East.

In the past couple of decades, though, a more promising, scalable solution has surfaced—reverse osmosis. Bear with me as I revisit high school chemistry. Take a semi-permeable membrane that water molecules can travel through, but not larger sediments like salt. Put very salty water on one side and less salty water on the other, and water will travel through towards the salty side until the concentrations are even. That’s osmosis. Alternately, apply pressure to the saltier side, and water flows through the membrane, but the salt gets stuck. That’s reverse osmosis, and the result is fresh water. And that’s how most modern day desalination plants work.

Today, there are over 13,000 desalination plants around the world, with a collective capacity to produce about 14 trillion gallons of drinkable water every day. Sounds like a lot, but it’s only about 0.5 percent of global demand. There are, however, many more in the works, particularly around large coastal cities in areas more vulnerable to drought or desertification. Parched Australia is a global leader, and an increasingly desperate California is getting serious about the technology. One plant planned for the San Diego area, for example, would churn out 50 million gallons per day, a drought-proof freshwater supply for about 300,000 people.

The upfront costs of building the plants are considerable—San Diego’s Poseidon Plant is budgeted at $300 million; Melbourne is fixing to spend $2.9 billion on one that’d be amongst the world’s largest—but after they’re built, the chief expense is the energy it takes to push the seawater through the membranes.

Then there are the environmental costs, which are slowing down the approval processes in regulation-heavy places like California. As ocean water gets sucked into the system, aquatic organisms can get sucked up with it. Then, besides drinking water, there’s the other byproduct of the process—very salty, and often hot, brine, which if released straight back into the ocean can create dead zones, worsening a problem already plaguing many coastal cities.

Both these problems can be addressed, albeit at some added expense. Sucking up seawater from beneath the sandy ocean floor avoids capturing unlucky creatures, and letting the brine mix with ocean water for awhile—as the Poseidon project is promising—before discharging it will prevent the dead zones.

But the chief environmental concern is certainly the energy it takes to run the system. There’s a perverse logic in burning fossil fuels to make up for a shortage of freshwater—essentially worsening the problem you’re trying to solve.

Of course, we can look to the wind and sun to power the desalination process. Offshore wind turbines make a lot of sense for plants that need to be located on the coast. Concentrated solar power could also do the trick. (Here’s a study (pdf) that makes a very strong case for CSP powering desalination.)

The tough reality of the world’s increasingly dire water crisis means that desalination isn’t merely an option, but a necessity. The only sensible way to power these processes—without further contributing to one of the main causes of the freshwater shortages—is to do it without greenhouse gas emissions. Without exception, desalination needs to be coupled with clean energy.

Posted by Ben Jervey for Good.is

(This is the article, published in The Age on February 7th, which helped some people put the stimulus package in the context of climate change)

MY OLDER Italian neighbour was lamenting the recent hot weather. “I think it might be climate change,” she said, and threw up her hands despairingly. “What can we do?” She sighed. “Nothing really.” I could sympathise, of course. Despair about the future of our planet is in no short supply. But I couldn’t help feeling that despair is a luxury we cannot afford.

As Wendell Berry, the Kentuckian agrarian poet and essayist says of the climate crisis, “The great obstacle is simply this: the conviction that we cannot change because we are dependent on what is wrong. But that is the addict’s excuse, and we know that it will not do.”

The science is overwhelming. Greenhouse gases, caused largely by our insatiable appetite for cheap, abundant energy, are heating the planet, melting ice caps and altering the climate, and we are nearing the dangerous tipping point towards catastrophic runaway climate change. Yet we continue to rely on unsustainable fossil fuels and our water use ignores the reality of this dry continent.

If this is the reality, why do we continue living as we do?

I work for Urban Seed, a community that has made a home in the heart of the city of Melbourne for about 15 years. We offer a free lunch, and often share it with the city’s most marginalised, many of whom struggle with long-term drug, alcohol and gambling addictions. Over the years we’ve learned a thing or two about addiction — how insidious it can be, how destructive of wellbeing. But most of all, we’ve learned that addiction is not confined to someone shooting up heroin in a back laneway.

Often the executive on Collins Street buying the latest technological wizardry to “keep up” or the person shopping for this season’s designer handbag are equally addicted — though some addictions are more socially acceptable than others.

Often I would sit with Luke as he slumped, defeated, over his lunch.

His addiction to the pokies had seen him blow his entire pension cheque at the casino — again. He would speak of how he had told himself just the night before that this time he wouldn’t do it. But the human capacity for self-delusion is immense. His denial of the odds led him to believe that this time it would all be different.

Such is our problem with climate change. We are addicted to the very things that accelerate global warming. We know the problems but remain in denial about what it is going to require of us to fix them. Like an addict who thinks they can control their addiction or stop any time they like, we cling to the train as it hurtles towards the abyss.

Addictions often develop because of a need to escape a reality that is too difficult to face. Whether it’s a heroin user escaping childhood abuse or an insatiable society escaping the reality of a world of finite resources, the same dynamic is involved.

Rudd’s recent “consume our way out of recession” policies are a perfect example. Despite the fact that we know our overconsumption is accelerating global warming, this Government, which was elected on taking “real action on climate change”, is encouraging us to buy more, consume more. The desalination plant is another exercise in contradiction — the logic of replacing one problem (lack of water) with another more destructive one (pollution, massive energy consumption). Yet without the Earth there is no human life and no economy.

Perhaps what we need is a 12-step program to rid ourselves of our addiction to destructive habits. Our experience at Urban Seed is that addictions are not cured by government policy or one-size-fits-all solutions. They are cured by slow, costly, patient, local, personal work. So it will be with climate change.

We need prophetic communities of imagination who can lead us to an alternative future — one that does not deny the realities of the ecologies in which we live but co-operates with their processes and yields to their limits.

But as any addict knows, the first step is admitting you have a problem — first to ourselves and then to each other.

So let me begin with this: My name is Simon and I am an addict.

Reverend Simon Moyle is public engagement co-ordinator for Urban Seed.

This story from ABC news on the giant cuttlefish in Spencers Gulf in South Australia which are at threat from a proposed desalination plant and construction of a deep sea port for shipping iron ore out of South Australia.

Written by Paul Dalby on 29 October 2008

I like the idea of a desalination plant. If Dubai can lush green golf courses I’d like to be able to grow a few square metres of lawn and not have to replace dead plants every spring, without fear of breaking the law. I also want to have 10 minute showers and enjoy the lovely sound of sprinklers on a warm summer’s night. 

And while I sympathise a little bit with the NIMBY’s in South Gippsland who don’t want the plant built in the Wonthaggi area, I take issue with the name of their protest group “Your Water, Your Say”.

OK it is my water, and I say build the fucking desal plant!

I think “Our region, our say” would be a far more appropriate name. Or, if I was being more cynical, “Our property values, our say”.

“In keeping with the recent tradition or renaming major infrastructure projects, may I present the Morris Iemma Memorial Desalination Plant. It sucks up power like there’s no tomorrow while giving little in return, pretending to be green when it is, in fact, an environmental abomination, punshing the entire state for the government’s inability to plan for Sydney’s needs and pretending to be part of the solution when it’s really part of the problem.”

Dave Campbell, letter to the Daily Telegraph.

The man nobody likes.