I have observed that the Perth desalination facility is often lauded as a baseline example of good environmental practice. It’s a large-scale facility for which the energy, brine discharge and waste product issues are reported to have been considered in depth before construction and during operation. I recall a similar presentation at the IDA Dubai World Congress in 2009 that investigated the concept of a life-cycle analysis of a desalination plant – I cannot recall whether this included Perth as an example?
A few facts and figures provided by Guguin: the facility has a production capacity of 144Ml/day and serves 1.8M people who had previously “10 years of water scarcity”.
The speed with which the plant was developed is incredible: 2004 announcement, 2005 contracts awarded, 2006 environmental licence granted, Nov 2006 first water produced. To me, this highlights why desalination must figure favourably for similar cities seeking solutions to urgent water problems. If it can be done in Perth with reported environmental compliance then this model can be developed elsewhere. The facility is also reported to have won the 2006 Global Water Award for ‘Desalination Plant of the Year’.
However, I do not believe that environmental protection and compliance is the same as sustainability…
Personally, the life cycle analysis provides a more comprehensive insight into sustainability. There is no mention of construction or end-of-life decommissioning impacts in Guguin’s assessment (although, of course, there may not have been sufficient time in the presentation to consider these issues). For me, sustainability should also be measured in the behavioural impact of the water users – I would have liked to have discovered whether people in Perth use less water per head now or whether desalination has a lit a green light to greater water use? So what if it has? Devil’s advocate could conclude that if the energy costs can be 100% accounted by wind and the environment is shown not to be adversely affected by the facility then maybe Western Australians should continue to water their lawns? Perhaps this is another research question for another time…
Guguin detailed the environmental assessment undertaken. I have specific notes concerning brine dilution, brine toxicity, monitoring protocols (of the discharge and the marine environment) and can discuss in comments if required.
Guguin also provided a helpful slide regarding the wind farm that provides the energy for the facility (reproduced below). In the light of the earlier presentations concerning wind-RO production this inevitably threw up more questions for me than it answered.
Finally, I asked Guguin a question concerning the relative cost of the EIA process compared to the build cost of the facility – if this is lauded as a gold-standard in environmental compliance then it would be interesting to know the spend on this: 50%, 5%, 0.5%. Unfortunately Guguin could not answer this question. It’s possible it a tad ambiguous and if I were to research this more fuller I guess I’ll need to define my terms of reference a bit more clearly.
Perhaps all the questions could be answered by a visit to the plant at the end of the year? Such a visit would be very interesting indeed.
ReplyDeleteI think there are going to be excursions over the week of the IDA World Congress in September. Definitely worth signing-up.
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