CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — City leaders were in California last week taking a tour of two desalination plants. They say they’ve learned some valuable lessons that they can apply to the Inner Harbor Desalination Plant which is set to be built in the Hillcrest community.
City Manager Peter Zanoni along with other city staff members and two councilmen made the trip to look over the 50 million gallon a day desal plant in Carlsbad. They then looked at the 3 million gallon a day setup in Santa Barbara.
Zanoni told 3NEWS that one idea he is going to incorporate into the City's first desal plant is a system where they will be able to use energy from the desal process to help run the plant.
"In the desalinization plants with the high pressure that is used at that last step to take all of the dissolved solids out of the water that takes a lot of energy. In recent times plants are recovering some of that energy and using it to run the operations of the plant," Zanoni said.
The city manager also spoke with officials at the plants about what they wished they had done differently.
"Some of the challenges they had to overcome because a third party either owned or operated their plant," he said. "If they had done it differently they may have tried to do what we are going to do which is we own it, we run it."
Councilman Roland Barrera was on the California trip and says officials there admitted that the cost of desal was a big worry but not now after nearly 10 years of operation.
"A majority of people we talked to said yes there was consternation in the beginning with regard to the cost, but then when it comes to the point that you’re out of water once eight or 10 years have passed then all of a sudden at that time you know the public embraces it because they’d just rather have the water," Barrera said.
Right now city officials are certain that the state will approve the City’s discharge permit in the coming months and that the Inner Harbor Desal Plant should be operational some three years later.