CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — For years, Corpus Christi city leaders have been working on getting a drought-resistant water supply for our area, saying it is not enough to simply rely on rainfall and conservation efforts.
Tuesday’s decision by City Council to move ahead with the funding and construction of the Inner Harbor Desalination Plant have raised two questions among residents:
What exactly is desal, and what comes next?
To put it simply, desalination is the process of taking seawater and removing salt and other minerals from it. That way, it can be further treated and consumed by humans. It can also be used for agriculture and commercial purposes.
Drew Molly, the newly appointed Chief Operating Officer of Corpus Christi Water, said the process requires a large plant, in this case, one capable of producing 30-million gallons of water a day.
“When you look at it and compare it to plants in the United States, this would be the second-largest municipal seawater desal plant in the country,” Molly said.
In Corpus Christi, water would slowly be removed from the bay by intake pipes covered with screens in order not to disturb any sea life. A process called "reverse osmosis" would then make a portion of the water usable by sending it through a membrane. What is left would be put back into the bay using a process called "jet diffusion".
City officials said doing it this way will result in negligible impacts on aquatic life. However, critics point out that it has too many unknowns and needs further study.
Molly said the next step takes that into consideration.
“Our plan is to build a pilot plant this year where we would test some of the equipment on a smaller scale to make sure that it works exactly how it needs to work,” he said. “We’re going to run water through the facility and we’re going to test it and we’re going to generate a lot of data, and this data will ultimately be shared with the TCEQ so that it’s very clear as to how this water is going to behave once it gets integrated into our existing water system.”
Molly told 3NEWS that they will spend this year looking for the right firm to design and build the desal plant so that if everything goes well with the smaller pilot plant, the city will be ready to move ahead.
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