Mexican developer wants to build desalination plant in Baja California, possibly to swap water with a U.S. urban water agency

From the Voice of San Diego:

The developer behind the Bajagua Project LLC, the controversial effort to boost Tijuana’s lagging sewage treatment infrastructure, has come up with a new proposal to build a desalination plant in Baja California.

The proposal from San Marcos businessman Enrique Landa has been dubbed Nevagua. It calls for the city of Tijuana to use water from a Baja California desalination plant. In exchange, the Mexican government would give up an equal amount of its annual slice of the water it receives from the Colorado River. Instead of flowing to Mexico, that swapped water would be stored in Lake Mead, a massive reservoir east of Las Vegas, where a United States-based urban water agency would tap into it. If it succeeded, the proposal would give water agencies from across the arid West a way to tap into the Pacific Ocean without having to shoulder the impractical costs of directly connecting pipes to the ocean.

Landa’s group would guarantee the water supply to the yet-to-be-identified urban agency, while building and operating the desalination plant, according to a 13-page presentation the developer prepared in March 2007.

Craig Benedetto, a spokesman for Landa, said the proposal was a back-burner idea that had never gained traction with any water suppliers in the United States. This project is nothing,” Benedetto said. “It’s going nowhere, it’s gone nowhere.”

Interesting he should mention that.   I wouldn’t count that option out yet.  I attended the Southern California Water Dialog meeting on Wednesday, and one of the speaker presentations was on the upcoming meeting with Mexico on March 11th to discuss Colorado River issues. Desalination plants are on the agenda. From the article:

Mexico’s share of the Colorado River has been a controversial subject with the United States for decades. The United States and Mexico signed a treaty in 1944 that guaranteed Mexico 1.5 million acre feet of water from the Colorado each year. (An acre foot is about 326,000 gallons, enough to supply two families for a year.)

But as the United States increased its dependence on the Colorado, the water that flowed into Mexico became saltier and seriously declined in quality. The United States eventually agreed in the early 1970s to build a desalination plant in Yuma to improve water quality. The treaty and subsequent negotiations have given Mexico a valuable trading chip as the West faces its predicted dry future.

“The Mexicans have 1.5 million acre feet that they can use for trading purposes. If the price is right, why not?” said Steve Erie, a political science professor at University of California, San Diego, who has studied water politics.

Building a desalination plant would be easier and less expensive in Mexico than in California, he said, because “you don’t have the regulatory system down there that you have here. You don’t have the speed bumps. All of the hoops that Poseidon has gone through with the Coastal Commission (to permit its Carlsbad desalination plant) aren’t there south of the border.”

Poseidon currently operates six desalination plants in Baja California. Get the full story from the Voice of San Diego by clicking here.

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