06 Aug They’d rather have a root canal …

A few weeks ago I attended the Texas Water Summit, a gathering of the Texas water cognoscenti – or “waterati” as one wag put it – to review how they propose to address the looming water crisis we face here.  Anyone who went there anticipating a broad-ranging discussion of our options went away sorely disappointed.

Yes, there were the paeans to conservation, duly noting that over a quarter of Texas’ “new” water demands over the next few decades were projected to be derived from conservation measures.  This is, of course, a testament to the fact that the cheapest water you will ever have is the water you’ve already got.  Why then it seems to escape all the finest water minds in Texas that one BIG part of the solution to our water woes is to stop sending perfectly good and useable water to that magical place we call “away” would seem to be a mystery.  Yet, from all evidence that could be observed at the Summit, that is the case.

That’s because the bulk of the discussion centered on two “plug-in fixes” – direct potable reuse and desalination, both of sea water for near coastal areas and of brackish groundwater for inland areas.  These are both “fixes” that simply entail plugging in hardware at the end of the pipe – in the case of direct potable reuse – or at the beginning of the pipe – in the case of desalination – obviating any need to reconsider the basic infrastructure model which those pipes represent.  Indeed, it seems that all our controlling institutions, and now all our finest minds, would rather have a root canal than to even consider a fundamental transformation of the form and function of our water resources infrastructure model.

I have written on this blog previously about this matter.  How the prevailing infrastructure model is essentially rooted in the circumstances considered to be paramount in the 19^th century, focused on making so much of the water that flows through our communities to go “away”, even as we search for “new” water to be piped in to make up for what was so gratuitously wasted.  And how society needs to move instead to an infrastructure model rooted in the water realities we face here in the 21^st century, a model featuring tighter water loops – meaning decentralization of the infrastructure – to maximize the water utilization efficiency.  And the fiscal efficiency of the money spent to assure we have a safe and adequate water supply.

For the uninitiated, “direct potable reuse” means piping the wastewater system effluent to a water treatment plant intended to turn that effluent into a safe drinking water supply.  That water would then be blended with the “normal” water supply and sent out through the water distribution system to homes, businesses and institutions, as part of the potable water supply.  Indeed, a major “charm” of direct potable reuse is that it does offer a “plug-in fix” at the end of the pipe – job done, “relieving” society of considering the matter in any more detail.

But that will come at a cost, well beyond the fiscal cost of the treatment facilities.  While those finest minds are hard at work determining what add-on’s to the water treatment system will make that safe water supply out of the wastewater effluent, they are doing this in an environment very light on information of critical importance.  Making the water “safe” in terms of exposure to pathogens is not at all difficult.  It’s all the other stuff in the water, stuff that we don’t even know what to test for, that is the unknown.  Just read the ingredients on your shampoo bottle, for instance.  But the biggest problem is likely to be pharmaceuticals, colloquially known as “pharms”.

The level of pharms in the wastewater is not well established, nor has the “safe” level for long-term ingestion of them been determined.  As one colleague who also questions this practice put it, if direct potable reuse becomes standard practice, “All our children may be born with mustaches.”  His point is that these chemicals, when ingested at low levels over a long time, may have health impacts that we cannot presently predict.  It is known that some pharms in wastewater – mainly the class known as “endocrine disruptors” – discharged to streams and rivers has resulted in fish changing sexes, even eliminating the male populations in some extreme cases.  That “canary in the coal mine” is what gives my friend pause about forging ahead with direct potable reuse.

As for desalination, there are two looming issues.  One is “disposal” of the concentrated brine that results from forcing the water through membranes and leaving the salts behind, to be discharged with the “reject water” from the desalination process.  As one speaker at the Texas Water Summit so succinctly put it, there is no safe disposal process for this brine at the moment for inland desalination plants.  (For coastal desalination plants, the reject water can be discharged to the sea, if proper arrangements are made to “adequately” disperse it.)  The current “best guess” at a “proper disposal practice” is to pump it into a deep injection well.

Which brings up the other issue – energy demand.  The energy use to pump the reject water into a deep injection well pales in comparison to the energy demanded to drive the desalination process.  Speakers at the Texas Water Summit spoke of the progress made on reducing energy demands by making this process more efficient, but still the energy use of this process is high.  And since it takes water – lots of water – to run the power plants which currently provide most of our energy, this practice has a bit of “eating its own tail” quality to it.  The carbon emissions entailed in making this energy will also drive climate change, which may exacerbate water supply issues in this region, so this only adds to that quality.

Again, these actions are the “flavor of the month” among the waterati exactly because they are the sort of “plug-in fixes” that technocrats can tackle – a sort of “all the brightest boys … with the biggest toys” (to borrow from the Rush song, “Manhattan Project”) means of addressing the issues at hand.  This approach doesn’t entail examining the infrastructure model and considering that fundamental transformation of its form and function, an action which will have to be actuated by broader society.  And which might threaten funding for those “toys”.

Now consider that a very small portion of the water distributed in a potable water supply system is used for things that require the water to be fully potable quality.  For certain, our outdoor usage does not require potable quality water.  Nor does toilet flushing.  Or really, laundry either.  This is a clue that direct NON-potable reuse may be a more profitable course of action.  And it would be toward maximizing this practice that a fundamental transformation of the infrastructure model would be aimed.

As reviewed in previous blog pieces on this site, this would entail moving toward distributed reuse schemes, treating and reusing the wastewater as close to where it is generated as practical.  We heard absolutely nothing about this at the Summit.  Perhaps that’s because such distributed reuse concepts would not entail the sort of “technical fix” actions that those flavor-of-the-month measures do.  The technology of distributed reuse is pretty “easy”.  The major challenges are institutional.

Again, an institutional challenge that it seems our controlling institutions would rather have a root canal than face.