How big can desalination plants get?

Joan E. Price – South Central New Mexico Correspondent

In the historical effort to clean saline water sources for municipal use, costs have skyrocketed for the technologies that would do the cleaning. In the meantime, customers in the rural areas of Otero County pay for desalinated water by the gallon in small stores – for coffee, tea and juicers – because the taste is so much better.

The technology to desalinate millions of gallons is the same as that used in a small store run by Maurice and Mary Hobson in Tularosa, where individuals who live far away from water services – or those whose wells have dried up, pay the cost for nearly pure water rather than use well water or the village tap.

In 1978, Maurice Hobson, an elected representative for the Lincoln/Otero areas, introduced the very first desalination bill into the NM legislature; House Bill 409, seeking $200,000 from the state and $700,000 from federal sources. But now, the very first state-of-the-art desalination plant underway in NM, in Alamogordo, is getting expensive at $27 million from the state, including lawsuits and technical expenses. Just the environmental study has required over $800,000, according to a story by Kendra Wells in the Alamogordo Daily News (February 2008).

In those early days, Hobson was following the work of a cadre of scientists calling themselves the NM Research Institute, including Dr. Mark Jones and Ernst Steinhoff, a rocket scientist from Germany working at White Sands Proving Grounds (which became the White Sands Missile Range) and Holloman Air Force Base. Steinhoff had a passion for groundwater and climate modeling.

Hobson starting listening to Steinhoff about the possibility of using technologies to clean salts and contaminants out of the ancient ocean bed of the Basin to supplement the sources of fresh water streams in the mountains.

In those days, water quality was not an issue. People drank local water. Some of it tasted okay; some tasted very bad. Lots of wells were useable, recalls Hobson, who grew up in the farming community of Tularosa. “The cattle would drink the water in our tanks where the green algae were growing. That was the sweet water – the algae cleaned the mineralized water flowing in from wells.”

“Steinhoff was brilliant,” said Hobson. “He was a global thinker. He wanted to help the people. The Tularosa Basin had the second biggest underwater lake in North America. The biggest was in the Salt Lake basin in Utah.”

By the late 1970’s, Steinhoff had analyzed all the existing data on rainfall. He showed Hobson that droughts were in three cycles – a 70-year cycle, a 7-year cycle and an intermediate cycle. As Hobson remembers, “He had projected those out in a chart. As I looked at this, I said, ‘look, those all come together at the beginning of 2000. Boy, that is going to be a barn burner of a drought!’” “Oh, yes,” Steinhoff agreed. “That is going to be a bad one.”

Hobson brought HB 409 to Santa Fe seeking state funds for test wells around Carrizozo at the high end of the Tularosa Basin. NMRI reasoned that the water; fresh, brackish or mixed, was dropping in altitude underground over 160 miles south to the Rio Grande River and El Paso, Texas.

“NMRI planned to watch surrounding individual wells that had prior water rights carefully to avoid any impacts,” said Hobson. This would then become a model for small-scale desalination plants to be constructed, one by one, moving south close to mountain freshwater recharge.

HB 409 made it all the way to Gov. Bruce King’s desk but King vetoed the matching funds request from the federal government. It could have been a number of things – the finance authority, opposition to Steinhoff, or legislators who had interest in desalination projects in their own districts. “I never really understood that,” said Hobson.

Hobson went into small-scale desalination in 1998, setting up The Water Source, a store in Tularosa. All the components of desalination technology – the village water supply and electricity, filters, pressure valves, membranes, ultraviolet light, and storage of nearly pure produced water in two 1,000-gallon tanks occupy a ten by thirty foot space in the back of his outlet. He understands it all and continues to find new improved technology for his ongoing interest. A steady stream of people from the surrounding area come with containers large and small to enjoy better tasting low cost drinking water.

Since Ernst Steinhoff passed away in1987, prices for water have risen dramatically. “It is just like the price of gas,” said Hobson. “When gas was 32 cents per gallon, they didn’t care how clean or efficient it was. Now it’s ten times that much so now it’s relevant.”

The first inland desalination plant has been in operation in El Paso and is currently running at 4% of capacity. The 20,200 square foot plant can produce up to 27.5 million gallons a day, reported David Burge for the El Paso Times last year.

John Balliew, the utility’s vice president of operations and engineering, told Burge, “A joint project between El Paso Water Utilities and the army, it was designed to meet growth in El Paso and at Fort Bliss and to combat droughts.”

In the meantime, the El Paso Water Utilities website shows the shift in the subsurface groundwaters of the Rio Grande and the drain on the groundwaters of the Tularosa Basin that have been developing as the border city grows.

NEXT MONTH: Part two looks at companies that have claimed deep groundwater sources on the border between Texas and NM in a grab for potentially lucrative brackish deep waters to supply NM, Texas and Mexico industries. In the eyes of NM State Engineer John d’Antonio, this is the next “gold rush.” What are the stakes for the borderlands?

©Joan E. Price is a freelance writer and photographer based in Tularosa. Email rainhousejoan@hotmail.com.

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