This ought to be interesting.
Texas regulators issued an environmental permit Thursday for the Port of Corpus Christi to build what could become the state’s first seawater desalination plant — but the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency may refuse to accept it.
The state permit for a desalination plant on Harbor Island represents the culmination of years of business strategy, political maneuvering and lawyering effort on behalf of the port, which wants to build a large-scale facility to convert seawater from the Gulf of Mexico into freshwater. The marine desalination plant is expected to cost at least half a billion dollars to construct; an estimate provided to the Texas Water Development Board puts the cost at more than $800 million.
Environmental groups have fought the project for four years on the grounds that wastewater from the plant could harm sensitive coastal ecosystems.
Now the port also will have to spar with the EPA, which can refuse to recognize the state permit on the grounds that it doesn’t comply with the Clean Water Act. The federal agency is concerned that Texas’ permit may not be sufficient to protect aquatic life and water quality, according to letters obtained by The Texas Tribune, and that the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality did not send the permit to the EPA for federal review.
The dispute centers on what type of permit is required: The EPA believes the desalination plant needs a “major” environmental permit — which requires EPA review — while TCEQ says the facility should be considered a minor project, which does not require federal review.
“If the TCEQ issues [the permit] without responding to the EPA … the EPA’s position will be that it is not a validly issued [permit],” Earthea Nance, regional administrator for the EPA’s Dallas-based Region 6, wrote in a Sept. 2 letter to TCEQ Commissioner Jon Niermann. Some experts speculated that the EPA may sue the TCEQ to determine whether Texas is legally obligated to consult the EPA on such seawater desalination permits.
TCEQ commissioners on Thursday seemed to dismiss the EPA’s concerns. Commissioner Bobby Janecka said he considered the federal agency’s objections but called them “outside our window of decision” on whether to issue the permit.
The Harbor Island plant is one of five marine desalination facilities proposed for Corpus Christi Bay — all racing to be the first built in Texas. Two are proposed by the Port of Corpus Christi and two by the city of Corpus Christi. (The port and the city have soured on one another as partners on desalination.) The fifth plant was proposed by a now bankrupt plastics company, which has since been taken over by Corpus Christi Polymers.
Water demand in the Corpus Christi region’s water planning area — pushed by a growing population and a boom in manufacturing and petrochemical facilities that need water to cool their plants — is expected to outstrip supply by more than 31,000 acre-feet, or about 10 billion gallons, by the end of the decade if new water sources are not secured, according to the state’s water plan.
The water planning area — made up of 11 counties in South Texas’ Nueces River Basin along the coast — projects that 70% of its new water resources will have to come from desalination plants by 2030.
“The potential for water independence from these kinds of facilities is very big,” said Manish Kumar, an associate professor of environmental and chemical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, who has worked on and advised desalination projects. “The significance is huge, because we have the coastline, we have energy and in many places, we have a need for high-quality water.”
While Texas already has more than 50 plants that desalinate brackish groundwater into freshwater, according to a state database, seawater desalination is much more technically difficult, energy intensive and expensive to achieve on a large scale because ocean water is much saltier than brackish groundwater.
The seawater plants also give less bang for buck: Marine desalination plants are able to convert around 40% to 50% of seawater into freshwater, while groundwater desalination plants convert closer to 80%, Kumar said. The remaining water — made saltier by removing most of the now fresh water — is discharged as waste.
There’s a lot more, so read the rest. The environmental groups stress that they are not opposed to desalination, but they don’t think the TCEQ has done enough to ensure that the wastewater will be disposed of safely – basically, they want it dumped farther out into the Gulf of Mexico, where it can be more easily dispersed. I don’t know how much that might add to the cost of the project, or how big an effect it might have on future projects. I do know that the lawsuit that will result if the EPA decides this is a “major” project and requires their review will be another opportunity for the right-wing legal machine to attack the regulatory state, and I would rather that be avoided if possible. We’ll see how it goes.
UPDATE: I drafted this a couple of weeks ago, and more recently a lawsuit has been filed by residents of a historically Black neighborhood in Corpus Christi to stop this construction on the grounds that it violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. We’ll see how that goes.