California Coastal Commission OKs desalination plant in Orange County
A proposed desalination plant would bring clean water to Orange County.
The California Coastal Commission in Orange County voted 4-0 to OK the facility’s permit approval on Monday, the Los Angeles Timesreported today.
The decision is a victory for the developer of the proposed plant, the California Desalination Corporation of Huntington Beach (DesalCo), which could draw water out of the ocean via a water transfer cable to generate more than a billion gallons of water per day.
The Orange County Planning Commission will then consider the project’s request for a conditional use permit, which could allow it to go forward if it gets approval from the county’s planning commission and board of supervisors.
But the project isn’t expected to go forward before the end of the year, if not early next year.
The development team is still working on the project’s environmental assessments and the water transfer system, which will pump the water from the ocean to the plant, the Timesreported. The plant won’t operate at full capacity until those are completed and it receives a permit from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Timesnoted.
The project would use ocean water — which is fresh, clean water. The plan is to then remove salts and other impurities, which reduce the quality of the water, in a process that’s called desalination.
Water transfer
The plant would take water from the ocean at the mouth of the Santa Ana River. Instead of being pumped up through pipes to the plant, the water would be transferred from the ocean to the facility via a water transfer cable, which would draw the water from the ocean and use it to generate more than a billion gallons of water per day that would otherwise be wasted, according to the project proposal.
“It’s an enormous waste of water,” Jeff Jacobson, a spokesman for the California Desalination Corporation, told the Times. “The desalination that’s going on today doesn’t take any amount of water that can even begin