PHOENIX — Arizona will provide taxpayer money to help private companies develop plans for at least two and possibly three desalination plants in California or Mexico under proposals approved by a state agency's board.
The three projects are among seven that the board of the Water Infrastructure Finance Agency decided to move ahead on developing new water supplies for Arizona. In a series of 9-0 votes Wednesday, the board agreed to take a more detailed look at the proposals and to negotiate over how the agency and the companies involved would split costs for the studies and eventual development.
But while all seven are classified as water importation projects, only one would actually involve building pipelines or other facilities to convey water from other U.S. states and Mexico into Arizona as a way of enhancing this state's dwindling water supplies.
The rest would involve Arizona working with a private company to build projects to desalinate seawater or treat wastewater for drinking, among other projects in those states and Mexico. Then, Arizona would exchange the rights to that new water with the other states and Mexico for a portion of their existing Colorado River supplies.
The board's action Wednesday marked the first time the authority publicly released details of the projects, which it previously kept under wraps due to what it said are confidentiality requirements in state procurement laws.
As he cast one of his "yes" votes on one of the projects, board member Buchanan Davis said, "This is a legitimate concept. It’s a legitimate team of people working on it. And so now we are about to embark on a process to determine if it’s a legitimate project, as we evaluate all the risks, political, financial and environmental. I'm excited that we have something we can realistically look at."
Environmentalists, however, are already raising concerns about these projects, with a Sierra Club official telling the board there are many unknowns about their environmental impacts, costs, energy use and long-term consequences for Arizona communities.
Arizona will provide taxpayer money to help private companies develop plans for at least two and possibly three desalination plants in California or Mexico under proposals approved by a state agency's board on Wednesday. Here, the inside of a desalination plant in El Paso is shown.
Together, the projects could bring the increasingly parched Arizona anywhere from a total of 427,000 to 1.641 million acre-feet a year, according to one-page summaries of each project the agency posted on its website. The higher figure amounts to as much or more water than the 336-mile-long Central Arizona Project was delivering to its customers annually in its peak years, before it started cutting its deliveries in 2022 due to declining flows on the Colorado River.
But it's unlikely the board would authorize spending money to build the 1.641 million acre-feet worth of water projects because that's far more than prospective water customers, municipal utilities and private companies, have said they'd be interested in paying for, said Ted Cooke, a retired CAP general manager who chairs the agency's long-term water augmentation committee.
"I won't say never but I doubt WIFA would ever build 1.6 million acre-feet of capacity," Cooke said, using a commonly used acronym for the state agency.
The proposals come more than three years after the Legislature passed legislation ordering the agency to find workable projects to import water from other states or countries. At the time, the Legislature and then-Gov. Doug Ducey pledged to appropriate $1 billion over three years to cover part of these plans' construction costs. But since then, the Legislature has not appropriated that much, and trimmed appropriations to less than $400 million.
Cooke and other agency officials and board members stressed that the water garnered from the augmentation projects is not expected to compensate for all the cuts the state's cities and farms will have to take in CAP and other Colorado River-based water deliveries. The exact amount of those cuts will be determined once the seven Colorado River Basin states and the federal government settle on a plan to reduce their take of water from the depleted river.
Not every water user that wants to buy augmentation supplies is a contractor to buy Colorado River water, and "not every (Colorado River) contractor will want or be able to afford an augmentation supply," Cooke said at a briefing with reporters after the board meeting.
Chelsea McGuire, the agency's executive director, said that as someone once quipped, "There's no silver bullet for our water supply. There's only silver buckshot," meaning more than one new supply will be needed. The comment, from Kathryn Sorensen, a water researcher at ASU, came at the annual Colorado River Users Association in Las Vegas.
The projects' total construction and related development costs weren't shown in the summaries. Those costs will also be negotiated between the state agency and the companies making the proposals, agency officials said Wednesday. The agency's plan is to build these projects using "public private partnerships."
The board voted on four separate proposals, three from the large private water company Epcor and one from a partnership calling itself the Acciona-Fengate Water Augmentation Alliance. The Acciona proposal, however, actually combines four separate projects, including two desalination plants, into one proposal. Epcor's three proposals include a single desalination plant.
Specifically, the proposed projects include:
- Separate desalination proposals by Acciona-Fengate in Mexico and Southern California. One proposal calls for building a new plant at a still undisclosed location in Mexico. Possible water supply: 50,000 to 250,000 acre-feet annually.
The other proposal calls for "creating new water supply for Arizona through existing or planned desalination facilities in California and Baja California," the proposal's summary said. Possible water supply: 150,000 acre-feet annually.
- Epcor proposes building a desal plant in Baja California, and a pipeline to deliver its water north to near the U.S.-Mexico border for it to be distributed and used within Mexico via the Colorado River. Possible water supply: 167,000 to 500,000 acre-feet a year.
- Acciona-Fengate proposes to build new and upgraded, modernized infrastructure to reduce water losses and conserve water on farmland in California, Mexico and Utah, with Arizona in turn getting shares of their Colorado River supplies. Possible water supply: 16,000 to 466,000 acre-feet annually.
- Epcor proposes to build a new plant to treat wastewater being collected and partially treated in Southern California to drinking quality for use in Mexico. Possible water supply: 14,000 to 95,000 acre feet a year.
- Acciona-Fengate proposes to reclaim and treat wastewater to drinking quality in Mexico and Colorado for use in those places. Possible water supply: 20,000 to 130,000 acre-feet per year.
- Epcor proposes to invest in storage and recover for drinking purposes what it calls "excess runoff water," presumably from irrigation to grow crops. Possible water supply: 10,000 to 100,000 acre-feet per year.
The board heard from three speakers representing a California tribe and conservation groups urging it to not approve a fifth proposal from Cadiz, a publicly traded company that wants to extract groundwater from a large aquifer in the Mojave Desert about 60 miles west of Parker, Arizona. Many opponents have blasted it as unsustainable groundwater "mining" that they say would drain an aquifer that's both sacred to the Chemehuevi tribe in California and used heavily by area wildlife.
But at the board meeting, members said over and over, as Chairman Jonathan Lines put it, that the Cadiz proposal is "off the table."
The earliest any of these supplies would be available is 2028, their proposals show, although most wouldn't be ready for delivery to Arizona until the early to mid-2030s.
At the meeting, Sierra Club official Jennifer Martin raised concerns about the proposals "after reviewing the limited materials available" on them.
"It is clear that these projects raise profound questions about cost, feasibility, environmental impacts, and long-term consequences for Arizona communities. Desalination in particular remains extraordinarily energy-intensive and expensive, with major brine-disposal and marine ecosystem risks. What we’ve seen about all of these proposals offers too few specifics to meaningfully evaluate their benefits or harms," Martin said.
The fundamental issue involving all the proposed projects is that they rely on "private, for-profit corporations exerting substantial control over Arizona’s future water supply. That is not a path we should take lightly, or at all when the public bears the risk and corporations extract the profit," said Martin, an Arizona water program manager for the Sierra Club's Grand Canyon chapter.
Defending the use of public-private partnerships for these projects, board member Cooke said, "We need private equity to get this done, we need private expertise to get this done. WIFA cannot build plants, finance the plants and operate the plans on our own."
Summing up about the projects, McGuire told the board meeting, "These are real projects, this is no longer a hypothetical. This is no longer something that someone is dreaming of in a room somewhere.
"We are a critical piece of this puzzle. We will have a very large water supply gap without importation. It will take many, many solutions, many approaches," McGuire said.
