While in Dubai looking at water desalination plants, NSW Premier Bob Carr announced that the proposed $2 billion desal plant for Sydney would be located in the Kurnell industrial area in southern Sydney (adjacent to the Caltex oil refinery).
So it is going ahead!
The plant is expected to supply up to a third of the city’s daily drinking water needs.
The proposal is already being condemned by many
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,10117,15895531-1242,00.html .
Aren’t these people, who are complaining the water from desal will cost too much, the same people who have been complaining we don’t pay enought for our water and/or we will all be doomed because Sydney is going to run out of water?
I think it is good that a state government is finally making a serious investment in some new water infrastructure.
Interestingly it was only last September, I think the 15th September 2004, that Alan Jones had me on his radio program wanting to talk about water – though he did most of the talking. I remember raising the possiblity of desalination and that ended ‘the conversation’.
There has been some discussion at this web-log on the issue of desalination
https://jennifermarohasy.com.dev.internet-thinking.com.au/blog/archives/000612.html with some useful links with the comments.
I am reminded of a quote from Bjorn Lomborg, “Desalination puts an upper boundary on the degree of water problems in the world. In principle we could produce the Earth’s entire present water consumption with a single desalination facility in the Sahara, powered by solar cells. The total area needed for the solar cells would take up less than 0.3 percent of the Sahara” (pg 153, The Skeptical Environmentalist, Cambridge University Press).
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD has worked in industry and government. She is currently researching a novel technique for long-range weather forecasting funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation.
I was a bit surprised that John Howard chose to make his comments about there being other cheaper options that the Carr government has ignored. People are always willing to wave their hands and allege that there are better ways of doing things. It’s easy to do, after all, but meaningless without costings. I’d have thought John Howard would have known better.
Supposedly the NSW opposition will release costings for their proposed alternative solutions. They will interesting, if they ever see the light of day. I suspect that the opposition will discover what everyone has discovered when they sit down and do the sums – which is that there are no easy answers.
Sylvia Else
Sylvia, I think the PM was to some extent set-up. I get the press stuff from his office as email updates and this came out yesterday morning as part of an interview that started off with a question about troop deployments in Iraq:
JOURNALIST:
Prime Minister, as a Sydneysider who I know likes to drink the water, have you heard Mr Carr’s plans about the desalination (inaudible)?
PRIME MINISTER:
I haven’t heard the detail, although it’s been widely speculated now for some days that an announcement would be made. I would like to hear the case. We do have a problem of water availability in Sydney and the responsible thing for me to do is to look at all of the possibilities and I don’t want to attack anything off the top of my head; that’s not responsible. I do however know that desalination is expensive, it’s also energy intensive. I would hope that all of the recycling options are fully explored. I do worry that the New South Wales Government has been a little too ready to dismiss almost out of hand the options of recycling and I’m not convinced that the case for preferring desalination has been strongly enough made by those who would want to have desalination rather than recycling. But it’s an important issue and having stated that principle I don’t want to say that under no circumstances
would desalination be a good idea, it’s just that it does have a number of disadvantages.
JOURNALIST:
Would you like to see more effort put into recycling (inaudible)?
PRIME MINISTER:
Well I think that option must be fully explored.
I would think that migrating to more clement sources of water would be the way to go.