An Arizona water agency took a historic vote Wednesday to pursue multiple water augmentation projects to boost the state's water supply — including desalination.
The state Water Infrastructure Finance Authority unanimously approved four water augmentation proposals for exploration. This is the product of a yearslong effort that could bring in hundreds of millions of acre-feet of water to Arizona.
“This is a huge milestone for the state of Arizona. We have huge water challenges facing us. This is going to be a key tool,” Arizona Department of Water Resources Director Tom Buschatzke said.
WIFA is a ways away from developing any of the projects on the table.
Last week, the Long-Term Water Augmentation Committee Meeting met in private “executive” sessions to consider those proposals and made confidential recommendations to the full WIFA board about which projects to pursue. The board agreed to all of them.
Over the next several months, the public will participate in an information gathering stakeholder process that will also include environmental reviews.
A better sense of the cost will also emerge from those meetings.
“We’ve been waiting for something like this to develop and not for lack of trying over a long period of time, and we can certainly have cause for celebration,” WIFA Long-Term Water Augmentation Committee Chair Ted Cooke said.
The projects are not mutually exclusive.
“They're all on their own trajectory,” Cooke said. “They’re not competing against each other.”
Desalination could benefit Arizona in a few ways. The state could develop a desalination facility in either California or Mexico and bring the water into Arizona — or could negotiate a deal to trade that water in exchange for some of California’s or Mexico’s allocation of Colorado River water.
Of the four proposals, most of them involve exchanging new water sources for Colorado River water.
WIFA Chair Jonathan Lines said he considers ongoing Colorado River negotiations to be a separate issue from the desalination plans.
Currently, Arizona, along with six other basin states and Mexico, is jockeying for a large share of river water, but at least some states will have to make cuts.
Depending on which desalination proposals go forward, Lines said he would want an “equal for equal” river trade.
If, for example, Arizona makes 100,000 acre-feet of cuts to its share of the Colorado River in ongoing basin state negotiations and also develops a desalination plant in Mexico, Lines said Arizona would seek to take 100,000 acre-feet of Mexico’s share of Colorado River water in exchange for providing the same amount of desalinated water to Mexico.
WIFA Director Chelsea McGuire said the augmentation proposals won’t necessarily fix the Colorado River shortage, but can be part of the solution.
“There's no silver bullet. A couple years ago at CRWUA (the Colorado River Water Users Association), I forget who it was that used this term, but it's silver buckshot,” she said. “There are multiple solutions that are all going to come together to bring us to a point of better water security and water stability for the future.”
The proposals
The first proposal on the table is from Acciona-Fengate Water Augmentation Alliance and has four ideas all rolled into it.
Acciona-Fengate is the partnership between two groups. Acciona is a Spanish firm with experience developing desalination plants and Fengate is an investment firm.
One component is “irrigation modernization.” It proposes improving irrigation infrastructure to save water, and then trading that conserved water for a portion of California’s, Utah’s and Mexico’s allocations of Colorado River water.
The second component of Acciona-Fengate’s proposal is desalination on the Gulf of California. This plan would entail building a desalination plant in Mexico and exchanging the water it produces for a portion of Mexico’s Colorado River water allocation.
The third component of the proposal is also desalination - but on the Pacific Coast in Baja California. Under that concept, water from the Pacific Coast plant would be exchanged for some of California’s and Mexico’s allocation of Colorado River water. Alternatively, the water would be physically transported to Arizona for Arizonans to use.
And the final part of Acciona-Fengate’s plan is treating wastewater from Mexico and Colorado, allowing it to be used locally in those areas. Then, Arizona would get a negotiated amount of Mexico’s and Colorado’s portion of Colorado River water.
The next three proposals approved are all from EPCOR - a Canadian-based utility company.
The first EPCOR idea would use treated wastewater that is currently in California and, after building a facility near the treatment plant, reuse the treated water in Mexico. Arizona would invest in the new facility and exchange the treated water for a part of Mexico’s share of Colorado River water.
As proposed by EPCOR, this Water Importation Project (WIP) concept would use existing technology to treat wastewater currently being collected and treated in California for reuse in Mexico. The WIP concept would include the phased development of a potable reuse facility near the existing treatment plant. Arizona’s investment would support the development of the facility. Water supplied by the potable reuse would be exchanged for a portion of Mexico’s allocation of Colorado River water.
The second EPCOR idea is, once again, desalination. This time in Baja California on the Gulf of California. The project would include building a pipeline to Mexico. Then, Arizona would exchange the desalinated water for a portion of Mexico’s share of Colorado River water.
The last EPCOR proposal would recover runoff water and increase aquifer storage. Arizona would exchange the water in the project for part of California’s allocation of Colorado River water.
The Long-Term Water Augmentation Committee considered a fifth proposal involving groundwater, but didn’t recommend it to the board.
And a desalination plan submitted by Israeli-based company ZARETAW didn’t make it through the procurement process.
ZARETAW’s president is Erez Hoter-Ishay. Three years ago, he was the project manager for Israeli company IDE.
Former Gov. Doug Ducey was in conversation with IDE about building a desalination plant in Mexico, but some stakeholders were asked to sign NDAs before WIFA engaged in any sort of procurement process. That led to accusations of backroom deals and a vehement statement by the government of Sonora, Mexico, pledging to never work with IDE.
Ultimately, WIFA determined that ZARETAW hadn’t submitted the information in its proposal the agency had requested.
Next steps
A key part of this “predevelopment process” is public comment.
All the water project proposals are now publicly available, and Arizona officials will be able to begin environmental impact reviews of the projects.
No money has been obligated to any of the companies yet.
Arizona also intends to approach other potential parties, like California and Mexico, during this new stage of the process.
The cost of the proposals is also yet to be determined, but will be made clearer over the next several months.
How much water will Arizona get out of this?
Depending on how many of the proposed projects actually make it to the development stage, Arizona stands to receive up to around 500,000 acre-feet of water a year through these plans.
For context, one acre-foot of water is enough to serve about three single-family homes for a year.
But that amount is an extremely rough estimate. Some of the proposals make an estimate for the amount of water they think Arizona could receive within a period of several years.
And based on the proposals, none of the projects would get water to Arizona before 2028. For the desalination projects, they’re not expected to be operational until 2031 at the earliest.
Also, all of the project proposals would require cooperation with other states and/or Mexico, who haven’t been part of negotiations yet, meaning the amount of water they would potentially agree to deliver is undetermined.
How much will it cost?
The price of these projects is one of the biggest unanswered questions so far. Some Arizona taxpayer dollars will presumably go into the project, but plenty of private equity is also going to be a part of the development.
Under Ducey, WIFA was promised $1 billion over the course of three years, largely to attract a big augmentation project. But under Gov. Katie Hobbs, most of that funding was clawed back.
McGuire said the agency isn’t anticipating a bigger budget anytime soon.
“I sure hope there's going to be, but I am not going to bank on hope, and I think that we've seen that this is going to be a very, very tight budget year. We are in no way anticipating that we will see more money coming, at least in this year,” she said.
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