Water council a long shot, senator says

Molly Ball

Tuesday, Dec. 14, 2004 | 10:55 a.m.

The country's water needs are dire, and a national council is needed to address the issue before it's too late, the chairman of the Senate's energy committee told a Las Vegas conference on Monday.

But Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., also warned that his proposal had little chance of being realized in the current political climate, "while we are vulnerable, while the world is scary" -- and while deficits have ballooned.

Domenici, a six-term senator who chairs the Energy and Natural Resources Committee and the Energy and Water Resources Subcommittee, spoke at the annual national conference on desalination, the removal of salt from water so it can be used for drinking and other purposes.

The senator said the water shortage currently gripping the American West -- the result of a population boom combined with years of drought -- was one of the three or four most urgent issues facing the nation.

"Most of the time in our great country, we wait till an issue is right in front of us, ready to blow up, before we try to do anything about it," he said. "Water is right in front of us," and we are already late in addressing it, he said.

Domenici called for a water supply council on the federal level that would coordinate the water-related activities of national agencies with local authorities, the private sector, academia and nonprofits.

Such a council would be overseen by the U.S. Energy Department in partnership with national laboratories such as New Mexico's Sandia, Domenici said. It would prevent government programs from overlapping and would coordinate the allocation of resources, he said.

But Domenici was pessimistic about the proposed council's prospects. "It's not the best time to ask the federal government to start something new," he said darkly. "The next few years will not be good years for new programs."

The reason, he said, is that "The deficit's too big, and frankly we have not done a good job in the last several years of scaling down the domestic side of the budget."

And with limited resources, water and energy are not as high a priority as perhaps they should be because of security concerns and commitments in the Middle East, Domenici said.

"The resource of this great American science and technology is clearly not appropriately focused on that (water supply) problem," he said.

"It's time for us to mobilize ... It's time for that (coordination) to happen. In fact, the time for that has already passed," he added.

Both conservation and augmentation of water supplies -- using less water, and finding more sources of water -- are needed, Domenici said.

Converting the earth's plentiful supply of saltwater into fresh water is one possibility, but for now it is a distant one. The processes currently available are expensive and fuel-intensive.

The conference, which continues today at Caesars Palace, gathers representatives of federal, state and local agencies across the Southwest, along with engineering firms and nonprofits.

Currently, about 12,500 desalination plants supply about 5.5 billion gallons of water a day -- 1 percent of the world's drinking water.

Many of the plants are in countries, such as Saudi Arabia, with plenty of fuel and near-total lack of water.

In the next five years, $10 billion is expected to be invested in desalination, increasing output by only 1.5 billion gallons per day, according to a presentation at the conference by Karl Wood of the New Mexico Water Resources Research Institute.

In light of the staggering costs, experts say one of two things must happen to make desalination viable: either a major innovation to lower the cost, or increased demand to the point that desalination is worth the high price.

"As desalination gets less expensive and water gets more expensive, those lines will eventually come together," said Allen Biaggi, director of Nevada's Department of Conservation and Natural Resources.

Cost is not the only obstacle. The salt extracted in desalination must be disposed of. In the case of inland states such as New Mexico, salt removed from groundwater would have to be stored. Coastal states such as California could release the salt into the ocean, but heightening the sea's salinity could hurt the plants and animals of the deep.

"With any desalination process, what you do with the brine is huge," Biaggi said.

Domenici, in his speech, said government and the scientific community must come together to solve obstacles such as those facing desalination.

The focus, he said, must be "to make new breakthroughs as to the technology and the availability and augmentation of the water supply," he said.