Borrego Sun - Since 1949

Global water experts will meet in San Diego at the end of August to look at southern California’s pioneering technologies for easing world-wide water shortages. The IDA World Congress on Desalination and Water Reuse was last held in San Diego in 1999. The Carlsbad seawater desalination plant and the Orange County Water District’s Groundwater Replenishment System will both be 2015 world congress topics. Doug Eisberg, a chairman of the technical program committee said both projects are models for water industries around the world. The Carlsbad plant uses reverse osmosis, which was originally developed and commercialized in San Diego by General Atomics in the 1960s. Reverse osmosis has been used successfully for seawater desalination in Israel, Saudi Arabia, Persian Gulf states and Australia. The process is used in California for brackish water, with two brackish water desalination plants currently operating in San Diego County in Oceanside and Chula Vista, with four more being planned. Israel gets close to 40 percent of its water from desalination. Carlsbad’s seawater desalination plant, Poseidon Water, is scheduled to begin operating this fall and will be the largest commercial desalination plant in the Western Hemisphere. The Orange County Water District’s Groundwater Replenishment System supplies around 100 million gallons of recycled water each day, which prevents the depletion of groundwater basins. The wastewater treatment facility began operation in 1976 and has since been replaced by a larger plant.