By Joshua Partlow | The Washington Post
Arizona’s newly expanded water finance board had met only three times. The state authority had no director. Nor had it made a public call for water projects to boost Arizona’s dwindling water supplies from the Colorado River.
But earlier this week the board was suddenly facing a vote on whether to support a $5 billion project led by an Israeli company to build a plant to desalinate ocean water in Mexico and pump it 200 miles across the border — and through a national monument — to ease the state’s water crisis. Arizona and Mexico have been talking for years about removing salt from water in the Sea of Cortez, but this plan was new to many, and the rush for the state’s blessing in the waning days of Republican Gov. Doug Ducey’s administration worried some in the state.
“I’m sorry but this reeks of backroom deals,” State Sen. Lisa Otondo (D) told the board during its meeting on Tuesday.
The accelerated debate also reflected the urgency of the water crisis facing the American Southwest. With water levels in key reservoirs approaching dangerously low thresholds — as a historic drought extends into its third decade — many officials want to import water into the Colorado River basin from elsewhere.
“The risk here clearly, in this case, outweighs the rush,” Andy Tobin, a member of the water finance board and a former speaker in the Arizona House of Representatives, said during [the Dec. 20] meeting. “We’ve got folks who are running out of water.”
IDE Technologies, an Israel-based company that has built desalination plants around the world, claims it can deliver an oasis of up to 1 million acre-feet of water to the drought-parched state — an amount roughly equal to what central and southern Arizona took from the Colorado River this year.
During its presentation to the Water Infrastructure Finance Authority of Arizona, two representatives from the developer, plus a Goldman Sachs official involved in financing for the project, presented their vision for the largest desalination plant in the world. The representatives said the project would be entirely financed by private money but they want Arizona to pledge to buy the water at an unspecified future price.
“We need a long-term commitment that when we deliver water to you, you will buy it,” said Erez Hoter-Ishay, manager of the Arizona Water Project Solution Team, as the IDE-led consortium is called. “Simple as that.”
On Tuesday, the water finance board voted unanimously approve a nonbinding resolution to continue to study the project.
IDE said the plant would be built near Puerto Peñasco, along the Sea of Cortez in the Mexican state of Sonora. The roughly $5 billion first phase would involve building a plant that sucks in seawater and filters it through membranes to remove the salt.
Then it would be pumped through a 200-mile pipeline north, crossing into the United States at the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, an international biosphere reserve, before following a highway toward Maricopa County, where it could join canals that serve Phoenix and Tucson. The first phase, a single pipeline, could carry about 300,000 acre-feet of water to Arizona and could be operational by 2027, with future pipes supplying up to 1 million acre-feet, the IDE representatives said. An acre-foot equals 326,000 gallons, or enough to cover an acre of land in a foot of water.
Environmental groups have raised concerns that the plant, which would pump brine back into the Sea of Cortez, could damage marine habitat, and the pipeline could disrupt the sensitive desert in the national monument.
Jennifer Martin, a program manager with the Sierra Club in Arizona, told the board that the state should be focused on conserving water, moving away from water-intensive crops such as alfalfa, and reining in rapid growth, rather than shifting the environmental burden onto Mexico and future generations.
“Sierra Club urges you to put the brakes on this expensive, energy-intensive and environmentally-harmful proposal now and not to rush it through in the waning days of 2022 and the Ducey administration,” she said.
Read More (subscriber content)
Some stories may only appear as partial reprints because of publisher restrictions.
Related: Scottsdale will cease providing hauled water outside the city limits