U.S. high-tech water future hinges on cost, politics

By Steve Gorman

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Anyone who has visited Disneyland recently and taken a sip from a drinking fountain there may have unknowingly sampled a taste of the future -- a small quantity of water that once flowed through a sewer.

Orange County Water District officials say that's a good thing -- the result of a successful, year-old project to purify wastewater and pump it into the ground to help restore depleted aquifers that provide most of the local water supply.

The $481 million recycling plant, the world's largest of its kind, uses microfiltration, reverse osmosis, ultraviolet light and hydrogen peroxide disinfection to treat 70 million gallons (265 million liters) of sewer water a day, enough to meet the drinking needs of 500,000 people.

Just don't call it "toilet-to-tap."

County officials prefer the term "Groundwater Replenishment System," a name chosen after similar projects in Los Angeles and San Diego fell prey to public misconceptions, also known as the "yuck" factor," and local election-year politics.

Their experience underscores one of the great lessons facing municipal officials across the U.S. West as they seek to bring purification and recycling technologies to bear against drought cycles expected to worsen with climate change.

Scientists, policymakers and investors agree ample know-how exists to solve the water crisis; the difficulties lie in energy constraints, economics and politics.

"We can solve most, if not all, of the world's biggest water problems with technology that exists today," said Stephan Dolezalek, who leads the clean-energy practice of Silicon Valley venture capital firm VantagePoint Venture Partners. "What we may not have is the willpower."

"A NEW DAY" FOR WATER

Experts say price distortions in the West, where government has long subsidized farm irrigation and the cost of pipelines and pumping stations to send fresh water from distant sources to cities, have discouraged the development of new supplies.

"The water that we use in the West is generally undervalued," said Tim Barnett, a marine research physicist for the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.

The math has changed as the region's water grows scarcer, its population swells and environmental pressures mount.

"This is a new day, and we have conditions which compel us to look to new water resources," said David Nahai, general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, the nation's largest municipal utility.

He and other water managers see tremendous potential in stepped-up conservation, from encouraging more waste-conscious personal behavior to installing low-flow showers, toilets, appliances and lawn sprinklers.

Such measures could add more than 1 million acre feet of water -- enough for 8 million people -- to Southern California's regional supply alone, or about 25 percent of current annual use, according to a report by the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp.