San Diego Studying Desal in Mexico

http://www.voiceofsandiego.org/articles/2009/02/27/environment/muck/979mexdesal022409.txt

Studying Desal in Mexico

The San Diego County Water Authority's board will consider this week whether to spend $30,000 to study the feasibility of building a seawater desalination plant in or near Rosarito.

The concept under consideration envisions a desalination plant capable of producing 25 million gallons of drinking water each day, with the potential to expand to 50 million gallons -- enough for 112,000 homes and the same size as the proposed Carlsbad desalination plant.

The study and preliminary design is being done in cooperation with the Los Angeles-based Metropolitan Water District, the Southern Nevada Water Authority and the Central Arizona Water Conservation District. The Arizona district is paying for 10 percent of the study, the other agencies are each paying for 30 percent. Mexican agencies are contributing "in-kind" services, a water authority presentation says.

A Mexican desalination plant would have several potential water customers. The San Diego County Water Authority or Mexican water agencies could buy the water and use it locally. But the participation of the Arizona district, which operates the Central Arizona Project, and the Southern Nevada Water Authority, which supplies parched Las Vegas, could lead to a bi-national water swap.

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they built a desal plant in the early 90s, at a cost of around $34 million. IIRC, they started it up in the spring of 1993, just as the area was getting record rainfall, so they didn't need the desal plant's output. They ran it for a couple weeks, and then promptly mothballed it. As far as I know, they never restarted it.

One was built in Point Loma in 1960, sold to Cuba a few years later.