By John — Desalination News
Spanish construction and engineering group Sacyr is leading a feasibility study for a seawater desalination plant in Baja California, Mexico, designed to channel water into the Colorado River system and ultimately boost Arizona’s water supply, according to Spanish-language reporting this month that lays out the clearest picture yet of a project previously known only in outline.
The proposal, called the Northern Gulf of California Desalination Plant, would see Sacyr build, operate and maintain a desalination facility on Mexico’s Gulf of California coast, with engineering firm Arcadis handling the technical design and Plenary Americas supporting the project’s financing structure. Desalinated water would travel through a new conveyance system to the Morelos Dam near the US-Mexico border, where it would enter the Colorado River system. Under the arrangement, Mexico would also be able to exchange a portion of its existing Colorado River allocation, freeing up additional water for use on the US side of the border.
Early estimates put the plant’s potential yield at up to 500,000 acre-feet of water a year — roughly 1.7 million cubic meters a day — with supply to Arizona not expected to begin until sometime between 2034 and 2039, underscoring how early-stage the project remains. No cost or investment figures have been disclosed, and the Sacyr-led consortium’s study is still limited to assessing technical, financial, environmental, cultural and regulatory viability rather than committing to construction.
The Northern Gulf of California plant is one of several Mexico-linked water-augmentation projects Arizona’s Water Infrastructure Finance Authority (WIFA) is now evaluating as the state looks for ways to offset a shrinking claim on the Colorado River. Desalination News reported last week that WIFA’s board had voted to fund feasibility studies for two further proposals from the Acciona-Fengate Water Augmentation Alliance, bringing the number of water-augmentation projects in the authority’s appraisal pipeline to five. The Sacyr-led Gulf of California plant is a separate proposal within that same pipeline, reflecting how many different consortiums — pairing Spanish infrastructure groups with Canadian financing and engineering partners — are now competing to supply water into Arizona’s system via cross-border deals with Mexico.
The underlying driver is the same across all of these proposals: Arizona faces cuts of at least 760,000 acre-feet a year from its 2.8-million-acre-foot Colorado River allocation, and state water officials have said repeatedly that no single state can resolve the river’s supply crunch acting alone. By helping finance new desalinated or reclaimed water production in Mexico in exchange for a share of that country’s existing river allocation, Arizona hopes to free up Colorado River water for its own use without directly expanding its draw on an already-overallocated river.
WIFA has approved only the first evaluation phase of the Sacyr-led study, and the authority has been clear that it will weigh execution and financing questions separately once preliminary results are in. With construction of any Gulf of California desalination plant expected to cost in the billions of dollars — far beyond the $386 million the Arizona legislature has appropriated to WIFA for water-augmentation projects generally — a financing decision, let alone a groundbreaking, remains years away. Still, the project’s emergence as a named, multi-partner proposal marks a more concrete stage than the brief mentions it has received in WIFA’s pipeline discussions to date.
(Source: Europa Press, Diario Estrategia)