By John — Desalination News
El Paso Water is adding a sixth reverse osmosis treatment skid to the Kay Bailey Hutchison Desalination Plant, a move the utility says will push the world’s largest inland desalination facility from 27.5 million gallons a day to 33 million gallons a day, a roughly 20 percent increase in output for a city that depends on the plant to stretch a shrinking Rio Grande supply.
Scott Reinert, El Paso Water’s resources manager, confirmed the expansion to Spectrum News, describing it as the latest step in a buildout the utility has been planning for several years as drought tightens its grip on the river basin that both El Paso and Fort Bliss, the Army post it also serves, depend on. The plant draws brackish groundwater from 15 saltwater wells beneath the region and runs it through a multi-stage filtration process before reverse osmosis membranes strip out the salt, a method that lets El Paso tap into a water source that would otherwise be undrinkable rather than competing for increasingly scarce fresh surface water. Spectrum News, citing figures from the utility, noted that the plant already treats roughly three times as much water each day as a comparable inland desalination facility in San Antonio, which handles about 10 to 12 million gallons a day, underscoring how central brackish desalination has become to El Paso’s water portfolio since the Kay Bailey Hutchison plant opened in 2007.
The sixth skid adds to five already in service and brings the plant closer to a capacity target that El Paso Water has signaled for some time. The American Water Works Association reported in 2024 that the utility was planning to raise the plant’s output by about 20 percent to 33 million gallons a day as part of a broader drought-resilience push, the same figure now being realized through the new skid, suggesting a long-planned upgrade is finally moving from blueprint to construction. The expansion sits alongside other investments the utility has been making in its water-supply system, including a brine-concentration project that recovers close to 3 million gallons a day of additional drinking water from the plant’s reject stream, and a wider regional reckoning with the Rio Grande’s decline that has pushed both Texas and New Mexico to lean more heavily on desalination as a hedge against a river running at a fraction of its historical flow.
For a city of roughly 700,000 people sitting in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert, the stakes in squeezing more water out of the ground are hard to overstate. El Paso has spent nearly two decades building out what it calls a diversified water strategy specifically because the Rio Grande, the Rio Grande Project’s irrigation allotments and the Hueco Bolson and Mesilla Bolson aquifers can no longer be counted on alone, and the Kay Bailey Hutchison plant has become the most visible proof of that strategy at scale. Each additional skid buys the utility more flexibility to lean on brackish groundwater during drought years without drawing down the fresher aquifers it also depends on for everyday supply, and the latest expansion signals that El Paso Water expects the dry conditions gripping the Rio Grande basin to persist rather than ease. Reinert did not give a timeline for when the sixth skid will come fully online, and the utility has not disclosed the cost of the latest phase, but the project adds to a capital program that has drawn roughly $118 million toward water-supply projects, including the desalination expansion, in the utility’s current fiscal year budget.
(Source: Spectrum News, American Water Works Association)