By John — Desalination News
Residents of Galveston County will get a chance to weigh in on a proposed seawater desalination plant on Galveston Bay in November, the next step in a permitting fight that has pitted the utility company EPCOR against a coalition of environmental groups over the future of one of the largest estuaries on the U.S. Gulf Coast.
The Bayshore Desalination Facility would be built on the San Leon Peninsula near Bacliff, Texas, on the site of the former P.H. Robinson power generating station on Galveston Bay’s south shore, roughly 30 miles southeast of Houston. As proposed, the plant would draw approximately 82.8 million gallons of seawater a day from the bay and treat it through reverse osmosis to produce about 26.5 million gallons of drinking water daily, discharging the remaining 56.3 million gallons as concentrated brine back into the bay. EPCOR, a Canadian-headquartered utility that also operates water systems elsewhere in Texas, has pitched the project as a “drought-resilient water source” for a region of nearly 8 million people.
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) granted the project preliminary approval on its discharge permit application in August, opening a public comment period that closed on September 18 after drawing roughly 148 submissions, the large majority of them critical of the plan. That comment period, and the public meeting now expected in November, mark the most consequential milestones so far in a review process that TCEQ officials caution is far from over — the agency has not yet set a firm date for the meeting or ruled on whether a formal contested-case hearing, a legal proceeding akin to a trial, will be granted.
A coalition of environmental organizations — including the Galveston Bay Foundation, Bayou City Waterkeeper, the Sierra Club’s Lone Star Chapter, the Raz Halili Trust and The Nature Conservancy — has asked TCEQ for that contested-case hearing, arguing that EPCOR’s environmental modeling understates how the plant’s brine discharge would affect salinity, water circulation and dissolved oxygen levels in the bay, particularly during drought conditions when the estuary is already under stress. Local critics have pointed specifically to risks facing oyster reefs and fishing grounds in nearby Dickinson Bay, and to the plant’s location, which some argue puts the discharge point too close to shore rather than further out in open water.
“Galveston Bay is not simply a receiving body for industrial discharge. It is a living estuary,” said Hajrulla Halili of the Raz Halili Trust, one of the parties pushing for a formal hearing.
Bob Stokes of the Galveston Bay Foundation has emphasized that the project remains far from finalized despite the preliminary permit. “This isn’t a done deal at all,” Stokes said. “They are still seeking their discharge permit.”
EPCOR filed its initial permit application in October of last year and says it operates roughly a century’s worth of combined utility experience across the United States and Canada, with around 100 employees currently based in Texas. The company has framed Bayshore as part of a broader push to diversify Gulf Coast water supplies away from sole reliance on rainfall-fed reservoirs, a rationale similar to that driving several other proposed Texas Gulf Coast desalination projects, including the now-abandoned Corpus Christi Inner Harbor plant roughly 200 miles down the coast.
For now, the project sits in a holding pattern familiar to large coastal desalination proposals: a preliminary regulatory green light, a vocal and organized opposition, and a public process still working through its early stages. Whether the November public meeting brings the project closer to a final permit or hardens the fight into a formal contested-case hearing should become clearer in the weeks ahead.
(Source: Houston Public Media) (Source: The Galveston County Daily News) (Source: EPCOR)