Tampa Bay desalination plant rises again

Clearwater, Fla.-based Tampa Bay Water reopened a 25 million gallon per day desalination plant, putting to rest a more than 10 year odyssey marked by developers filing for bankruptcy protection and problems with the plant design.

The $158 million reverse osmosis facility, up from an original cost of $110 million, is expected to cover at least 10 percent of the drinking water needs of the more than 2.4 million people in the Tampa Bay area.

It's the largest seawater desalination facility in the U.S.

The water authority is considering more plants for the future, but it needs to see how things go on its first plant before any decisions are made.

"With this plant and the ability to complete it and operate it on a sustained basis, I think that certainly will help the odds of us building another one of these plants down the road," Ken Hurd, operations director at Tampa Bay Water, told the Cleantech Group.

Hurd said about a third of the cost of the project is in power. But the group managed to save some money by co-locating the plant with Tampa Electric's Big Bend power plant.

"We're able to use their intake facilities and their discharge facilities. So we didn't have to build and permit a water withdrawal structure or a concentrate discharge structure," said Hurd.

Hurd said the newly refurbished desalination plant uses warm water from Tampa Electric, which has already gone through the power plant's condensers, so it takes less energy to desalt it.

The Tampa Bay desalination plant originally went online in March 2003, but at a reduced capacity. It was shut down less than two years later due to deficiencies in the design, according to the water authority.

Spain's Acciona Agua and Voorhees, N.J.-based American Water Works fixed the problems with the plant and are running the facility under an 18 year agreement with Tampa Bay Water.

Take a look at the plant here >>

Acciona Agua is a unit of Acciona, one of Spain's largest contractors. American Water Works is part of German utility RWE (OTC: RWEOY).

Last year, Acciona Agua received a contract to build an even bigger desalination plant in Carslbad, Calif. Set to go online in 2010, that plant is expected to produce 204,000 cubic meters of drinking water per day, almost double the output of the Tampa Bay facility.

The long road to desalination started in 1997 for Tampa Bay Water, then called West Coast Regional Water Supply Authority, when it first issued a request for proposals.

The authority was looking for solutions to protect against drought in the region.

"It definitely is something we need, especially now, given how dry things have been," said Hurd.

The project hit its first hurdle in June 2000 when developer Stone & Webster filed for Chapter 11. The following year, the other developer, Poseidon Resources, acquired 100 percent of the desalination development venture and took on Covanta Energy as a new partner.

But in December 2001, Tampa Bay Water said Covanta failed to post a required construction bond for the project, postponing the sale of private bonds to fund the project.

The following year, with the project fully designed, permitted and almost a third of the construction complete, Tampa Bay Water decided to buy the project outright from Poseiden, which it said would help secure long-term financing.

But the problems didn't end there.

In 2003, the plant failed several performance tests and Tampa Bay Water issued a notice of default to Covanta's Tampa Construction unit in early October of that year.

And that's when the second bankruptcy of this story comes into play, with Covanta Tampa Construction filing for protection from its creditors later that month.

Tampa Bay Water and Covanta reached a settlement in February 2004, with Tampa Bay gaining full control of the facility's operating contract.

Acciona Agua and American Water came on board in November 2004 to work on problems with the plant's pretreatment process, as well as the filters and membranes.

The refurbished plant has room to grow, but it's a little too early to start work on it again.

"We have that potential expansion of this plant, up to 10 million gallon per day expansion, as an option," said Hurd.

"There will probably be a need to operate this plant for a while to demonstrate how it can perform before the board's going to be comfortable doing that."