DC Bureau - Investigative Journalism, Environmental News, and National Security Stories That Matter

Poseidon's Desalinization Plant: Dream Water Supply or Draining the Pacific and Taxpayers?

Written by Janet Wilson Tuesday, 11 May 2010

CARLSBAD, CA – High on a hill above this sunny beach town sits a reservoir filled with water pumped from hundreds of miles away. But the price of that imported water is soaring, and supplies are shrinking. Local officials see salvation to the west – a huge new desalination plant that would turn 300 million gallons a day of the sparkling Pacific Ocean into a new, 50 million gallon river of drinking water.

Down below, Poseidon Resources LLC is pushing to complete a dizzying checklist of approvals before heading to Wall Street for project financing. After 12 years of permitting battles, the desalination plant – which could open the floodgates for many others on the California coast – may finally be built.

Best of all, the developers promise, it will cost the public nothing to build.

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DESAL TIMELINE

Written by Janet Wilson Monday, 10 May 2010

Six weeks and counting. That’s how much time Poseidon officials have to clear a laundry list of approvals, then persuade Wall Street investors to buy $530 million in bonds to construct their 50 million gallon a day seawater desalination plant.

Senior vice president Peter MacLaggan said company personnel and southern California water officials alike are “working day and night to get to the finish line…everybody’s making a tremendous effort.”

Between late April and June 22 all were pushing to complete the following:

 

√ Nine separate local water districts must approve revised 30 year contracts with Poseidon to buy the water. There has been haggling over water delivery, percent of profits allowed, and a few other issues. But MacLaggan said nearly all of the agreements were “dropping into place like clockwork.” Several district managers agreed.

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Saving A Dam To Save Waterfront Homeowners

Written by Marc Hequet Tuesday, 13 April 2010

Across the United States, financially-strapped governments are struggling to make ends meet just as an anti-tax-and-spend, anti-government political tsunami is heading toward the November elections.

As the infrastructure fails on thousands of old dams, the costs to rebuild them are in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Some communities, like Front Royal, Virginia, have abandoned a decades-old structure because the cost of repairs is just too much and the benefits of the dam long ago vanished.

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The Atlantic Water Summit …After These Messages

Written by Byron Moore Wednesday, 18 November 2009

[Editor’s Note: DCBureau.org sent a pair of reporters to Atlantic magazine's October 29th Water Summit. Our reporters were prevented from videotaping the conference by The Atlantic who arranged to exclusively tape the event, but did not offer it live. We present our Atlantic — approved video report by Allison Sickle and a companion piece by correspondent Byron Moore that was not shared in advance with Atlantic’s team of editors and advertisers.]

The main Ballroom at the National Press Club was packed with individuals from nonprofits, government and business (lobbyists, media relations and a few executives) who traded business cards, overused acronyms and buzzwords, asked long questions, and got short answers. As a large camera in the back panned the room, The Atlantic Water Summit was officially live.

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Nestlé: Draining America Bottle By Bottle: How Nestlé Got Millions and Millions of Dollars From a $230 Permit.

Written by Joseph Trento Monday, 20 July 2009

Madison, Florida – It takes a smart and politically well-connected company like Nestlé to get a drought-stricken state like Florida to give it tens of millions of dollars worth of water to resell at enormous profits to its neighbors in states like the Carolinas and Georgia.

For Nestlé, finding new sources of fresh spring water and securing the right to pump the water requires political influence: the ability to secure support with high-level state and local officials. Nestlé, like other large corporations, believes residents see dollar signs when they hear a large corporation is coming to their town. They often use local residents as straw men to keep the cost of expansion cheaper, all the while extracting tax and water pumping concessions by promising good paying jobs.

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Nestlé: Draining America Bottle By Bottle: Creating and Marketing the Demand for Water

Written by Norah Shipman Thursday, 16 July 2009

Ruth Caplan, co-chair of Alliance for Democracy’s Defending Water for Life campaign, said Nestlé has sophisticated marketing campaigns that convince Americans to buy bottled water. “What they do is they try to make us want to pay a lot of money for bottled water by implying that it’s safer and healthier than water coming out of our tap,” she said. “This whole idea that bottled water is somehow pure is a marketing gimmick that consumers shouldn’t buy.”

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Nestlé: Draining America Bottle By Bottle: Rural communities take a stand

Written by Norah Shipman Wednesday, 15 July 2009

Across the country, communities have raised questions about the environmental impact of Nestlé’s water withdrawal, but Nestlé is not dissuaded and keeps pushing for the plants. A few communities in Colorado, California, Michigan, New Hampshire, and Maine have successfully fought back.

In Salida, Colorado, recent disputes between Nestlé and residents have flared up over Nestlé’s plan to withdraw 65 million gallons of water from their springs. Nestlé wants the rights to Arkansas Valley spring water in order to pipe it five miles to a truck stop and then ship it 100 miles to a Denver bottling facility. Nestlé promised the community it would replace the water it took, restore riverside habitats, and monitor wells and water levels, but residents still are against the plan because of the effect it will have on the environment and doubts that Nestlé will follow through and be the “good neighbor” it promises to be.

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Nestlé: Draining America Bottle By Bottle: Nestlé builds an empire at the expense of rural communities

Written by Norah Shipman Monday, 13 July 2009

“At what point did water go from being a public resource and a basic human right to being a commodity?”— Deborah Lapidus, national organizer for Corporate Accountability International

Swiss-owned Nestlé is the Walmart of the bottled water industry. Like the mammoth retailer, Nestlé is a volume powerhouse: it already controls a third of the bottled water market in the United States and is expanding.

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