Desalination: Pro/Con

The disadvantages and advantages of desalination are constantly debated. I have listed the most important pros and cons for desalination below.

Disadvantages: 

• As I mentioned in my last post, desalination is an expensive process. The Charles Meyer desalination plant will cost the district a large amount of money to reactivate and operate the facility. For exact costs, take a look at my last blog post. 
• Desalination is a high energy process. The average desalination plant uses about 2 kilowatt hours of electricity to produce a cubic meter of drinking water. To generate this energy, fossil fuels are often used. This is clearly harmful to the environment and is adding to the climate change problem. Some desalination plants harness solar energy, but I doubt that the district will spend further money to install solar power into the Charles Meyer desalination plant. 
• The waste of the desalination plant, which is often called brine, is loaded with salt and chemicals used in treatment such as chlorine. When this waste is dumped back into the ocean, environmental problems can arise. The brine poisons some animals and can create entire dead zones in the ocean.

At the beginning of this blog, I said that I wanted to create an unbiased guide to the desalination decision. I just listed some very strong disadvantages for desalination. Don't get discouraged! Desalination may not have many advantages, but they are strong positives. 

Advantages: 

• Simply put, Santa Barbara needs the water. The ocean is extremely vast and provides a drought proof source of water. Reverse Osmosis treatment provides a clean high quality water. The desalination provides a stable source of clean water. Santa Barbara needs this. 
• Desalination gives other freshwater sources a reprieve. For example, It helps prevent groundwater over-drafting, simply by having a new source of water. 

My Opinion: 

You may not want my opinion on desalination, but I am going to tell you it just once. After this post, I will only state the facts and I will attempt to remove my bias from all other posts. I do not really approve of desalination. I think that a lot of times it hurts the environment more than it helps the community. It should not be a primary source of water for many districts. For example, placing a desalination plant in Seattle, Washington would be disastrous. However, there are many cases in which desalination is imperative. Freshwater is not as accessible to many people. While Seattle is abundant in water, other locations are not. It would be absurd to shame the United Arab Emirates for their use of desalination because they lack access to freshwater from other sources. I understand the use of desalination in the UAE and I understand the need for desalination in Santa Barbara. Sure, it is expensive, not necessarily environmentally friendly and it requires a large amount of energy, but Santa Barbara needs a stable source of high quality water and desalination is the solution.