ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the California Coastal Commission (Commission)/Poseidon Water (Poseidon) joint fact-finding (JFF) effort to evaluate whether it is feasible for Poseidon to construct a subsurface intake that draws water from beneath the ocean floor for its proposed desalination plant in Huntington Beach, California. In 2006, Poseidon Water, which is a private company that builds and operates desalination facilities, submitted a permit application to the California Coastal Commission, a powerful statewide regulatory agency charged with ensuring proposed development projects in the California coastal zone conform to the California Coastal Act,1 for the construction of a large desalination plant in Huntington Beach. If built as planned, this plant would provide up to 50 million gallons per day of drinking water for Orange County residents and would use an existing open ocean intake pipe originally built by a soon-to-retire power plant that draws water directly from the ocean. Because open ocean intake pipes have been shown to entrain and kill larvae and eggs of marine organisms, the recently adopted State Water Resources Control Board’s Water Quality Control Plan for the Ocean Waters of California (Ocean Plan) requires that if it is feasible to build a desalination plant with a subsurface intake, the applicant must use that construction method.2
