Premier Bligh Buys Nine Billion Dollar Round Of Drinks
December 1st 2008 04:51
Locals were lining up to have their first taste of desalinated seawater from the brand new Tugun Desalination Plant on the Gold Coast at yesterday’s Open Day. It may be their only chance as the 125 million litres of desalinated water the plant will produce every day will be pumped away to top up Brisbane’s depleted dams. The taste? It's a little flat, like distilled water in my opinion.
Queensland Premier Anna Bligh, the great, great granddaughter of Captain Bligh of the Bounty, turned on the waterworks today in a surprise visit. However she has postponed the Grand Opening and ribbon cutting ceremony.
There is little glory in spending $9 billion on the South East Queensland Water Grid when it has been raining for weeks and the Gold Coast’s Hinze Dam is overflowing. Even Brisbane’s’ massive Wivenhoe Dam, languishing around the 40% mark, has had a good top up.
A Grand Opening ceremony would be an ideal campaign stunt, to coincide with a possible early election next March, and perhaps a dry spell too. A suggestion that recent wild weather had delayed the Grand Opening had technicians scratching their heads as the seawater intake pipes are 20 metres deep and 1.5 kilometres offshore.
In Queensland there are about 20 small scale desalination plants servicing mining and island communities, but this is the first large scale plant in the Sunshine State. Covering 6 hectares adjacent to Coolangatta Airport, the plant turns seawater into fresh drinking water by the reverse osmosis pressurised filtration method.
Drawn from the intake pipe, seawater is forced through a series of more than two thousand membrane filters under high pressure. The treated water is so pure that dissolved minerals must be added to make it taste more palatable, like dam water.
The treated water can then be stored in two 15ML on site storage tanks or pumped into a series of local mixing reservoirs, to be diluted into the regular water supply. The majority of the desalinated water will be pumped into the South East Queensland Water Grid and siphoned off to Brisbane.
The concentrated salty brine that is the by-product of desalination is pumped into an outlet pipe running underground and under the seafloor. The brine is then dispersed into the ocean two kilometers offshore through a series of diffusers that were positioned by a Self Elevating Platform Barge.
The plant was built by Gold Coast Desalination Alliance in just three years and addressed a very real need for an alternative water source at a time when water reserves were perilously low. Combined with other water initiatives and infrastructure, water supplies to the booming population of SE Queensland are assured for the near future.
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Comment by Lilla
From The Home Front
Enviro Warrior
Dream Herald
Esoteric Bookshop
A great post! You should have put it under environmetnal, I would have seen it sooner.
A huge problem for the marine life both in being sucked in and killed in the inlet pipes, and then in dealing with the rises in salt levels to come from the dumped concentrate; which will destablise the fragile system even further.
I am not sure this is the best solution.
Is that monstrocity off the shoreline at Tugan, nuclear powered?
Lilla ...
Comment by GlenB
Raw Fish
As environmental news, it was a split decision between environment and news.
The Intake pipes have exclusion devices which prevent fish, and especially cornflake weed, from entering.
The barge is deisel powered
The high salinity brine is still an insoluble problem. (Pardon the pun.)
Comment by Lilla
From The Home Front
Enviro Warrior
Dream Herald
Esoteric Bookshop