DESAL PLANT WORTH ITS SALT AFTER ALL
WHEN at a barbecue and asked “what do you do mate?”, Scott Murphy cringes as he answers “I manage the Tugun desalination plant”.
He’s used to what comes next: “that’s a white elephant”; “that useless rustbucket?”; “has that thing ever been used?”.
Scott is happy to correct the perception that has dogged the facility since its conception a decade ago. He was there from the start as Queensland choked on the dust of the record-smashing “Millenium drought” and water supplies fell below critical.
It began as a series of lowrainfall years in the mid-90s and worsened from there as one failed wet season followed another for more than a decade.
Governments panicked, showers shortened, gardens withered, cars were coated with dust and a proliferation of rainwater tanks sat dry and useless in browning backyards.
Four years passed without natural supply flowing into southeast Queensland dams.
Seawater was everywhere, but there was not a drop to drink, so capturing it seemed logical – even for $1.2 billion.
The Tugun Desalination Plant, based on technology developed by NASA about 30 years earlier, was handed over to the Queensland Government in September 2010, about 12 weeks before the drought broke in dramatic fashion.
Swamped Queenslanders, many of whom had already reduced their water consumption by two thirds, started thinking about other ways that billion could have been spent.
Ironically those floods knocked out the key Mount Crosby water treatment plant in Brisbane so Tugun was critical in maintaining the state’s supply.
The plant, striped dark blue and green, sits 1.2km from the sparkling waves of Tugun beach and next to the expanding Gold Coast Airport, which provides a quirky soundtrack of roaring jet engines and bird-scaring gunfire.
Far from hiding the controversial facility, SEQWater jumps at the Bulletin’s request for a tour – and the Government PR machine sees us joined on the day by the facility’s hard-hatted managers and Water Minister Mark Bailey.
“It’s an important part of our water security – when other parts of the grid get knocked out, it kicks in,” the Minister says.
“It’s been controversial over the years but it’s getting used more and more now.
“As our population grows, it will get used more and more.”
As Scott shows our fluorovested group through the scifi-looking warehouse stacked with the tanks and pipes of the reverse osmosis system it’s hard to imagine anyone could be so enthusiastic about polysulfone membranes.
He and the other 23 permanent staff of the plant are defiantly proud of the place – they’ve had to be. One staffer, who doesn’t want to be named, snorts at its “rustbucket” moniker.
“It’s all aluminium and super-coated steel,” he says, waving his arm across the tanks where seawater sits waiting to be processed.
“There is word out there that it’s all rusting but it’s a pristine asset. I really don’t know where the perception comes from.”
The annual power bill has been reduced from $15 million in 2011-12 to less than $13 million for 2016-17, largely because of a 2013 switch to “hot standby mode”, where it runs at minimum capacity three times a fortnight to keep it operational.
The Queensland Audit Office in 2013 found the decision to build the plant was “an appropriate response to the severe drought circumstances at the time”.
However, “as no robust business case was developed for the Gold Coast Desalination Plant, the decision on the capacity of the plant did not benefit from the rigorous costbenefit analysis that is required to be applied to such large scale investments,” the report said.
Scott believes the plant has since proven itself – and that its value as an insurance policy is priceless.
“When there’s no water in the dams, what do you do? When you turn on the tap and there’s nothing there? Australia is the country of droughts and flooding rains – for absolute certain there will be another drought.”