Scientists oppose SA desalination plans
By Penelope Debelle
May 31, 2008 — 12.00am
A PLANT to keep a Greg Norman-branded golf course green is one of three desalination proposals in South Australia causing scientific and public concern.
Three hundred residents from the Port Hughes on the Yorke Peninsula attended a public meeting this month where marine ecologist Toby Bolton warned that too little was known about the cumulative, long-term effects of desalination plants for them to be regarded as the solution to the nation's water shortages.
Port Hughes resident Bev Schultz at the under-construction Dunes resort. Its developers want to build a desalination plant to keep the resort's Greg Norman-branded golf course green. Credit:David Mariuz
The second desalination plant is proposed by BHP Billiton in the upper reaches of Spencer Gulf to feed its expanded Olympic Dam uranium mine.
A third is proposed by the Government at Port Stanvac on Gulf St Vincent, near Adelaide, to boost domestic water supply.
Dr Bolton said it was difficult to think of a more inappropriate location than BHP's proposed Spencer Gulf plant. It would operate in an area that combined poor tidal exchange with mangrove and samphire swamps that nurtured organisms for the marine food chain such as giant cuttlefish and the area's prized whiting.
Dr Bolton, from Flinders University's Lincoln Marine Science Centre at Port Lincoln, said he did not oppose desalination plants that were in open ocean where strong tidal currents dispersed the waste brine.
He is one of five South Australian scientists who last month wrote to the State Government warning it of the dangers of desalination when so little was known about its long-term effects on marine life.
While the third plant, proposed by the developers of the Port Hughes resort, was much smaller, it raised questions about the use to which reclaimed water was to be put, Dr Bolton said.
"This whole thing (project) is built around trying to provide a green golf course," he said.
Greens MP Mark Parnell, an environmental lawyer, said states such as Victoria, where the Federal Court recently rejected a community attempt to defer a $3.1 billion desalination plant at Wonthaggi, should take heed and not rush into high-energy desalination plants that were prematurely deemed to be solutions.
"It would be a tragic irony if the reason we have less water is because of climate change, and the reason we have climate change is because, as a planet, we have burnt too many fossil fuels, and how are we going to fix it? We are going to burn more fossil fuels," Mr Parnell said.
With an environmental assessment of BHP Billiton's proposed $300 million desalination plant yet to be released, the SA Government last month gave major project status to the proposed 50-gigalitre desalination plant at Port Stanvac as part of its response to the Murray River water crisis.
Flinders University marine scientist Kirsten Benkendorff, who was a signatory to the protest letter, said there was insufficient knowledge about how either desalination plant would harm marine life, particularly creatures such as squid, which lay their eggs on the seabed where heavy brine would accumulate.
She said it was outrageous for two large-scale desalination plants to proceed in SA with so little oceanographic information about the effect of accumulated brine on a gulf system with limited open ocean exchange.
"It is difficult to predict impacts because there is no comparable situation except in the Middle East, and many of those countries are relocating their desalination plants because of the impacts they had on their gulf systems," Dr Benkendorff said. "They have basically destroyed their fisheries."
Phil Hudson, project manager for the Dunes, the luxury resort being sold off the plan in a semi-arid part of SA, said the developers were looking at alternatives but he could not rule out building a desalination plant as a means of watering the Greg Norman-branded golf course, which Norman visited briefly last year.
"We have to recognise there is a water problem in this state and we can't expect to get (River Murray) water for the golf course," Mr Hudson said.
"We are under the same water restrictions as everyone else so we have had to look at alternatives, and desalination was one of the options we looked at."
The Copper Coast Council last December identified an area near the boat ramp on the Port Hughes foreshore as its preferred site for the developer's desalination plant.
The proposal, which locals learnt about from a report in the local newspaper, hit a nerve. The clear water under the nearby jetty is loved by recreational divers and shelters the rare and protected leafy sea dragon.
The area is also a commercial fishing ground and the prawn industry fleet is at nearby Wallaroo.
Locals, one of whom proposed fake grass for the Greg Norman greens, say they don't mind progress but not at the cost of their lifestyle.
"I want to maintain Port Hughes as a pristine place," resident Don Morley told the community meeting.
"I want all of us to be able to go down to the jetty and catch a couple of squid for tea."